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Anton Chekhov (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

By the end of his short life Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was considered one of the masters of nineteenth century Russian fiction, especially of the short story, along with Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolay Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev. As a dramatist he has no peer in his own country and his plays, especially the masterpieces from his later years, UNCLE VANIA (1897), THREE SISTERS (1901), and THE CHERRY ORCHARD (1904), have earned him a place of international prominence as one of the founders of modern theater.

Although the Chekhovs were only one generation removed from serfdom and plagued by the family’s hereditary susceptibility to tuberculosis, they produced a remarkable family of writers, artists, civil servants, and teachers. Wracked by disease, poverty, and ongoing depression, it is small wonder that Chekhov survived his beginnings, let alone flourished to become one of the world’s greatest writers. By focusing mainly on the intimacy of the relationships with family and friends and by working from Russian archival sources, mostly ignored or under-used by previous biographers, Donald Rayfield provides a detailed, often grippingly painful, portrait of the social and historical milieu out of which Chekhov fashioned his remarkable outpouring of fiction and drama.

With ANTON CHEKHOV: A LIFE Rayfield has earned a respected place among the Russian author’s biographers—of which there have been many—and done much to augment readers’ understanding of the world in which Chekhov lived and wrote. Rayfield’s careful and creative use of greatly expanded documented resources offers not only a broader understanding of Chekhov’s life but also opens up possibilities for examining his work from a more informed awareness of the events and personalities that shaped his unique vision of the world.

Sources for Further Study

American Theatre. XV, October, 1998, p. 86.

Booklist. XCIV, March 1, 1998, p. 1086.

Choice. XXXVI, October, 1998, p. 324.

Library Journal. CXXIII, February 1, 1998, p. 86.

The New Republic. CCXVIII, March 2, 1998, p. 27.

The New York Review of Books. XLIV, November 6, 1997, p. 61.

The New York Times Book Review. CIII, March 15, 1998, p. 12.

The Times Literary Supplement. July 18, 1997, p. 4.

The Wall Street Journal. March 9, 1998, p. A16.

The Wilson Quarterly. XXII, Autumn, 1998, p. 95.

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