A Snack before I Die
James Wood, 21 August 1997
Anton Chekhov: A Life
by Donald Rayfield.
HarperCollins, 674 pp., £25, June 1997,0 00 255503 4 Show More
by Donald Rayfield.
HarperCollins, 674 pp., £25, June 1997,
“... complacent Dr Ragin in ‘Ward 6’, who lectures his abused patients at the local asylum about Marcus Aurelius and the importance of stoicism, and in the fatuous priest in ‘In the Ravine’ who, at dinner, comforts a woman who has lost her baby while pointing at her with ‘a fork with a pickled mushroom on the end of it’. Yet the son did not abandon ... ”