Chekhov - Hardcover

Sanders, Ed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087685966X ISBN 13: 9780876859667

Publisher: Black Sparrow Pr, 1995

Synopsis

When poet Edward Sanders, founder of New York's famous Peace Eye Book Store as well as of the 60's folk-rock group The Fugs, undertook to write a drama based on the life of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, he started with a poem. Hoping that a poem would engender dialogue and chorus refrains, Sanders' finished product was. . . a poem. Delving into the life of the classic Russian author, Sanders was so taken with his subject that he realized "a verse biography of Chekhov could extend to five or ten thousand pages" and his poem (really a series of short poems about the short life and revolutionary times of the author of "The Seagull") grew and grew.
While Chekhov is slightly shorter than those five to ten thousand pages, it does contain "surprisingly detailed information about the social, political, and intellectual phenomena of Chekhov's Russia" (Booklist) and is written in verse that would do Pushkin proud. A must for any student of Chekhov, Russia or, for that matter, literature.

About this title

About the Author:

In the 1960s, Edward Sanders co-founded the groundbreaking rock band The Fugs, opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, and appeared on the cover of Life magazine, becoming a hero of the American counterculture. He is a classics scholar, pioneer in investigative poetics, inventor of musical instruments, publisher of The Woodstock Journal, and author of many books, including the best-selling Charles Manson expose The Family, the ambitious, nine-volume project, America: A History in Verse, and LET'S NOT KEEP FIGHTING THE TROJAN WAR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1986-2009. He lives in Woodstock, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

A third of this biography-in-verse skirts the gifted doctor cum playwright to serve instead as a primer on political strife in 19th-century Russia and a condensed retelling of facts done up in funny line breaks ("and the ghastly geekiness/ of the state bureaucracy"). Chekhov's early years get surprisingly short shrift: 44 words are given to the childhood event that led him into medicine. Only when we get to the adult artist is our attention finally aroused, as Sanders, while relating Chekhov's rationalizing away of tuberculosis, a research visit to Siberia and the albatross of censorship, finally breathes bloody life into his subject. Too rarely, however, does the poet enter Chekhov's mind; rather he works from the outside in, via scholarly details and letter excerpts. Sanders's career has been firmly rooted in the Beat movement?it's easy to understand his love of a great writer in a time of revolution. Less comprehensible is the lack of creativity that accompanies much of this work; and often silly is the occasional toke of Beat lingo, as when the toil of creating Uncle Vanya is described as "batter/ for the Divine Waffle."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Pr
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 087685966X
• ISBN 13: 9780876859667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240