![]() ![]() ![]() As Pevear puts it, “The writer was seen first of all as a pointer of the way, a leader in the struggle of social justice his works were expected to be ‘true to life’ and to carry a clear moral value.’” Chekhov wrote against this tradition, embracing what Pevear refers to as a kind of literary impressionism: Russian literature in the 1800s reflected a lot of the social and political upheaval occurring at the time, and authors were often expected to be (as it sometimes feels now, too) didactic, moralizing, and politically engaged via their fiction. Pevear does a great job in his thorough introduction of putting Chekhov’s work into both the broader context of Russian history at the time he was writing and the enduring influence of his work on the short story form throughout the 20th and, now, 21st centuries. In other words, I was long overdue to correct this oversight in my reading history. ![]() I had read one much-slimmer collection more than a decade ago, but comparing the tables of contents between it and this new purchase (as well as another volume that belongs to my wife) I saw virtually no overlap in terms of the stories included. I had scant experience with the short stories of Anton Chekhov prior to tackling this lengthy collection translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |