James Wood’s books include The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, The Book against God, a novel, and, most recently, How Fiction Works. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard.
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Biography and memoirs, Biography, Literature and literary criticism, Drama, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1900-1909, Anton Chekhov, Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia
Vol. 19 No. 16 · 21 August 1997
pages 19-21 | 4414 words
A Snack before I Die
James Wood
- Anton Chekhov: A Life by Donald Rayfield
HarperCollins, 674 pp, £25.00, June 1997, ISBN 0 00 255503 4
We can get a better understanding of Chekhov and his work from the notebook he kept than from any biography – even an important biography, like this one. It is a ledger of enigmas in which nothing adds up, full of strange squints, comic observations and promptings for new stories.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 18 · 18 September 1997
From Valentin Lyubarsky
In his review of Donald Rayfield’s Life of Chekhov (LRB, 21 August), James Wood mentions that Bunin supplied Chekhov with an ‘anecdote about a deacon who ate all the caviar at a funeral party’. Nina Berberova once told me how in the hungry Paris of 1946 she invited some fifteen people to her birthday party, and the most precious treat awaiting each guest was a piece of bread with a slice of kolbassa on it. Bunin had come first and while talking with her unhurriedly moved around the table lifting kolbassa slices from each plate. When the other guests arrived only pieces of bread were left.
Valentin Lyubarsky
Brooklyn
