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Anton Chekhov A LIFE IN LETTERS Folio Society

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Folio edition, first print slipcased hardback edited and translated by Gordon McVay. Published by the Folio Society in 1994
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Folio edition, first print slipcased hardback of CHEKHOV A LIFE IN LETTERS, by Anton Chekhov. Edited and Translated by Gordon McVay. Published by the Folio Society, London, in 1994.

The book is in very good condition (Bound in black buckram. Blocked with Chekhov's large signature in gilt on the front and back boards and gilt lettering on the spine). In its original red slipcase which is in very good condition with just light shelf wear. Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860 – 1904) was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress.

Chekhov started writing plays a few years later, mainly short comic sketches he called vaudvilles. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1896, the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg performed his first full- length drama, The Seagull. Some of Chekhov's most successful plays include The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters.

Chekhov brought believable but complex personalizations to his characters, while exploring the conflict between the landed gentry and the oppressed peasant classes. Chekhov voiced a need for serious, even revolutionary, action, and the social stresses he described prefigured the Communist Revolution in Russia by twenty years. He is considered one of Russia's greatest playwrights. Chekhov contracted tuberculosis in 1884, and was certain he would die an early death. In 1901, he married Olga Knipper, an actress who had played leading roles in several of his plays. Chekhov died in 1904, spending his final years in Yalta.

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 Folio edition Chekhov: A Life in Letters presents a coherent portrait of Chekhov's life in letters and 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.

"Anton Chekhov was born in 1860, the grandson of a serf. When he died, of tuberculosis in 1904, he was world famous, not just as a dramatist and short-story writer, the friend of Tolstoy and Gorky, but as a supremely endearing man. 'His story', said Thomas Mann, 'is the most moving and captivating biography I know.' It is through Chekhov's letters that his story is best told. As a child he learned to avoid trouble by clowning, and he carried this talent for humour and self-mockery into the sketches he wrote to support his family and pay his way through medical school, and later, with subtle brilliance, into his stories and plays.

In 1890, intent as always on not taking either himself or his health too seriously, he made the hair-raising journey across Siberia to the penal colony of Sakhalin, 'a descent into hell' which brought him even greater fame. Women idolised him, but he, who wrote so knowingly about love, kept them at arm's length, until, in 1901, he married the actress, Olga Knipper. Only in his letters did he let himself go - about family; friends; travels to Vienna, Venice, St Petersburg; his work - in short, about his life, lived zestfully and humorously until the end."

Book size: 6¼" × 9½". 378 pages. Illustrated with black & white frontis and 16 pages of black & white photographs.

ISBN: n/a

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Chekhov: A Life in Letters by Anton Chekhov and edited by Gordon McVay

 
  • Condition:
    Used
  • Product Code:
    2261
  • Weight:
    1.08kg