Anton Chekhov Audiobook By Donald Rayfield cover art

Anton Chekhov

A Life

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Anton Chekhov

By: Donald Rayfield
Narrated by: Fred Williams
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Anton Chekhov's life was short, intense, and dominated by battles, both with his dependents and with the tuberculosis that was to kill him at age 44. He was one of the greatest playwrights and short-story writers ever born, but he was torn between medicine and literature, as he was between family and friends, between a longing for solitude and a need for company. When he was a child, his family life was at times made a hell by a monstrous father, a possessive sister, and delinquent elder brothers; his own adult life was tortuously balanced between the affections of a series of mistresses and a marriage to an actress that was not as idyllic as it has traditionally been painted.

Donald Rayfield's biography strips the whitewash from the image of Chekhov and shows us what lay behind his restrained, ironic facade. The result does not denigrate him but shows him in the full heroism of his brief, prodigiously creative life. Rayfield has spent more than three years combing the Chekhov archives all over Russia (Chekhov was a restless traveler for the whole of his life, going from Siberia to the Cote d'Azur) and has uncovered thousands of documents and letters from Chekhov's lovers, friends, and family, most of them never published before, which cumulatively tell of a life far more entangled and turbulent than we ever previously suspected.

Anton Chekhov is a vivid portrait of Russia and Russian society 100 years ago, as well as an investigation of the emotions, ideas, conflicts, and experiences that Chekhov built into his stories and plays. Above all, it is the moving story of an artist's sometimes ruthless, often covert fight to save his creativity from strangulation by illness and family. It will establish itself as the definitive modern biography.

©1997 Donald Rayfield (P)1998 Blackstone Audiobooks Art & Literature Authors Russia Witty Biography

Critic reviews

"Rayfield has done Chekhov and his readers a great service. His efforts have uncovered a Chekhov, complex, troubling and ambiguous, who finally feels right as the man behind the art." (The New York Times Book Review)

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I’d started listening to his stories brought to me by a ‘free’ Audible narrated by actor Richard Armitage, who more than read the stories, he appeared to inhabit Anton’s tender soul. With all the beings within his stories, I became confused about how they fit into his works. So I went to find a biography I could listen to while doing other things and found this magnificent well-documented narrative performed exceptionally well so as not to influence me in any way.

To understand his stories you must know the man

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If you want a thorough record of Chekhov’s life, this is a great choice. But it so crammed with details, provided chronologically, that one doesn’t get much of a sense of the shape or color of Chekhov’s life.

Comprehensive but schematic

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It is a rather tedious read as the other readers described. The minutiae of Chekhov's many relationships and the Access Hollywood take on who was hot on the Russian literary landscape is excessive. It is a biography, however, and an expansive one at that. Nonetheless, the mass of letters quoted in the book is an extremely pathetic look into the life of a family of Russians in the beginning of the XX c., the strife, the misery, the sorrows. It is dreadful and moving at once.

moving insight into life of writer

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The author ‘s obsessive attention to the daily chronology and details of Chekhov is fascinating. It’s a uniquely focused approach that excludes context, but it works somehow. It is the opposite of Robert Caro. But it works to give you a sense of the texture of Chekhov and the distance between his stories and in certain ways his personality.

A total immersion in CHEKHOV

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I found the book interesting, narration however was bad. It lacked emotion and was monotonous.

Interesting book, poor performance

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This audio book uses a virtual voice. Because the virtual voice sounds like a reading of the train timetables it's impossible to enjoy the story. Simple dates sounds annoying because virtual voice reads them as numbers "one, two, or three".

terrible virtual voice

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This is by far the most tedious book I have ever listened to. I will stick it out until the end because some of these very descriptive, tiny details about Chekhov and Russian culture/history are interesing. I am not a stranger to long listens...but this one will test your patience and concentration skills.

Creeping Detail

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