Borges in his short story “Kafka and his Precursors” makes the point that as he came to read more of Kafka, he could ‘recognise his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods’. Borges lists Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Browning Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany
Anton Chekhov studied medicine at the University of Moscow, graduating in 1884. He had already published a short story Dragonfly in 1880 whilst he was a medical student and in the year of his graduation published The Tales of Melponeme. He moved to Melikhovo, an estate 45 miles from Moscow in 1892. This was also…
Continue reading ➞ Chekhov and the 1892 Russian Cholera epidemic
There are quite a number of Chekhov’s short stories that deal in the business of dying and death:‘ The Bishop’, ‘Typhus’, and ‘A Tragic Actor’ are examples. However, my favourite is ‘A Dreary Story From the Notebook of an Old Man’. I suppose I am drawn to the story because our protagonist is an aging…
In 1890 Anton Chekhov set off for Sakhalin to conduct a census of the prison and exile population of the island. He was 30 years old at the time and was already suffering from tuberculosis. His letters and the publication of The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin remain compelling documents of the trip, even…
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