Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Early in 1892, Chekhov bought a modest estate in Melikhovo, forty miles south of Moscow. In March, he moved there from Moscow together with his parents and sister, and would live in Melikhovo until 1899. From time to time, he…
A Daughter of Albion is a short story by Anton Chekhov. It was first published in 1883 in Nikolai Leykin’s magazine, Fragments (or Shards, perhaps more precisely). Up until 1888 Chekhov was known to the Russian public primarily as the…
Almost three weeks ago now, the Argumentative Old Git (Himadri Chatterjee) wrote of his plan to re-read Ibsen’s mature works, which include Brand, Peer Gynt and the twelve plays from The Pillars of Society (1877) to When We Dead Awaken…
Simon Karlinsky wrote in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (1973): The other novel of Chekhov’s student years, the somewhat Dostoyevskian murder mystery The Shooting Party (the original Russian title was Drama During a Hunt) of 1884,…
Chekhov started writing around 1880 to support his family while studying medicine and produced “more than 500 comic stories, spoofs, and vignettes for Moscow’s popular weekly magazines” in the 1880s. Some of them can be found in The Prank, the…
About a month ago I noticed that the opening two lines of T. S. Eliot’s Grishkin poem from Whispers of Immortality (1920) mimic the respective lines of Théophile Gautier’s Carmen (1852). Compare Eliot’s half-stanza Grishkin is nice: her Russian eyeIs…