"Anton Chekhov's plays and stories have become familiar classics in translation, but his remarkable correspondence has been more or less unknown to American readers. Yet the letters show Chekhov intimately as man and artist, and offer a revealing glimpse of Russian life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From the various Russian editions of the voluminous Chekhov correspondence, Avrahm Yarmolinsky has chosen more than five hundred letters for this book, annotating them where necessary to identify people, places, and events. What emerges from this comprehensive selection is a compelling self-portrait of a man of irrepressible humor, a man who abhorred deceit and coercion; loved individuality and freedom; trusted in science; looked quizzically at government; had no faith in the intelligentsia, the proletariat, or for that matter the peasantry from which he stemmed, yet had a strong sense of civic responsibility and was deeply humane. As writer, doctor, and playwright, as kinsman and husband, he was a man of genius and generosity. He was also, as Mr. Yarmolinsky writes, 'an incorruptible witness' to his time. Chekhov is a complex figure, and the letters disclose a person more than usually self-contradictory, elusive, and lonely. For much of his life he was dangerously ill, and his last years were spent as a consumptive in exile in the Crimea. From his home there--or from hotels in Nice, Moscow, and finally the Black Forest--letters poured out to members of his family, other writers and doctors, editors, actors, and his wife--an actress with the Moscow Art Theater who played leading roles in most of his plays. These letters are as engaging as the earlier ones written while traveling across Siberia to study the penal colony on Sakhalin, or to his first publishers and friends in the theater. Read chronologically, from the earliest teenage missives of the 1870s to his last letters of 1904, they tell a story of his delight in life, of passion, of wrenching pathos."--Dust jacket.