Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. Gift message in front. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Philip Callow’s new biography of Russia’s greatest dramatist and storyteller is a major achievement. Examining Chekhov’s life with- in the context of his art Callow finds him as- tonishingly modern: the new kind of man un- comfortable in the world and refusing to sen- timentalize his unease. His irony is as modern as Beckett’s; he is as Arthur Miller has said. “in nearly every way our contemporary.” In his personal life he is as understated as in his work. But the love theme that is central to his biography and his art which Callow explores with a novelist’s skills and sensitivities has been somehow slighted byChekhov scholars. It is the hidden ground from which his work sprang and on which his divided life stood. We must constantly remind ourselves that Chekhov was for years a doctor first and a writer second seeing writing as a frivolous ir- relevant activity. He exhausted himself with this double life and was soon in bad health. The exhortations of characters in his plays (“We must work work work”) were aimed at himself. Callow’s splendid portrait reveals a puzzlingly clusive man who constantly sur prises us: a modest genius who finds the whole nature of fame unseemly; a man furious at injustice who is apolitical; a humorist in de- spair before the mediocrity stupidity and cru- elty of the world; a generous spirit unable to stop working to improve the lot of others in- capable of turning anyone away who remains stubbornly apart and hidden. He hestan as a camic writer of fauntin