The stories are good, but the names are long and confusing and also some stories become confusing with the choice of words chosen by the author. Overall, though, a good book.

One problem with this Dover edition is the footnotes refer back to previous identical footnotes. This stops the flow of reading because the reader has to page back. There's no reason not to just repeat the footnote. Chekhov presents even these long-named Russian characters as individuals with defined personalities. The plot is simple or nonexistent. It serves only as background for character development. I'd be reading along and all of a sudden stop dead by a thought so authentic and original that I'd have to highlight it. Then reread it. Then think about it. That's the singular trait which makes Chekhov a writer worth reading.

If you want a short indroduction to Chekhov, this Dover Thrift Edition is a great value. This edition uses older translations because in order to offer such an unbelievable value, the editor must use text that is not copyright protected. I found the translations used to be readible and I enjoyed the character development. Chekhov is not O'Henry ... i.e, the stories in this book do not have tremendous plot development and surprise or ironic twists. Rather, he seeks to give a slice of life in the Tzarist Russsia of his day. Four of the stories are slices of life of fairly well off members of Russian society or, at least, Russian upper middle class. One, appropriately entitled "The Peasants" is indeed a story about the lives of peasants. I enjoyed all of the stories but, my favorite was "The Lady With the Toy Dog," which explored the age old phenomenon of extramarital affairs and the tragedy of forbidden love. Chekhov explores the chraracters' emotions, in this story, without being judgmental one way or the other. Another engaging story is "The Black Monk" which explores happiness in one's delusions as opposed to unhappiness in the real world (or was the main character's vision a delusion at all?). Like I say, the translations are not the latest and only five stories are included but this is a five star value. The book has made me interested (when I have more time) to explore a larger volume of Chekhov's stories so, this edition has fulfilled its task well.

Basically I picked this book up hoping that it would have the hard-to-find play, "Wild Honey," the closest Chekhov ever came to being Noel Coward. Not here! Ivanov - not here! The Bear - Not Here! While the essays are here and several insightful writings - to call this book "THE PLAYS" is an utter falsehood, not when there is so much missing.

Though this is not the fullest collection of Chekhov's work, it offers wonderful criticism and discussion on four of his greatest plays. The book intrigued me as a Norton Critical Edition--filled with notes, essays, and articles on one of the greatest authors of the genre. While not the complete works, arguably the best representation of Chekhov's drama available.

Review of Anton Chekhov: A Life. Donald Rayfield. NY: Henry Holt, 1997. 603 pp.

There are many good biographies of Chekhov available, and if a person has not read any,I would suggest another before reading Donald Rayfield's Anton Chekhov: A Life. Rayfield says that he has received access to much previously classified information. Unfortunately this loads his biography with an over-abundance of undigested detail, as if we were reading Chekhov's engagement calendar for each year or an encyclopedia of the minutiae of Chekhov's life. The material needs to be pruned down and focused. No where do I feel a biographer's point of view towards his subject -- unless it be to include as many facts as possible. And although it is interesting to read about the lives of those with whom Chekhov was most closely involved, we do not need to learn about every tart he slept with or every family problem encountered by one of his brother's wives. When these influence his writing, they are an interesting bonus, when they do not, a stronger hand at selection would have been appreciated. Indeed, the most interesting parts of the biography to me were those areas which showed how Chekhov transformed the details of his life into his work. However, too little of these connections were shown, and too many details were simply superfluous. I also miss the author's awareness of Chekhov's ironic humor, and I feel disappointed at the lack of discussion of the short farces. I recommend this book for Chekhov affectionados rather than for Chekhov novices.

BARBARA MACKEY, Ph.D. University of Toledo

This is a book that grows and grows on the reader. At first I was put off by the book's clumsy style and by the brutality (really unforgivable) of Chekhov's father Pavel. Then I got "hooked" on Anton's fierce ambition joined to his extraordinary sweetness of temper; until, when he contracts TB and finally marries Olga Knipper, I was wholly sympathetic to him, his milieu, and his struggle to create masterpieces like THE CHERRY ORCHARD. A friend said of him, "Why are such precious contents locked up in such a frail vessel?" (p. 581). The author provides little interpretation of personalities and events; rather, he uses letters (thousands of them) to create, like a mosaic, the rich beauty of Chekhov's personality and the flowering of his genius. Highly recommended. -- Michael Squires, Ph.D.

As an actor dealing with navigating the dangerous world of Chekhov on the stage, I am always looking to find whatever information I can on the landscape of his work. I read Rayfield's Biography of Chekhov which was quite thorough and very informative (if difficult to get through) and I picked up this one to take me a bit more into his view of Chekhov. This is a realy solid book, full of wonderfully well-thought ideas peppered with his knowledge and research, and it really helped to put some perspective on the piece. The danger is that it is Rayfield's perspective, and at times his opinions override the play as a whole. As a research tool, I'd highly recommend it for actors -- he illuminates some pretty sticky spots and gives some real useful angles on the text, as well as sharing the histories in performance and criticism. But it is all his own ideas, which are well to be respected, but he's deeply attached to making sense of the plays relative to what he's found in Chekhov's life, and THAT can be distracting and problematic. It was for me. Thankfully, he's quite clear about his opinions -- they are more than obvious. So despite those minor distractions, I would highly recommend it for anyone wanting to dig a little deeper into Chekhov's world.

I enjoyed reading the play. But, I found it to be a very simplistic and mundane piece of literature. Overall, I enjoyed the simplicity and down-to-earth form of the play quite fascinating.

In 1984, The Ecco Press published a handsome thirteen-volume edition of The Tales of Chekhov that contained the respected, if somewhat dated, English translations of Constance Garnett. The original thirteen volumes were subsequently supplemented by two additional volumes, "The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings," translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (a volume which is still in print under the auspices of another publisher) and the book I review here, "Notebook of Anton Chekhov," translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.

Chekhov's stories are, of course, classic examples of the genre. In writing those stories, he was known (not surprisingly) to draw on numerous incidents from his everyday life. As Vladimir Nabokov relates in his "Lectures on Russian Literature," interpolating and quoting from an article on Chekhov:

" 'Do you know how I write my short stories?' [Chekhov] said to Korolenko, the radical journalist and short story writer, when the latter had just made his acquaintance. 'Here's how!' 'He glanced at his table,' Korolenko tells us, 'took up the first object that met his eye--it happened to be an ash tray--placed it before me and said: "If you want it you'll have a story to-morrow. It will be called 'The Ash Tray.' " ' And it seemed to Korolenko then and there that a magical transformation of that ash tray was taking place: 'Certain indefinite situations, adventures which had not yet found concrete form, were already beginning to crystallize about the ash tray.' "

Chekhov regularly recorded seemingly mundane daily incidents in notebooks and diaries and later referred to them in writing his stories. It is from this material that Koteliansky and Woolf have drawn in compiling the short (146 pages) collection of materials titled "Notebook of Anton Chekhov." While hardly an exhaustive collection of these materials, it is a useful little volume that illustrates some of Chekhov's writing habits.

The diary excerpts are a mere twelve pages from Chekhov's 1896 diary. The notebook excerpts are 130 pages from the notebooks written between 1894 and 1896. As the translators note in their short introduction to this collection, "[the] volume consists of notes, themes and sketches for works which Anton Chekhov intended to write, and are characteristic of the methods of his artistic production. If he used any material, he used to strike it out in the note-book."

While unfortunately out of print, "Notebook of Anton Chekhov" is a fascinating companion to Chekhov's stories, a little glimmer of insight into how Chekhov created the remarkably drawn pictures of nineteenth century Russian life that still enchant readers today.

In 1984, The Ecco Press published a handsome thirteen-volume edition of The Tales of Chekhov that contained the respected, if somewhat dated, English translations of Constance Garnett. The original thirteen volumes were subsequently supplemented by two additional volumes, "The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings," translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (a volume which is still in print under the auspices of another publisher) and the book I review here, "Notebook of Anton Chekhov," translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.

Chekhov's stories are, of course, classic examples of the genre. In writing those stories, he was known (not surprisingly) to draw on numerous incidents from his everyday life. As Vladimir Nabokov relates in his "Lectures on Russian Literature," interpolating and quoting from an article on Chekhov:

" 'Do you know how I write my short stories?' [Chekhov] said to Korolenko, the radical journalist and short story writer, when the latter had just made his acquaintance. 'Here's how!' 'He glanced at his table,' Korolenko tells us, 'took up the first object that met his eye--it happened to be an ash tray--placed it before me and said: "If you want it you'll have a story to-morrow. It will be called 'The Ash Tray.' " ' And it seemed to Korolenko then and there that a magical transformation of that ash tray was taking place: 'Certain indefinite situations, adventures which had not yet found concrete form, were already beginning to crystallize about the ash tray.' "

Chekhov regularly recorded seemingly mundane daily incidents in notebooks and diaries and later referred to them in writing his stories. It is from this material that Koteliansky and Woolf have drawn in compiling the short (146 pages) collection of materials titled "Notebook of Anton Chekhov." While hardly an exhaustive collection of these materials, it is a useful little volume that illustrates some of Chekhov's writing habits.

The diary excerpts are a mere twelve pages from Chekhov's 1896 diary. The notebook excerpts are 130 pages from the notebooks written between 1894 and 1896. As the translators note in their short introduction to this collection, "[the] volume consists of notes, themes and sketches for works which Anton Chekhov intended to write, and are characteristic of the methods of his artistic production. If he used any material, he used to strike it out in the note-book."

While unfortunately out of print, "Notebook of Anton Chekhov" is a fascinating companion to Chekhov's stories, a little glimmer of insight into how Chekhov created the remarkably drawn pictures of nineteenth century Russian life that still enchant readers today.

Checkov was a master of composing life's largest problems into beautiful language and ordinary situations which the entire world could understand. Granted he wrote them a long time ago but the underlying situation exists everywhere today. Here are three sisters completely unable to move on with their lives. They are unhappy, they are desperate for a change of scene, they are forced to give up anyone they love to someone else but yet they remain glued to the exact place where all of this occurs. Olga has passed her prime, Masha loves someone other than her husband, and Irina has no idea what could possibly make her happy and all they do is talk about change, but never do anything active. And in the end it all comes full circle and we as an audience, a reader, need to decide how to not fall into such a life rut, to learn by their actions as we do from Aesop's fables. This play is just written a great deal better, with a little more comedy and tugging at the heartstrings.

Ed Sanders is the author of numerous poetic and prose works, and is perhaps most famous for his book The Family (on the Manson murders), but here Sanders offers a 225 page biopoem of the russian playwright and shortstory writer (not to mention physician and humanitarian and lady's man), and his book is an ambitious attempt to capture the life and times of a genius who lived through a tumultous period of his country's history, a history that chekhov shared w/ figures like Lenin, Kropotkin, various Tsars and Tsar-lackey's, not to mention other literary giants of Tolstoyan and Dostoevskyean dimensions, all of whom put in cameos in Sanders' poem, a poem which is, by the way, scholarly in its accuracy, lucid in its exposition, and entertaining in a way that few poems manage to be, which is a way of saying that even if you normally can't stand contemporary american poetry, you will dig this book, especially of course if you are familiar W/ chekhov's work and the main thrust of 19th (and early 20th) century russian fiction, and if you're not, then you would probably be advised (and I bet Sanders would agree w/ me here) to read some of Chekhov's stories first, then get Sanders' Chekhov for a behind the scenes look at the man who created some of the best fiction in the history of the planet

As an entertainer, I am of course "in love" with the work of Chekov. I must admit that I was extremely skeptical of an adaption of his work. But the authors appear to have achieved a true "transformation" here, even deepening and finding more meanings in Dr. Chekov's work. It is truly incredible and a must for any serious lover of the theater or any casual Chekov reader. But the best here is that it can performed by 2 ACTORS!!!! WOW!!! I hope the play is one day again mounted because I personally would love to see it (even be in it). Signed, Dick Hammer

I thuroughly enjoyed the works of Chekhov, the writer who helped define the famous Moscow Art Theatre. His plot twists are a bit difficult to grasp outside of a theatre, but still very enjoyable.

Chekhov utilizes a realistic writing style. Fantastic and absurd stories where the actors just flailed around on stage and delivered their lines were of little use to him. His plays can be viewed in many different ways. A scene that at one moment can seem tragic, can be comedic if looked at another way. There is no consistant good or evil in a Chekhov piece. He once wrote, "depict life as it actually is. Its aim is truth, unconditional and honest... a man of letters... has to... realize that dung heaps play a very significant role in a landscape and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones." He wanted the emotions that the characters were experiencing to be sensed in the actions of the actors on stage, not in the words that anyone could sit down and read. This makes his work some of the more difficult to perform in theatre today. Only an experienced actor who is able to create a reality of their character is capable of performing a Chekhov play. Chekhov's comedies are often mistaken for tragidies. They are actually perfect examples of high comedy. In a true tragedy, the main characters have some heroic qualities that make their fall devestating to the audience. The characters in Chekhov's plays "The Seagull," and "The Cherry Orchard" have no such qualities. Chekhov also had a very particular way of writing his play. He set out with a purpose. He felt that the writer of the play needed a clearly defined reason to be writing, or else they would find themselves lost with a mediocre piece of work.

Schmidt presents a 'smooth' translation of Chekhov including his insertion of '(Beat)'s. However it is not faithful to the TIME and CONTEXT of Chekhov's Russia. TIME: Chekhov's language often reflects the social customs of the period and manner with which to approach communication. It's not always meant to be economical or direct (although he is direct in his day). So an 'updated' translation which flows quickly will flatten these nuances. CONTEXT: One has to understand the development of Theater in Russia in his time. His plays are not meant for melodramatic performances (prior to his time) or 'Method' acting (our time). Hence, a translation written for performances today will be colored by the directorial style preferred today. It is important to take that into consideration. By these standards, then no translation is acceptable. However if you find one that will generously tell the reader the difficulties in translating, present the various versions, include historical resources, notes and essays, and have plenty of footnotes. Then you are likely to have a good idea. I recommend Bristow's translation from Norton.

PS - I'm reviewing this from the point of view of a director. For actors or literature students or everyday readers, it is obviously a different matter.

This translation, which incorporates the original vernacular seamlessly into a contemporary translation, is by FAR the finest translation of Chekhov's plays (especially *Uncle Vanya*) I have ever read, or am likely to. As a professor of dramatic literature, I will never again teach Chekhov without assigning my students this fine edition--may it long stay in print.

introduced me to the wonder of chekhov. it's alive. "fresh" is definitely an apt description. read cherry orchard through and then start again at the beginning. hoofa!