Some interesting material on hitherto unexplored aspects of Chekhov’s life, but this one’s strictly for specialists.
A peculiar biography that justifies its addition to an overcrowded shelf by focusing on the landscapes most important to the Russian writer.
It’s a good idea—for a magazine article or an academic monograph. Drawn out to book length, this geographical survey eventually palls as the text wanders from Taganrog, where Chekhov was born in 1860, through Moscow and St. Petersburg to Melikhovo, his country home outside Moscow, and Yalta, the Crimean resort to which he relocated in a vain attempt to stem the progress of his tuberculosis. British scholar Bartlett (Russian/Univ. of Durham; Wagner and Russia, not reviewed) admits to taking “an impressionistic approach,” and early chapters provide atmospheric context for his work by the evoking flat, unpopulated steppe, dotted with ancient Scythian burial mounds, of his childhood; and the arcadian meadows, forests and rivers he enjoyed when summering in a dacha outside Moscow. But her occasional schematic linking of these vistas to a particular story through lengthy quotes merely serves to underscore how little information this book provides about Chekhov’s literary life, apart from his surprising friendship with reactionary St. Petersburg magazine publisher Alexei Suvorin. The plays in particular get very short shrift here; in a typical passage, the author writes, “When [Chekhov] returned to Nice for that last visit, he spent the first week of his stay putting the final touches on Three Sisters”—which has hardly been mentioned before. Happily, we learn a good deal more about Chekhov the man than Chekhov the writer. He quietly improved every place he lived, treating the local peasants long after he had given up practicing medicine and raising funds for local schools and post offices. The chronology of his existence, largely abandoned for long stretches, reasserts itself in the final chapters about his slow decline and death at a German spa in 1904, which make the previous emphasis on the physical terrain seem even more arbitrary.
Some interesting material on hitherto unexplored aspects of Chekhov’s life, but this one’s strictly for specialists.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-3075-2
Page Count: 395
Publisher: Free Press UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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