Word: chekhovisms
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Alice Munro may be the one contemporary writer whose work bears comparison with Chekhov's, and she knows it. In Friend of My Youth (Knopf; 273 pages; $18.95), the Canadian author tells a story of burial at sea. She titles it Goodness and Mercy. Chekhov wrote on the same subject and called his tale Gusev. Is Munro's work a challenge or an homage? No matter; both stories are masterpieces of subtlety and cunning. Other tales investigate the vagaries of love, married and adulterous, and the mystery that separates the sexes. One woman's musings encapsulate the story collection...
They were neither amused nor encouraging. "My mother wanted to protect me from the fabled anguish of the literary life. She said I could be a doctor and write on the side, like Chekhov and William Carlos Williams." No sale. At Amherst College in the hubbub of the counterculture '60s, Turow became more rebellious still. During his freshman year, he and 22 other students marched against Army recruiters on campus; all promptly lost their student draft deferments. Turow eventually received a 1-Y permanent deferment because of a chronic anemic condition...
UNCLE VANYA. San Diego's Old Globe Theater finds all the humor and all the pain in a superb staging of Chekhov...
Readers not familiar with Sinyavsky's style or the content of his life may have difficulty with the half-submerged facts. He was born into an affluent family in 1925. His father, who appears in the book as a brilliant though ineffectual figure out of a Chekhov play, was a revolutionary but not a Bolshevik. He was individualistic and something of an eccentric pragmatist. While waiting to be drafted during World War I, he practiced writing with his left hand in case he lost his right...
...struggles to sustain his clan and make sure that his daughters find suitable (meaning Greek) husbands. Gatzoyiannis' death at age 90 provides a classic resolution. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he drifts off on old memories. It is a scene that evokes Chekhov and his observation that "any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears...