Word: chekhovs
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...Anton Chekhov of the Selected Letters wears his rue with a difference: it is not black, only charcoal grey. No one mocked his low spirits more high-spiritedly than Chekhov. While he put his genius into his short stories and plays, he put his complaints into his letters. But deftly introduced and edited by Playwright Lillian Hellman, Letter-Writer Chekhov emerges as a sweet, kind and amiable grouch, and his correspondence as a thoroughly engaging testimonial to the power of negative thinking...
...Chekhov put himself through medical school, but he was a doctor only by chance and a writing man out of inner necessity. Before he was 30 he had churned out some 400 stories, sketches and one-act plays, and the first version of Uncle Vanya. He believed that a writer had to be an irritated oyster before he would produce any pearls: "He who doesn't desire anything, doesn't hope for anything and isn't afraid of anything cannot be an artist." Damning his own as a literary generation of "lemonade" dispensers, Chekhov makes a telling...
...Portable Sickroom. To avoid Hamyopia, Chekhov traveled widely. But the Russian hinterland rarely sent Chekhov into those flights of mystic brotherhood common to 19th century Russian intellectuals. He approached it with a clothespin ever ready to clamp to his nose, as when he described a provincial sausage: "The odor was as if you had entered a stable at the moment the coachman was unwinding his leg puttees; when you started chewing the stuff you experienced a sensation like sinking your teeth into a tar-smeared dog's tail." Yet he spent a heroic overworked year heading off a cholera...
...Chekhov was himself a portable sickroom, a walking one-man plague. At 24, he coughed blood for the first time, heralding the tuberculosis that would kill him 20 years later. In letter after letter, he issued bulletins on "my phlebitis in the left leg," on palpitations of the heart ("Every minute my heart stops for several seconds and does not beat"), on hemorrhoids ("a vile, despicable malady"), and even recognized the psychosomatic nature of some of his ailments. ("My intestinal catarrh left me the moment I left Uncle's. Evidently the odor of sanctity has a weakening effect...
...Hell with Philosophy." Yet he showed intestinal fortitude at the rarest moments. When The Seagull flopped miserably on its St. Petersburg opening, Chekhov went home, "gave myself a dose of castor oil, took a cold bath-and now I wouldn't even mind doing another play." When the 37-year-old Chekhov collapsed from a tuberculous attack in 1897, the great Tolstoy stormed past the nurses to soothe the patient with bedside chitchat, but stayed on to argue that a work of art only fulfilled its function if an uneducated peasant could understand it. By the time Tolstoy left...