Die Tschechowa 
Catherine Merridale
Olga Chekhova was the beautiful and talented niece of Anton Chekhov’s wife, Olga Knipper. Her life spanned Lenin’s Revolution, Stalin’s Terror, and the rise and fall of Hitler’s Reich; her relatives and friends were actors, politicians, millionaires and spies. She liked to dramatise herself, embroidering her anecdotes of childhood and youth with wild jackals, rugged scenery and doting older men.
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Catherine Merridale, a lecturer in history at Bristol University, is the author of Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia.
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