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Article: Imitation of life.(The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- December 13, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE COMPLETE SHORT NOVELS.
By Anton Chekhov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Everyman's Library. 548 pp. $23.
To return to Chekhov in this cultural moment makes you feel as if you were experiencing spring in Russia. His meticulously crafted fiction and plays seem absolutely free of artifice, as if telling stories were a natural function of his physical being, like a birdsong, and not a highly disciplined and self-conscious creative-intellectual activity. Yet so much writing about fiction now consists of tiresome debates over realism versus modernism, the nature of consciousness in the novel, character versus caricature, ...