Written in 1895 and first performed in 1896, "The Sea-Gull" is widely hailed as the first of Anton Chekhov's four most important plays. It is acclaimed for its brilliant use of subtext and remains widely studied and performed as a significant dramatic work. It is the story of the romantic and artistic conflicts between four main characters: Nina, a young, aspiring actress and the daughter of a wealthy landowner; Madame Irina Arkadina, once a great...

"A Hero of Our Time" by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Marr Murray and J. H. Wisdom, is a timeless classic of Russian literature that delves into the complexities of human nature, love, and the pursuit of meaning in a world marked by moral ambiguity and existential angst. Set against the stunning backdrop of the Caucasus Mountains, the novel follows the life of Pechorin, a young Russian officer whose enigmatic personality and reckless behavior...

Born in the port city of Taganrog in southern Russia, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) survived a difficult childhood with an abusive father and put himself through school (while supporting his family), qualifying as a physician in 1884. At the same time he began practicing medicine, he also became celebrated for his short fiction, which redefined the genre with its formal innovations and psychological depth. His first serious play, The Seagull, was booed...

Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic Belarusian poet, and Collected Body is her first collection composed in English. Whether writing about sex, relatives, violence, or fish markets as opera, Mort insists on vibrant, dark truths. "Death hands you every new day like a golden coin," she writes, then warns that as the bribe grows "it gets harder to turn down."Preface" on a bare tree--a red beast, so still, it has become the tree. Now it's the tree that prowls...

Best known today as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Count Leo Tolstoy also is acknowledged as a skilled playwright. His five-act drama The Power of Darkness offers a cold and unsparing look at Russian peasant life that illustrates the costs of pursuing personal desires rather than the dictates of morality. The grimly realistic tragedy is based on a real incident, centering on a peasant's confession to a party of wedding guests of his...

The more softly the word is pronounced The more ardent, the more miraculous. The less it dreams of becoming a song That much nearer it draws to music. -from "Apollo in the Grass" For the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, the poems of Aleksandr Kushner were essential: "Kushner is one of the best Russian lyric poets of the twentieth century, and his name is destined to rank with those close to the heart of everyone whose mother tongue is Russian." Apollo...

The Power of Darkness (1886) is a play by Leo Tolstoy. Forbidden for decades in Tolstoy's native Russia, the five-act play was first, staged in Paris, where it earned praise from some of France's leading critics. Noted for its brutal depiction of violence and desperation, the play is concerned with the universal religious and philosophical themes that inspired such masterpieces as War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Peasant life is often,...

The Cherry Orchard (1903) is Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov's final play. It was first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904, directed by acclaimed actor Konstantin Stanislavski-who also played the role of Leonid Gayev, the bizarre and uninspired brother of Madame Ranevskaya. It has since become one of twentieth century theater's most important-and most frequently staged-dramatic works. After five years of living in...

A Russian version of Don Juan is the focus of Chekhov's first play, a farce in which a newly arrived schoolmaster proves irresistible to the bored women of a provincial community. Platonov's charm lies in his novelty, and his seductions are strictly passive as a libidinous widow, her idealistic stepdaughter, and an earnest student vie for his romantic attentions. Discovered in 1923, two decades after Chekhov's death, this play was written while the...

Here in one compact and modestly priced edition are the celebrated Russian playwright's most popular works. In addition to five full-length plays-The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and Ivanov-this anthology features five of Anton Chekhov's one-act comedies: The Anniversary, An Unwilling Martyr, The Wedding, The Bear, and The Proposal. Chekhov's taste for vaudeville shows and French farces influenced his comic one-acts,...