Chekhov

19 hrs. 33 min.

Language Russian

Author Alexander Izmaylov

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

Description

A prominent Russian literary critic, prose writer, and poet Alexander Alekseevich Izmailov (1873–1921) is the author of the first monograph study of Chekhov’s work. Izmailov provides a fairly accurate genre definition of his book—a biographical sketch. Indeed, the whole work focuses primarily on biographical facts; according to Izmailov, the book did not claim to cover everything completely—hence the term “sketch.”
Izmailov, practically, does not interpret or analyze Chekhov’s works, incorporating them into his study only as facts of biography and literary history (he writes about their emergence, their significance in the literary process, includes critics’ responses, and illustrates works with letters by Chekhov and his contemporaries). It is the epistolary material and the recollections of contemporaries—which are sometimes even unpublished, and obtained by Izmailov orally—that formed the basis of the book.