Letters to His Family and Friends

Chekhov wrote nearly two thousand letters during his short life; Constance Garnett selected from them the passages that best illuminate his character and craft. The collection moves from a teenage Chekhov writing home from boarding-school Taganrog, through his rise as Russia's most acclaimed short-story writer, his journey to the penal colony at Sakhalin, his exile to Yalta for tuberculosis, his collaboration with Stanislavsky on the Moscow Art Theatre, and his late marriage to the actress Olga Knipper. The letters — addressed to Suvorin, Gorky, Tchaikovsky, his brothers and sister, and dozens of others — are by turns scathingly funny, generous, exhausted, and astonishingly clear-eyed about literature, politics, and the conditions of Russian life.