Chekhov [Paperback]

Ed Sanders (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0876859651 | ISBN-13: 978-0876859650 | Publication Date: May 1, 1995 | Edition: First edition.

When poet Edward Sanders, founder of New York's famous Peace Eye Book Store as well as of the 60's folk-rock group The Fugs, undertook to write a drama based on the life of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, he started with a poem. Hoping that a poem would engender dialogue and chorus refrains, Sanders' finished product was. . . a poem. Delving into the life of the classic Russian author, Sanders was so taken with his subject that he realized "a verse biography of Chekhov could extend to five or ten thousand pages" and his poem (really a series of short poems about the short life and revolutionary times of the author of "The Seagull") grew and grew.


While Chekhov is slightly shorter than those five to ten thousand pages, it does contain "surprisingly detailed information about the social, political, and intellectual phenomena of Chekhov's Russia" (Booklist) and is written in verse that would do Pushkin proud. A must for any student of Chekhov, Russia or, for that matter, literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A third of this biography-in-verse skirts the gifted doctor cum playwright to serve instead as a primer on political strife in 19th-century Russia and a condensed retelling of facts done up in funny line breaks ("and the ghastly geekiness/ of the state bureaucracy"). Chekhov's early years get surprisingly short shrift: 44 words are given to the childhood event that led him into medicine. Only when we get to the adult artist is our attention finally aroused, as Sanders, while relating Chekhov's rationalizing away of tuberculosis, a research visit to Siberia and the albatross of censorship, finally breathes bloody life into his subject. Too rarely, however, does the poet enter Chekhov's mind; rather he works from the outside in, via scholarly details and letter excerpts. Sanders's career has been firmly rooted in the Beat movement?it's easy to understand his love of a great writer in a time of revolution. Less comprehensible is the lack of creativity that accompanies much of this work; and often silly is the occasional toke of Beat lingo, as when the toil of creating Uncle Vanya is described as "batter/ for the Divine Waffle."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Writer, perf-po (performing poet), and founding member of the 1960s poets' rock group the Fugs, Sanders has now created his own genre, the perf-po verse biography. First subject: the great Russian playwright and story writer Anton Chekhov. It's a highly readable work, beautiful as poetry, accessible as prose, that succeeds brilliantly in telling Chekhov's complex, fascinating life story: childhood in Taganrog, double career as hack journalist and respected physician, rise to a place of honor among Russian writers, and tragic early death from tuberculosis. Structured as a series of short, self-contained poems, many only a few lines long, the intelligent, well-researched work includes considerable discussion of nineteenth-century European history and provides some surprisingly detailed information about the social, political, and intellectual phenomena of Chekhov's Russia: Czar Alexander II's attempts to liberalize (which foundered after his assassination), his son Nicholas I's subsequent reactionary and repressive regime, and the myriad Russian secret societies, all pushing for revolution of some kind. Jack Helbig --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press; First edition. edition (May 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0876859651
• ISBN-13: 978-0876859650
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,174,591 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A laudotory ramble, October 10, 1997

By 

David Zauhar (Greensburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chekhov (Hardcover)

Ed Sanders is the author of numerous poetic and prose works, and is perhaps most famous for his book The Family (on the Manson murders), but here Sanders offers a 225 page biopoem of the russian playwright and shortstory writer (not to mention physician and humanitarian and lady's man), and his book is an ambitious attempt to capture the life and times of a genius who lived through a tumultous period of his country's history, a history that chekhov shared w/ figures like Lenin, Kropotkin, various Tsars and Tsar-lackey's, not to mention other literary giants of Tolstoyan and Dostoevskyean dimensions, all of whom put in cameos in Sanders' poem, a poem which is, by the way, scholarly in its accuracy, lucid in its exposition, and entertaining in a way that few poems manage to be, which is a way of saying that even if you normally can't stand contemporary american poetry, you will dig this book, especially of course if you are familiar W/ chekhov's work and the main thrust of 19th (and early 20th) century russian fiction, and if you're not, then you would probably be advised (and I bet Sanders would agree w/ me here) to read some of Chekhov's stories first, then get Sanders' Chekhov for a behind the scenes look at the man who created some of the best fiction in the history of the planet