Skip navigation
London Review of Books

Why Sakhalin? subscriber-only content

Joseph Frank

  • Chekhov: Scenes from a Life by Rosamund Bartlett  Buy this book
  • Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips  Buy this book

Chekhov biographers are lucky: they don’t have to face the problem of spending a good deal of time studying the life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this shift in sentiment.

subscriber-only content Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.

Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford. The fifth and final volume of his Life of Dostoevsky was published in 2002.