Cathy Popkin
In Seeing Chekhov, Michael C. Finke succeeds in integrating Chekhov's life and work, his art and his science, his role as a physician and as a patient, as a dramatist and a prose writer, the personal and the professional, the pseudonyms that efface his identity and those that all but proclaim it. Chekhov's preference for not being seen, as it turns out, demands that we examine his strategies of hiding rather than obligingly averting our eyes. The payoff in terms of insight into Chekhov's poetics is enormous.
Robert Louis Jackson
Michael C. Finke has written an outstanding and innovative piece of work: a psychobiography of Chekhov the man and writer based on deep and sensitive readings of the Russian author's prose, plays, and letters, and of extensive biographical writings and materials. Thoroughly informed, Finke does not merely talk 'about' Chekhov or rehash general ideas, but opens up an unknown Chekhov, or, in any case, aspects of the man that the writer, Chekhov, rigorously guarded, and that have hitherto been seen or described mostly from the outside, and apart from Chekhov's writing and poetics. 'Seeing, being seen, hiding and showing,' in Finke's words, are signal concepts for exploring Chekhov the man and the writer. Here is a book that will interest both a wide range of specialists and the interested general reader.
Cathy Popkin Cathy Popkin
In Seeing Chekhov, Michael C. Finke succeeds in integrating Chekhov's life and work, his art and his science, his role as a physician and as a patient, as a dramatist and a prose writer, the personal and the professional, the pseudonyms that efface his identity and those that all but proclaim it. Chekhov's preference for not being seen, as it turns out, demands that we examine his strategies of hiding rather than obligingly averting our eyes. The payoff in terms of insight into Chekhov's poetics is enormous.
Rosamund Bartlett
Chekhov was a master at deflecting critical attention away from his own personality, both in his writing and in his private life. But he reckoned without the supreme forensic skills of a scholar such as Michael C. Finke, who seeks to probe beneath the layers of dusty cliché that have accumulated during the past century. In his incisive new book, Finke lays Chekhov bare by marshaling an impressive arsenal of analytical tools and by playing the writer at his own game, using X-ray vision to penetrate the unexpected points of contact between the life and the creative work. It is exhilarating to see Chekhov through Finke's eyes.
