Radislav Lapushin tracks Chekhov’s tortuous legacy through the Soviet period. While the Soviets attempted to co-opt Chekhov for their own uses, Chekhov also became, for many in the anti-Soviet intelligentsia, a democratic ideal, a moral authority, and an anti-authoritarian icon – a watchword, in short, for the ideologically impregnable.

Carol Apollonio orients Chekhov’s English-language readers by surveying the plethora of available translations of Chekhov, exploring the history of Chekhov in English, and discussing the elements of his style that pose the greatest challenges to the English language.

Yuri Corrigan introduces the volume; gives an overview of the book’s structure and the content of each chapter.

Robin Feuer Miller closes the volume with a meditation on Chekhov’s career-long search for new ways to end stories and plays, distinguishing his intervention into literary endings from the work of other major Russian writers and showing how he took great pains to craft the overtone of an “eidetic” ending, the kind that retains the sharpness of its image long after one looks away from the text.

Matthew Mangold provides a detailed overview of Chekhov’s medical education, tracing Chekhov’s writerly formation in light of the environmental approach to medicine emerging at the time in the areas of hygiene, anatomy, and psychiatry, and in the new connections that were being conceived between the outer material world and the life of the psyche.

Michael Finke provides an account of the fatal illness that overshadowed almost the whole of Chekhov’s career and resulted in his early death at the age of forty-four. Finke traces the course of the illness, Chekhov’s correspondence, and the testimony of those around him, reflecting on Chekhov’s reticence and stoicism with regard to his illness in the context of his views of mortality, degeneration, and the body.

Tracing the problems of emancipation across the various estates, Jenny Kaminer probes the social position of women in the second half of the nineteenth century as a microcosm for Russia’s larger-scale reevaluation of social institutions, with an eye to the new opportunities for work and education available to women, as well as to the restrictive regimes, legal and otherwise, that informed the lives of Chekhov’s struggling and often unhappily married heroines.

Olga Tabachnikova examines Chekhov as a mirror for the transformation of British culture over the twentieth century, from the Bloomsbury Circle’s natural affinity for Chekhov’s prose, to the uphill, against-the-grain climb of the plays onto the British stage, delineating the gradual emergence of Chekhov in the cultural consciousness as a kind of honorary Englishman, whose understated manner, modesty, reserve, and reticence made him the least un-foreign of the Russian literary titans.

Rosamund Bartlett examines the case of Chekhov’s most important literary influence, placing the younger writer’s lifelong admiration of Leo Tolstoy as an artist, arbiter of good taste, and moral authority, alongside his gradual divergence from Tolstoy over the value of culture, the importance of art and beauty, the questions of marriage and adultery, and the state and future of the peasantry.

Louise McReynolds considers what it was like for Chekhov as young writer amid the increasingly diverse readerships, publishers, and editorial boards of his time, and how his writing developed in response to the state censorship apparatus and to the media outlets, both popular and “prestige,” that constituted a newly emergent commercial press.

Julia Listengarten assesses Chekhov’s theatrical revolution in the context of other major innovators of his time, including Ibsen, Strindberg, and Maeterlinck, presenting Chekhov not as an exponent of any movement but as a unique theatrical practitioner whose work resonated within a broader cultural moment.

This chapter explores the various methods employed by Jewish ghetto leadership and the German ghetto administration to distribute food inside the ghettos. Different ghettos used different methods at different times. Food distribution through house committees, ration cards, soup kitchen, private food stores, private kitchens, vegetable distribution points, and other methods were employed in various places at various times. In Warsaw and Krakow, a combination of rations and private provisioning prevailed while in Lodz, a ration system prevailed over private food sources. People also received food through mailed packages. All three ghettos employed communal coping mechanisms to supplement the scarce food resources through a variety of means. Food processing, particularly to minimize food waste, and agricultural projects were ways in which the community sought to expand food provisions. Soup kitchens and welfare supplemental payments were used to help supply food to the impoverished of the ghetto. Also discussed was the ubiquitous food line which was a major feature of many types of food distribution.

Ch 2: The second chapter looks at the complex confrontation of Christian lyric with death. Finality lends meaning to the life of the faithful, and lyric allows the poet and the reader to undo that death, to turn it into “love.” More concretely, Clément Marot’s word manipulations consistently use the praise of the deceased as a means of promoting the pursuit of peace, as if death on earth were unmade, at the same time, by the turning of “mort” into “amour.”