About Love and Other Stories By Anton Chekhov

Raymond Carver called Anton Chekhov "the greatest short story writer who has ever lived." This unequivocal verdict on Chekhov's genius has been echoed many times by writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, John Cheever and Tobias Wolf. While his popularity as a playwright has sometimes overshadowed his achievements in prose, the importance of Chekhov's stories is now recognized by readers as well as by fellow authors. Their themes--alienation, the absurdity and tragedy of human existence--have as much relevance today as when they were written, and these superb new translations capture their modernist spirit. Elusive and subtle, spare and unadorned, the stories in this selection are among Chekhov's most poignant and lyrical. The book includes well-known pieces such as "The Lady with the Little Dog," as well as less familiar work like "Gusev," inspired by Chekhov's travels in the Far East, and "Rothschild's Violin," a haunting and darkly humorous tale about death and loss. The stories are arranged chronologically to show the evolution of Chekhov's art.

An Honest Look at Love

This collection of short stories truly is about love. Not happy-ending fairytale love, but the love that really exists in the world: usually unequal felt, sometimes obsessive, and often inexplicable. The stories are all beautiful, well written and self-contained. Each story exhibits a different type of love: love of parents for children, unrequited love, obsessive love, forbidden loves, loves that could have been. Most fascinating to me is the way Chekhov has written the stories so we can see the motivations of all the various lovers. Some of them really want security, an interest to distract them from their meaningless lives, or just sex. In so many cases, what we would like to call love is just avarice. However the stories are not bleak. There are moments when true concern for others breaks through the characters innately selfish natures. I love Chekhov because his stories feel real, his characters aren't just characters. They are human, with all of our vices, and our slim redeeming virtues. Download the book here.

Lady with The Dog and Other Stories By Anton Chekhov

This particular collection/translation is far and away the closest any english-speaking reader can come to experiencing Chekov in his native tongue.

In his introduction, translator David Magarshack writes "reading [these stories] one gets the impression of holding life itself, like a fluttering bird, in one's cupped hands." Magarshack's sensitivity as a translator is unparalled, and this small, immaculately chosen collection of Chekov's work will leave readers marvelling at his ability to bring a character to life in two paragraghs, bring a sunset to life in two sentences, and capture the timeless experiences of life, love and loss in only a few pages. This particular Penguin Classic is now out of print, but definitely worth searching out. This one sets the standard-- no Chekov collection is complete without it.

The Lady with the Dog is perhaps Chekhov's best known and certainly one of his best-loved stories. It exemplifies the author's subtle yet powerful style, as Chekhov is economical with language and never says more than he needs. He conveys emotional complexity in just a few words, thus preserving the intensity of his characters' feelings. For example, on first seeing Anna at the theater in her hometown, Chekhov expresses Dmitri's romantic yearning with the passage: "she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lornette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy. He thought and dreamed." The author writes as though he is painting a canvas, producing a work that is grand in scope yet intimate in feel. The author uses colors to convey both the changing spirits and feelings of the characters, as they veer from the grandly impressive to the muted and prosaic.

For example, the aging Dmitri's hair is described as graying, and he often wears gray suits, whereas the sea at Yalta is suffused with color as "the water was of a soft warm lilac hue, and there was a golden streak from the moon upon it." Chekhov presents Yalta as a romantic oasis for Anna and Dmitri, a place of color, freedom, and intimacy that they cannot hope to recreate elsewhere. The lovers worry about what they mean to one another--Anna frets that Dmitri thinks of her only as a "common woman," while Dmitri thinks that Anna is beguiled by a false impression of him as a "kind, exceptional, lofty" man--because both recognize that their relationship is founded on past disappointments and future hopes, as well as on present desires. Chekhov thus plays with our implicit belief that characters do not exist beyond their narrative framework: clearly, Anna and Dmitri are people defined by the past and their dreams for the future, as much as they are by the short period of their lives conveyed here.

Memories from the past...

The Lady with the Dog is about a chance love affair that takes possession of two people and changes them against their will, and which closes with them far apart and rarely able to meet.One intimate meeting, changed their entire outlook towards life.In The Lady with the Lap Dog, Gurov and Anna are both married.Both have gone on a stolen holiday to Yalta, a resort notorious for its casual love affairs. One interesting thing is that Chehkov never described the seduction unlike the later novelists. The memories from their affair haunts them and they want to be together forever. Every time they meet, they have to over come the fact that they both are married.The real subject of the story is this serious conflict in the minds of the lovers. Every two or three months after this they will meet and wrestle with their dilemma. Chekhov doesnt want to end the novel in a typical manner. He wants the rest to be interpreted by the reader's imagination. Thats the best part of the novel in point of view. Many of us have gone through this situation ourselves. We may have betrayed our loved ones once in a while.A night with a stranger might haunt us throughout the rest of our life.

Every one has certain priorities in their life. The novel explains few critical decisions a person takes while tacking one of the most sensitive issues of their lives.

Cherry Orchard deals with the forced sale of a beautiful Cherry Orchard by an aristocratic family experiencing hard economic times. The plangent sound of an ax cutting down the cherry trees ends the play.

All of these plays were written in four acts. Their major themes are the need for work even in a world where such effort might seem futile.

Chekhov's focus is on families of the lower aristocracy and middle class. He wrote on the eve of Russian revolution as the old way of life was about to pass from the scene forever

Out of respect for the author and the translator, I will refrain from mentioning other stories that could have been added in lieu of the ones chosen.

Maybe I'm being selfish in only giving four stars based on a personal opinion of the plays included, but, after all, that is why this is a review, right? Enjoy the book anyway. A great addition to your Checkov collection. Download this book here.

Chekhov: The Essential Plays By Anton Chekhov

Because Chekhov’s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago. Gathered here in superb new renderings by one of the most highly regarded translators of our time—versions that have been staged throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain—are Chekhov’s four essential masterpieces for the theater.

Chekhov's lyrical plays and uproarious farces continue to entertain theatergoers nearly a century after he wrote them. From his early work The Seagull --a depiction of estranged love and thwarted passion that became a great success Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater--to his last, The Cherry Orchard --the poignant portrayal of a land-owning family unable to adapt to a changing society--all his plays masterfully combine both levity and pathos. But his comedic genius comes to fruition most fully in his short entertainments, such as the hilarious courtship between a hypochondriac and a shrew depicted in The Proposal. Putting a "slice of life" on stage, Chekhov's dramatic art evokes the painful loneliness of the human condition, yet unfailingly highlights the pretensions and absurdities that make us laugh--at ourselves.

Chekhov was a brilliant genius of classic short stories and plays. In this RBC’s edition his four most famous plays are translated into English. Those plays are:

1. The Seagull: This 1896 play won fame for Chekhov following its production at the Moscow Art Theatre. The work deals with the love of the fledgling playwright Trepilov in love with Nina who dreams of becoming a great actress. Nina falls in love with the famous playwright Trigorin running away with him. In despair, Trepilov plays a dead seagull which he has shot down at the feet of Nina. Two years later, Nina returns to the estate deserted by her quondom lover the scamp Trigorin. She declares that her life has been shot down just as the seagull was earlier brought down to death. Trigorin attempts suicide for the second time and is successful in this effort. The play is beautifully written and the theme of being busy with work is prominent. It is a play about the hard work necessary by a playwright as well as dealing with a tragic love story.

2. Uncle Vanya-This 1899 play deals with the kindly Uncle Vanya who has managed the estate of professor Serebryakov for many years. Vanya comes to realize that the lazy professor is an academic fraud. Vanya falls in love with the professor's lovely second wife Elena Andreyevna. She rejects him as a lover. The inept Vanya then attempts to kill the professor with a gun but fails. The professor forgives him though he agrees not to sell the estate which Vanya feared would occur. Life returns to normal.

3. The Three Sisters-The play deals with the boring lives of three sisters from Moscow: Olga, Masha and Irina who live in a provincial city of 100,000. The three women dream of returning to Moscow; fall in love with various officers stationed in the town but at the end of Act IV remain in their dull lives. The play deals with ordinary day to day existence. The lives of the characters are jejune as they yearn to be free of everyday responsibilities. They remind this reviewer of Thoreau's famous line about people living lives of "quiet desperation."

4. The Cherry Orchard deals with the forced sale of a beautiful Cherry Orchard by an aristocratic family experiencing hard economic times. The plangent sound of an ax cutting down the cherry trees ends the play.

All of these plays were written in four acts. Their major themes are the need for work even in a world where such effort might seem futile.

Chekhov's focus is on families of the lower aristocracy and middle class. He wrote on the eve of Russian revolution as the old way of life was about to pass from the scene forever

Out of respect for the author and the translator, I will refrain from mentioning other stories that could have been added in lieu of the ones chosen.

Maybe I'm being selfish in only giving four stars based on a personal opinion of the plays included, but, after all, that is why this is a review, right? Enjoy the book anyway. A great addition to your Checkov collection. Download the book here.

A Life in Letters By Anton Chekhov

From his teenage years in provincial Russia to his premature death in 1904, Anton Chekhov wrote thousands of letters to a wide range of correspondents. This fascinating new selection tells Chekhov’s story as a man and a writer through affectionate bulletins to his family, insightful discussions of literature with publishers and theater directors, and tender love letters to his actress wife. Vividly evoking landscapes, people, and his daily life, the letters offer revealing glimpses into Chekhov’s preoccupations—the onset of tuberculosis, his dual careers as doctor and writer, and his ambivalence about his growing reputation as Russia’s foremost playwright and author. This volume takes us inside the mind of one of the world’s greatest writers, and the character that emerges from these pages is resilient, generous, charming, and life enhancing.

The book is the fullest collection of Chekhov's letters in English translation to date and contains 370 selected letters reproduced in full. It comes with a chronology of Chekhov's life, a very readable, splendid short introduction, suggestions for further reading, a helpful list of correspondents and four very useful maps. An index at the end of the volume assists in, among other things, finding references to stories and plays in Chekhov's letters.

According to the editors, this book is also the first uncensored edition of Chekhov's correspondence in any language. Chekhov, a physician by training, called the facts of life by their name and took life's mishaps with a sense of humor. Later editors, more prudish and therefore considerably more boring, simply cut out what they called "rude language." Only after Glasnost, in the 1990s, the official portrait of Chekhov as a "decorous and refined gentleman with a stick, who never permitted himself to use racy language and who was rather pious and sickly, with little interest in women" (xv) was beginning to be revised.

The editors point out that Chekhov "may have hidden himself in his literary works, leaving it up to his readers to puzzle out his point of view, and he may have had an aversion to talking about himself in public, but in his letters he could be surprisingly outspoken at times," (xxxv) and so it happens that his correspondence reads almost like the autobiography he always declined to write.

Chekhov's letters illustrate why he is perhaps Russia's best-loved writer: "The qualities which first endeared him to Russian readers back in the 1880s are the same ones which explain his appeal today. He wrote no vast novels in which he attempted to solve the problems of existence [that would be Dostoevsky] or fathom the forces of world history [Tolstoy in "War and Peace"]. He had no particular axe to grind about how people should live their lives, but, like the good doctor that he was, he had a superb ability to diagnose what it was that prevented people from finding happiness and fulfillment and a unique talent for pinpointing it in a clear-sighted way that was a the same time immensely gentle and compassionate. He also had an infectious sense of humour and an unerring sense of life's ironies, which prevented his writing from ever becoming too portentous or sentimental." (xxxvii). Download this book in here.

Some other of my Chekov Collection that (also) you can download:

The Wife and Other Stories

The Witch and Other Stories

The Schoolmaster and Other Stories

The Party and Other Stories

The Witch and Other Stories

The Horse Stealers & Other Stories

The Duel and Other Stories

The Darling and Other Stories

The Cook’s Wedding and Other Stories

The Chorus Girl and Other Stories

The Bishop and Other Stories

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov