Word: chekhovisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...moved into a small basement apartment in Moscow. Young Anton, at 19, began writing stories for cheap magazines to put himself through medical school and support the family. At one time or another, mother, father, a sister, an aunt and four brothers all lived in the apartment. The young Chekhov's output was so great that in a few years he was able to buy a small country estate at Melikhovo, where he planted a cherry orchard and began, as he put it, to "squeeze the last drop of slave out" of himself. At Melikhovo, Chekhov was a lavish...
Worse than Shakespeare. Chekhov liked to think of himself primarily as a doctor. But after five years' scribbling. Chekhov suddenly discovered that the literary world was taking seriously the stories he poured out purely for extra cash. "When I didn't know they read my tales." he explained to a friend, "I wrote serenely, just the way I eat pancakes. Now I'm afraid." Taking more pains, Chekhov won more acclaim. He became a friend of Tolstoy's, who praised everything except Chekhov's dramas. "You know, I cannot abide Shakespeare," the old man explained...
Being Russians, his contemporaries were not put off by Chekhov's lack of plot. What they could not forgive was his apparent lack of message. But Chekhov, who was dogmatic about little else, was dead sure of his literary methods. "In order to portray horse thieves," Chekhov explained. "I must speak and think as they would. You would like me to say: 'The stealing of horses is bad.' Surely this has long since been known without my saying...
...Panaceas. Like any Russian of conscience, he longed to improve miserable conditions in his country, languishing under Czar Alexander III. Chekhov wrote stories about the brutalized existence of the serf and the stagnating intelligentsia. In 1890. he journeyed 10,000 miles to write a report on the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. He built schools for peasants and treated their ills for nothing. But he could not shake off a medical man's distrust of all panaceas. Whether it was Communism, Tolstoy's windy plans for the spiritual regeneration of mankind, or Dostoevsky's wild chiaroscuro Christianity...
...languages and literature at Columbia University, suffers from the biographer's occupational disease -a constitutional inability to leave out any detail, however trivial. But his book does build to considerable power. Using new source material, Simmons demolishes Writer Lidiya Avilova's claim, put forth in her book Chekhov in My Life, that she was the writer's secret lifelong passion. Chekhov's only love. Simmons insists, was Olga Knipper, one of the first of a long series of famous actresses (including Dame Sybil Thorndike. Dame Judith Anderson and Katharine Cornell) to revel in Chekhov...