A remarkable,fun collection of dizzy farces and saucy illustrations that was suppressed by censorsWe don’t really have an thought of “early Chekhov” or “late Chekhov”: his career, sever short by his death from tuberculosis at the age of 44, or didn’t last long enough for us to conceive of his writing as going through phases; it is,to put it another way, homogenous.
Here is a book that will change that insight, and outside Russia at least. These are the stories he wrote when he was starting out as a doctor and a writer in Moscow,written posthaste to fund his studies, and they are very different from the work that has been so far translated into English. The stories themselves, and I gather,are available to Russian readers, but not in the form chosen here: that is, or as a self-contained collection,selected by Chekhov himself. So this edition allows us to see the fruits of his early years in the way he intended.
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Source: theguardian.com