HOME || Art|| Biography || Business || Crime Stories || Fiction || Foreign Languages|| Healthy Living || History || Humor ||
Kids Books Radio Shows || Spiritual || Self Help || TV/Film ||

 
Anton Chekhov: A Life
Play Windows Media Sample  Play Real Sample

Anton Chekhov: A Life

Donald Rayfield
Narrated By : Fred Williams
Published By : Blackstone Audio Inc
29 hours
Categories : Biography
Download Price : $59.95 $49.95
Purchase...
"Rayfield has done Chekhov and his readers a great service. His efforts have uncovered
a Chekhovcomplex, troubling and ambiguouswho finally feels right as the man behind the art."
New York Times Book Review

Anton Chekhovs life was short, intense, and dominated by battlesboth with his dependents
and with the tuberculosis that was to kill him at age forty-four. He was one of the greatest
playwrights and short-story writers ever born, but he was torn between medicine and literature,
as he was between family and friends, between a longing for solitude and a need for company.
When he was a child, his family life was at times made a hell by a monstrous father, a
possessive sister, and delinquent elder brothers; his own adult life was tortuously balanced
between the affections of a series of mistresses and a marriage to an actress that was not
as idyllic as it has traditionally been painted.

Donald Rayfields biography strips the whitewash from the image of Chekhov and shows us what
lay behind his restrained, ironic facade. The result does not denigrate him but shows him in the full
heroism of his brief, prodigiously creative life. Rayfield has spent more than three years combing
the Chekhov archives all over Russia (Chekhov was a restless traveler for the whole of his life, going
from Siberia to the Cte dAzur) and has uncovered thousands of documents and letters from
Chekhovs lovers, friends, and family, most of them never published before, which cumulatively
tell of a life far more entangled and turbulent than we ever previously suspected. The many cuts
made in Soviet and foreign editions of Chekhovs and his wifes letters have been restored; what
once was hidden is now revealed.

Chekhovs biography has an extraordinarily rich cast of charactersGorky, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, the
press baron Aleksei Suvorin, the great landscape painter Isaak Levitan, and Chekhovs wife, Olga
Knipper, widely acknowledged as the greatest female interpreter of his work. Anton Chekhov is a vivid
portrait of Russia and Russian society one hundred years ago, as well as an investigation of the emotions,
ideas, conflicts, and experiences that Chekhov built into his stories and plays. Above all, it is the moving
story of an artists sometimes ruthless, often covert fight to save his creativity from strangulation by illness
and family. It will establish itself as the definitive modern biography.

Fred Williams, a graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, works in theater, film, TV, and radio in England, Ireland, and America. Besides narrating audiobooks, he is a performer in living-history re-enactments, an archer, and a poet.

Other Audiobooks you may be interested in :

Olive Harvest, The

Olive Harvest, The

Carol Drinkwater
Narrated By : Carol Drinkwater
Published By : Orion Publishing Group
6 hours 20 minutes
Categories : Autobiography
Travel
Download Price : $14.25
Returning to their home after an extended absence, Carol and her husband Michel are looking forward to summer together on the farm. A shocking blow leaves Carol alone. The future is uncertain... View...
Prince, The / Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Prince, The / Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Niccol Machiavelli and Etienne de la Boetie
Narrated By : Craig Deitschmann with a supporting cast
Published By : Blackstone Audio Inc
3 hours
Categories : Politics
Download Price : $12.95
The Prince - Machiavelli wrote The Prince for his ruler as a guide for gaining and keeping power. Central themes of his essay are the relation between politics and ethics; what the best form of gov... View...
Alistair Cooke at the BBC

Alistair Cooke at the BBC

Nick Clarke
Narrated By : Various
Published By : BBC Audiobooks Ltd
2 hours 40 minutes
Categories : Journalism
Autobiography
Download Price : $18.49
A specially compiled collection charting the career of veteran journalist Alistair Cooke. View...
Population: 485

Population: 485

Michael Perry
Narrated By : Michael Perry
Published By : Harper Collins US
7 hours
Categories : Autobiography
Download Price : $29.95 $19.95
In a place where men post claims of manhood on bug deflectors, where the local vigilante is a farmer's wife with a pistol and a Bible, and where the most senior firefighter is a cross-eyed butcher. View...
Too Many Mothers

Too Many Mothers

Roberta Taylor
Narrated By : Roberta Taylor
Published By : Orion Publishing Group
4 hours 50 minutes
Categories : Autobiography
Arts & Drama
TV & Film
Women
Biographical
Download Price : $14.25
'A gut-wrenching memoir that still has you gasping with laughter. A hell of a book' View...
Audio Books - Create a Free Blog