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Boston. 1962. Atlantic Monthly Press/Little Brown. 1st American Edition. Small Stain Mark On Top Corner Of Front Free Endpaper, Otherwise Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket With Some Tears. 669 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Martha Lehtola. keywords: Europe Russia Literature Translated Biography Anton Chekhov Literary Criticism World Literature. DESCRIPTION - In Ernest J. Simmons's major and comprehensive biography, Chekhov's life reveals itself in all its innate vigor and with its own natural rhythm. Mr. Simmons has brought to his immense task an exhaustive acquaintance with the rich material on all aspects of Chekhov's private life and career, including much fresh evidence only recently made available in Russia. He has tracked down the anomalies in the official Soviet edition of Chekhov's correspondence and pointed to its intermittent censorship both of politics and of personal intimacies. He has, once and for all, sought out the true facts about Chekhov's poignant and involved love affairs. The work reads like a massive nineteenth-century Russian novel, but one in which a real hero dominates a tapestry of real life and real celebrities. Chekhov was the grandson of a serf; Chekhov's life was an endless struggle to squeeze the slave out. We watch him grow from a choir boy and grocery clerk in the Caucasus to a gay medical student and hard-scribbling journalist in Moscow; we see him receiving recognition from the literary giants of St. Petersburg, growing successful, becoming a landowner, enjoying and beautifying a dacha, and traveling in Western Europe. We see, too, the gradual advance of tuberculosis, and at the same time Chekhov's medical work among the poor and his passionate concern with civic improvement. We also gain insight into his development as a literary artist, from the merry sketches to the somber and full- blooded tales of his maturity and the plays that even his contemporaries were puzzled whether to call comic or tragic. We learn the connection between certain of his tales and plays and his own life. We follow his early ambivalence about marriage. We see him through the deep psychological struggle that almost led him to turn his back on art. We travel with him on his great journey to Sakhalin Island off Russia's Pacific coast; live with him through his first theatrical successes and the closing-in of his racking disease; worry through his marriage to the actress Olga Knipper; share his friendships with Tolstoy, Gorky, Ivan Bunin, Tschaikovsky, Stanislavsky, Chaliapin. When at last death takes Chekhov, the reader of this massive and sympathetic biography Will feel that he has lost not only an interpreter but a friend. As Tolstoy wrote, Chekhov is understood and accepted not only by every Russian, but by all humanity. inventory #34750 Small Stain Mark On Top Corner Of Front Free Endpaper, Otherwise Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket With Some Tears.
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