Checkhov. Translated by Michael Henry Heim.

New York: E. P. Dutton, (1986). First American Edition, stated. Octavo, cream cloth & boards (hardcover), gilt letters, viii, 364 pp. Former owner inscription; otherwise, Fine; in a Very Good, price-clipped dust jacket with some rumpling. From dust jacket: The Russian-born biographer Henri Troyat presents the lives of the Russian novelists with the vividness and drama they brought to their own fiction. With Chechov, his first return to a literary subject in fifteen years and the winner of the Grand Prix de la Critique Litteraire 1984, he creates an (truncated) indelible portrait of the writer closest to his own temperament, and the most modern of the Russian masters. To endure a nightmarish childhood ruled by a tyrannical father, Anton Checkhov forged for himself a stoical code of self-mastery, and at a young age was serving as counselor to his large family and entertaining them with stories. A doctor inspired him to take up medicine, a critic to rewrite his stories, and by his early twenties medicine and literature were established as the twin pillars of his life -- shadowed by the progressive tuberculosis that would haunt his every achievement. Pivoting between commitment -- to family and medicine -- and freedom -- from politics, religion, any form of cant -- Checkhov was always the man caught in the deadly middle. “I am as bored as a sturgeon,” he wrote, and fled to Sakhalin Island to observe the life of convicts, then journeyed through Europe. Returning to Russia, he sold his dacha in the Moscow suburbs for a healthier seaside property in Yalta. He remained skeptical of his own success and fearful of women, fending them off until the end of his life when, truly in love for the first time and marrying a young actress, he could not live with her because of her career and his worsening health. With his novelist’s talent for presenting his subject’s life from the inside, Henri Troyat has written a rich biography of the engaging pessimist that will send us all back to Chekhov’s work. (Inventory #: vita5985)