Anton Pavolich Checkov

     This post is dedicated to our friends in Russia, who are reading this blog almost daily.
     Anton Pavolich Checkov was a medical doctor. He was born on January 29, 1860 in Taganrog, Russia. He died of tuberculosis on July 15, 1904, at age 44, at the spa resort of Badenweiler, Germany. The world knows him, not as a doctor, but as a famous author, a writer of short stories and plays.
     His writing style was descriptive and poetic. While his "trend of consciousness" plots are generally faulted, his character descriptions and word-portraits of nature are praised. He wrote in an age when long cumbersome phrases and sentences were the rule, and brevity and direct expression were the exception. Comparing his style of writing to that of other Russian writers of the period, his style was more compact and precise.
     Here is a sample, taken from the short story The Post:
     "The cart with the mailbags looked like a patch of darkness. Two silhouettes were moving lazily beside it: the student with a portmanteau in his hand and the driver. The latter was smoking a short pipe; the light of the pipe moved about in the darkness, dying away and flaring up again; for an instant it lighted up a bit of sleeve, then a shaggy moustache and big copper-red nose, then stern-looking, overhanging eyebrows."
     Read The Lady With The Dog, a short story about adultery which illustrates Checkov's talents. It takes fifteen minutes of your time. Find it at Google books. http://books.google.com/books?id=zxJ8AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+lady+with+the+dog&hl=en&ei=7eOBTuLjL-Tg0QHU-pmeAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false