A unique collection of everything that Chekhov wrote about the theatre.
Chekhov started writing about theatre in newspaper articles and in his own letters even before he began writing plays. Later, he wrote in detail about his own plays to his lifelong friend and mentor Alexei Suvorin, his wife and leading actress, Olga Knipper, and to the two directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Collected for this volume, these writings reveal Chekhov’s instinctive curiosity about the way theatre works – and his concerns about how best to realise his own intentions as a playwright. Often peppery, passionate, even distraught, as he feels his plays misinterpreted or undermined, Chekhov comes over in these pages as a true man of the theatre.
'Chekhov is an acute observer who could easily have made his way as a director or dramaturg judging by his ability to spot strengths and weaknesses in not only his own writing but that of others. This book builds a strong picture of theatrical life in Moscow and St Petersburg just before and at the turn of the last century, with vast amounts of bitching seemingly a commonplace. It can also serve as a tangential autobiography since, through its pages, it is possible to learn much about its subject's life and work.' – British Theatre Guide
About the author
Peter Urban (16 July 1941 in Berlin – 9 December 2013) was a German writer and translator. He became famous for his translations of Russian authors, including Isaak Babel, Anton Chekhov, Daniel Charms, Leonid Dobychin, Ivan Goncharov, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, and Ivan Turgenev. He also translated from Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene and Czech. He was granted several important translation prizes, such as the Übersetzerpreis der Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, the Preis der Stadt Münster für Europäische Poesie, the Johann-Heinrich-Voß-Preis für Übersetzung and the Helmut-M.-Braem-Übersetzerpreis.
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