I don't know who he is but he's old, he's got to know stuff... he's got to be like wise and stuff yeah? Anton Chekhov, masterful playwright and mirror to Russian society, awakening from one hundred years of sleep, is thrust rudely into twenty first century Britain. Reality shows, fashionistas, Z-list celebrities, illegal immigrants, chuggers and wags. Pole dancing, YouTube, Twitter and 5-a-day. Chekhov in Hell takes you on a whirlwind tour of modern day Britain.

Eminent critic Richard Gilman examines each of Chekhov's full-length plays, showing how they relate to each other, to Chekhov's short stories, and to his life. Gilman places the plays in the context of Russian and European drama and the larger culture of the period, and the reasons behind the enduring power of these classic works.

"Chekhov's keen powers of observation have been remarked by both memoirists who knew him well and scholars who approach him only through the written record and across the distance of many decades. To apprehend Chekhov means seeing how Chekhov sees, and the author's remarkable vision is understood as deriving from his occupational or professional training and identity. But we have failed to register, let alone understand, just what a central concern for Chekhov himself, and how deeply problematic, were precisely issues of seeing and being seen."—from the Introduction Michael C. Finke explodes a century of critical truisms concerning Chekhov's objective eye and what being a physician gave him as a writer in a book that foregrounds the deeply subjective and self-reflexive aspects of his fiction and drama. In exploring previously unrecognized seams between the author's life and his verbal art, Finke profoundly alters and deepens our understanding of Chekhov's personality and behaviors, provides startling new interpretations of a broad array of Chekhov's texts, and fleshes out Chekhov's simultaneous pride in his identity as a physician and devastating critique of turn-of-the-century medical practices and ideologies. Seeing Chekhov is essential reading for students of Russian literature, devotees of the short story and modern drama, and anyone interested in the intersection of literature, psychology, and medicine.

In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with his notes and extracts from his letters to relatives and associates.Highly valuable both as a detailed depiction of the Tsarist system of penal servitude and as an insight into Chekhov's motivations and objectives for visiting the colony and writing the expose, Sakhalin Island is a haunting work which had a huge impact both on Chekhov's career and on Russian society.

‘I’m having absolutely nothing to do with the theatre or the human race. They can all go to hell.’ – Anton Chekhov During the turmoil of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Maria Chekhov, Anton’s sister, placed many of her late brother’s manuscripts and papers in a safety deposit box in Moscow. In 1921 Soviet scholars opened the box, and discovered a play. The title page was missing. The play they found has too many characters, too many themes, too much action. All in all, it’s generally dismissed as unstageable. Like life. A new play by Dead Centre, creators of the OBIE / Fringe First winning LIPPY.

In his brief life, Chekhov was a doctor, essayist, dramatist and a humanitarian. He saw no conflict between art and science or art and medicine. This collection of stories presents powerful portraits of doctors in their everyday lives, struggling with their own personal problems.

The Undiscovered Chekhov gives us, in rich abundance, a new Chekhov. Peter Constantine's historic collection presents 38 new stories and with them a fresh interpretation of the Russian master. In contrast to the brooding representative of a dying century we have seen over and over, here is Chekhov's work from the 1880s, when Chekhov was in his twenties and his writing was sharp, witty and innovative. Many of the stories in The Undiscovered Chekhov reveal Chekhov as a keen modernist. Emphasizing impressions and the juxtaposition of incongruent elements, instead of the straight narrative his readers were used to, these stories upturned many of the assumptions of storytelling of the period. Here is "Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town," written as a series of telegrams, beginning with "Have been drinking to Sarah's health all week! Enchanting! She actually dies standing up!..." In "Confession...," a thirty-nine year old bachelor recounts some of the fifteen times chance foiled his marriage plans. In "How I Came to be Lawfully Wed," a couple reminisces about the day they vowed to resist their parents' plans that they should marry. And in the more familiarly Chekhovian "Autumn," an alcoholic landowner fallen low and a peasant from his village meet far from home in a sad and haunting reunion in which the action of the story is far less important than the powerful impression it leaves with the reader that each man must live his life and has his reasons.

This set comprises forty volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first sixty-eight volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

The essays collected in this book constitute a new contribution to our understanding of the originality and significance of Chekhov’s prose. A close textual analysis of his work is provided, and especially of previously neglected works—some long overdue for in-depth investigation—that Chekhov himself rightfully considered to be masterpieces. Analysis of both these and other previously analyzed works offers a new interpretation which contrasts with those offered by previous Chekhov scholars. Works examined include those dealing with Chekhov’s astonishingly accurate and artistic portrayal of a wide variety of illnesses—without the use of any medical terms. These works are shown to be not mere “clinical studies,” but genuine, impressive works of art. The author, who suffered half of his life from tuberculosis, effectively portrayed many characters afflicted with this disease which was incurable at the time. Many of these works reveal an indisputable symbiosis of the doctor and the artist. Chekhov maintained that “in Goethe the poet lived amicably side by side with the scientist”—a fitting description of him as well. Doctors, the most frequently portrayed characters in Chekhov’s oeuvre are appropriately subjected to extensive analysis, as are the themes of fate and death and dying that figure so prominently in Chekhov’s work. Attention is accorded to imaginative fictional works dealing with philosophy and the theme of crime and punishment, as well as The Island of Sakhalin, a narrative of non-fictional sociological content.

Of all Russian writers, Chekhov is one of the best liked and most easily appreciated. Yet because his work is subtle and understated, we need help to understand him. Chekhov can be (as his friends complained) the most elusive of writers, and one who appears capable of having two opposite views and opposite intentions simultaneously. Donald Rayfield, one of the world's foremost Chekhov scholars, reveals the layers of meaning on which the stories and plays are built. All Chekhov's important works are studied: we see how closely the two genres are connected and gain insight into Chekhov's rapid development over his brief twenty years of creative life, from medical student supplementing his income by writing comic stories, to father of twentieth-century drama and narrative prose.