Billington, James A. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
Figes, Orlando. Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).
Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia and the Russians: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Rzhevsky, Nicholas, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
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NOTES
Preface and Introduction
Anton Cechov, Senza trame e senza finale: 99 consigli di scrit- tura, ed. Piero Brunello, trans. Gigliola Venturi and Clara Coisson (Rome: Minimum Fax, 2002); Anton Cechov, Scarpe buone e un quaderno di appunti: Come fare un reportage, ed. Piero Brunello, trans. Nadia Caprioglio and Giovanna Spendel (Rome: Minimum Fax, 2004).
A. P. Chekhov, Ostrov Sakhalin: (Izputevykh zapisok) Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, Sochineniia, vols. 14—15 (Moscow: Iz- datel'stvo "Nauka," 1978). In English, the title is generally given as The Island of Sakhalin. Chekhov spent four years on his Sakhalin project. After extensive preliminary research in St. Petersburg and Moscow, he set off for the czarist penal colony on April 21, 1890, and returned on December 9 of the same year. He was on Sakhalin from July 11 through October 30. He published his Sakhalin Island: Travel Notes in 1895. [L.L.]
Raymond Carver, No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage, 1992), and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (New York: Vintage, 1989).
Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley Green (New York: Dover, 1957), p. 35.
Sanvitale, "Postfazione," in Katherine Mansfield, Lettere e diari: Pagine scelte, ed. C. K. Stead (Milan: Mondadori, 1981), p. 395.
Katherine Mansfield, The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), p. 204.
Natalia Ginzburg, E difficileparlare di sй: Conversazione apiu voci condotta da Marino Sinibaldi, ed. Cesare Garboli and Lisa Ginzburg (Torino: Einaudi, 1999), pp. 191-92.
Korney Chukovsky, quoted in Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 247.
Anton Chekhov, "Zapisnye knizhki: knizhka pervaja" ("Notebooks: First Notebook") Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 10 (Moscow: Khudozestvennaia literatura, 1963), p. 482 [L.L. translation]. Chekhov is countering the antimaterialist position articulated in Leo Tolstoy's fable "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"; see Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories, intr. A. N. Wilson, trans. Ronald Wilkes (London: Penguin, 1994).
Lev Shestov, Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays (Maunsel & Co., 1916).
Constantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art (Theater Arts Books, 1924).
Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov (B. W. Huebsch, 1921).
The characterizations belong, respectively, to the literary historian D. S. Mirsky ("singer of twilight moods," "a poet of superfluous people"), the populist literary critic N. K. Mikhailovsky ("a sick talent," "a poet of anguish"), Yu. Aleksandrovich (pen name of the critic A. N. Poteryakhin) (voice of "world sorrow"), and the theologian Sergei Bulgakov ("optimopessimist"). See also Nina Toumanova, Anton Chekhov: The Voice of Twilight Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937). I would eventually discover that Chekhov was just as brutal in his estimate of his fellow Russians. He wrote to his editor Suvorin in 1889, "Russian writers live in drainpipes, eat slugs, and make love to sluts and laundresses. They know nothing of history, geography, or the natural sciences." Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin, May 15, 1889, in Anton Chekhov, Perepiska A. P. Chekhova, available at: http://www.dushu.com.ua/. Subsequent citations from Chekhov's correspondence come from this source, and the translations are mine.
Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin, September 8, 1891.
Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin, May 30, 1888.
Ivan Bunin, the Nobel Prize-winning modernist, identified the squalid port on the Sea of Azov as having had a profound influence on Chekhov's "innate melancholy."
"Locals in Taganrog lived in small, dilapidated houses with moth-eaten awnings, tiny gardens, and common latrines. They rendered nothing sacred or private via gossip and news filled with envy and spite. They were also host to cruel spectacles; for example, prisoners were flogged or executed in public squares; stray dogs were beaten to death with clubs and sticks; young girls occasionally were kidnapped for Turkish harems.
"Chekhov never got over his dislike of Taganrog. In fact, the only saving grace about the place was the surrounding sea, its sights, smells, and sounds becoming a hallmark of his writing." (Ivan Bunin, About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony, ed. and trans. Thomas Gaiton Marullo [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007], p. 3)
Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin, October 27, 1888.
Undated letter (1900), cited in F. Malcovati, "Intro- duzione," in Anton Cechov, Racconti (Milan: Garzanti, 1996), vol. 1, p. xxv.
Anton Chekhov to Alexei Suvorin, March 27, 1894.
Anton Chekhov to Ivan Ivanovich Orlov, February 22, 1899.
Anton Chekhov to Alexei Pleshcheyev, October 4, 1888.
Anton Chekhov to Nikolai Chekhov, 1886.
A. P. Chudakov and Julian Graffy, "The Poetics of Chekhov: The Sphere of Ideas," New Literary History, vol. 9, no. 2, "Soviet Semiotics and Criticism: An Anthology" (Winter 1978): 375.
Anton Chekhov, The Wood-Demon, act III.
Anton Chekhov, "Svirel" ("The Reed Pipe").
L. Gol'denveizer, Vblizi Tolstogo (Moscow: Gosudarstven- noe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1959), pp. 68-69. Boris Eichenbaum, the Russian formalist critic, notes that Tolstoy recognized Chekhov's radical originality and found in him his only serious competitor. He quotes the novelist as saying,
"Chekhov is an incomparable artist, yes, yes: incomparable
An artist of life ... Chekhov created new forms of writing, completely new, in my opinion, to the entire world, the like of which I have encountered nowhere.. And already it is impossible to compare Chekhov, as an artist, with earlier Russian writers—with Turgenev, with Dostoevsky, or with me. Chekhov has his own special form like the impressionists." Boris Eichenbaum, "Chekhov at Large," Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 27.
Anton Chekhov to Alexander Chekhov, May 18, 1886.
Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper, ed. and trans. Jean Benedetti (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1996).
Anton Chekhov to Rimma Vashuk-Neishtadt, March 28, 1897.