Chekhov's Letters

Carol Apollonio is professor of Russian at Duke University.Radislav Lapushin is associate professor of Russian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

• Introduction: Chekhov's Letters: An Integral Body of Work, Carol Apollonio and Radislav LapushinPart I: Publication History, Reception, and Textual IssuesChapter 1: Reader Reception of Chekhov’s Letters at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, Liya BushkanetsChapter 2: Some Like It Hot: The Censored Letters, Vladimir KataevChapter 3: On Editing and Translating Chekhov's Letters, Rosamund BartlettChapter 4: Imaginary Chekhov? Yet Another Fabrication by Boris Sadovskoy, Igor SukhikhPart II: Approaches to a Body of WorkChapter 5: Chekhov's “Postal Prose,” Vladimir LakshinChapter 6: Letters Not about Chekhov: On How We Read Chekhov's Letters, Michael FinkeChapter 7: Chekhov’s Letters: Slow Reading, Alevtina KuzichevaChapter 8: The Writer’s Correspondence as a Narrative Genre: Aspects of Chekhov’s Epistolary Prose, Irina GitovichPart III: GenreChapter 9: A Unity of Vision: Chekhov’s Letters, Alexander ChudakovChapter 10: “I Listen to My Irtysh Beating against Coffins”: The Existential and Dreamlike in Chekhov’s Letters, Radislav LapushinChapter 11: A Playwright’s Letters, Emma PolotskayaPart IV: From Life to Art: ReadingsChapter 12: Homo Sachaliensis: Chekhov as a Family Man, Galina RylkovaChapter 13: Russian Binaries and the Question of Culture: Chekhov’s True Intelligent, Svetlana EvdokimovaChapter 14: Burned Letters: Reconstructing the Chekhov-Levitan Friendship, Serge GregoryChapter 15: Verbal Games and Animal Metaphors in Chekhov’s Correspondence with Olga Knipper, John Douglas ClaytonChatper 16: The Withered Tree, Zinovy PapernyChapter 17: Anton Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence: The Art of Letters and the Discourse of Mortality, Katherine Tiernan O'ConnorPart V: My Favorite Chekhov LetterChapter 18: Preface: Chekhov’s Blotter, Dina RubinaChapter 19: Chekhov's First Dissertation Proposal (to Alexander Chekhov, from Moscow, 17/18 April 1883), Michael FinkeChapter 20: Letters, Dreams and Their Environments (to Dmitry Grigorovich, from Moscow, 12 February 1887), Matthew MangoldChapter 21: Chekhov's Letter to Lermontov (to Mikhail Chekhov, from the ship “Dir,” 28 July 1888), Katherine Tiernan O'ConnorChapter 22: A Favorite Chekhov Letter: Mission Impossible (Letters from 1888–89), Robin Feuer MillerChapter 23: Chekhov's “Holy of Holies”: The Poetics of Corporeity (to Alexander Pleshcheev, from Moscow, 4 October 1888), Svetlana EvdokimovaChapter 24: Winged Things (to Alexei Suvorin, from Moscow, 17 October 1889), Elizabeth GeballeChapter 25: A Fragment from the Aggregate: Sinai and Sakhalin in Chekhov's Letters to Suvorin (to Alexei Suvorin, 9 March 1890; 9 December 1890; 17 December 1890), Robert Louis JacksonChapter 26: Why Not Stay Here, so Long as It's not Boring? (to family, from Siberia, 23–26 June 1890), Carol ApollonioChapter 27: A Prescription to Keep Love at Bay (to Lika Mizinova, from Bogimovo, 20 June 1891), Serge GregoryChapter 28: Sympathy for the Devil (to Alexei Suvorin from Melikhovo, 8 April 1892), Cathy PopkinChapter 29: Doctor Chekhov Comes to Terms with Tolstoy (to Alexei Suvorin, from Melikhovo, 1 August 1892), Caryl EmersonChapter 30: In the Hospital (to Rimma Vashchuk, from Moscow, 27 March 1897), Rosamund BartlettChapter 31: The Power of Memory (to Fyodor Batyushkov, from Nice, 15 December 1897), Elena GorokhovaChapter 32: I Have no Faith in Our Intelligentsia (to Ivan Orlov, from Yalta, 22 February 1899), Andrei StepanovChapter 33: Forgive, Forget, and Write (to Ivan Leontyev (Shcheglov), from Yalta, 2 February 1900), Sharon M. CarnickeChapter 34: In Place of a Conclusion (to Grigory Rossolimo and to Maria Chekhova, from Badenweiler, 28 June 1904), Radislav Lapushin

The Chekhov that emerges from these insightful essays is a warm, generous, and deeply empathetic man. Appropriately, Lapushin concludes the scintillating volume by shedding light on the open ending of Chekhov’s two last letters and his enduring legacy. Chekhov’s Letters is as rigorous in its scholarship as it is delightful in its creative detours. One only wishes that more individual letters were covered, but given the sheer volume of Chekhov’s correspondence, that would be impossible. This marvelous book instructs, entertains, and inspires to delve into the letters themselves.