Chekhov's Gun

Interesting to read that Boris Pasternak's father, Leonid Osipovich , was an accomplished portrait artist and took Boris with him to Astapovo station to see Tolstoy before his death.  Pasternak had painted and sketched several portraits of Tolstoy over the years, including this one of the Count at Yasnaya Polyana in the late 1890s.  I love this painting entitled The Night Before the Examination .

I have to say I like the British book cover better than the American one , but it is between the covers that counts, and it seems in this case you get the same narrative.  Ann Pasternak Slater is not happy with the literal Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, preferring the more lyrical original English translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari.  You can read her review in the Guardian. I did notice that P-V can be too literal in previous translations like that of The Master and Margarita , to the point of calling Bezdomny "Homeless" throughout the book, when it would have sufficed to provide a footnote that the surname Bulgakov used means "homeless."  In that case, I preferred the earlier Michael Glenny translation. It has been a long time since I read the Hayward-Harari translation so it will be hard to compare, but from what I read in Richard Pevear's introduction he and Larissa Volokhonsky have chosen to maintain the awkwardness of Pasternak's ori...

‘I heartily recommend taking as often as possible Chekhov’s books … and dreaming through them as they are intended to be dreamed through’   -- Vladimir Nabokov For those with an unbridled passion for Anton Chekhov there is this box set of Collected Stories , weighing in at 1400 pages, bound in buckram, that would be a very handsome addition to any book shelf.  It appears to be lavishly illustrated as well.  I have a copy of The Shooting Party which I cherish.

I've been enjoying the bits and pieces of the literature and theater of the absurd which characterized a part of the Russian avant-garde in the late 1920s.  Daniil Kharms kick started the movement with his reading of the OBERIU manifesto in 1928, although the organization apparently dates back to 1926 ( read more ).  Kharms along with several others contributed greatly to this movement, and many of their writings have been collected into anthologies like The Man with the Black Coat and OBERIU - An Anthology of Russian Absurdism .  In many ways, this movement seemed to echo that of the Italian Futurists and Dadaism, but the Russian absurdists tended to shun all political relationships, preferring to explore universal ideas and playing these ideas out on stage with the theater group, Radix.  Nice to see this movement getting more attention.