Three Sisters – 4/5 Stars For all the talk about Chekhov and his plays, he didn’t write THAT many of them. He wrote a ton of stories though. This play immediately draws some connections in my mind to King Lear because as the title suggests, we are dealing with Three Sisters and their various prospects in the world. They are off living in the middle of nowhere, and as happens when you are of some kind of monied class (not that I ever have been, […]
Lice consume grass, rust consumes iron, and lying the soul!
The Novellas: The Duel – 4/5 Stars I often tell my students that if they’re stuck in an English class and can’t figure out what to say about a text they’re reading for class to think about the title and what it means. You can even make the comment: “I think it’s really interesting that it’s called “The Duel” and not something else.” This seemingly trite statement gets to the heart of authorship or translation or publication in some interesting ways. For one, what does […]
Ivan Nivan Movan Invanavitch Vonitsky
I do this thing where I can’t tell if I like an author. So I just keep reading. Or worse, I read a bunch of things by an author and then I can’t figure out if I like them or not because I DO like some of what they write and not others. But especially with classic literature, I struggle, because it’s hard for me to be ok liking some things a writer writes but not others. And then in Russian literature, it’s even harder […]