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tatyana_taos's review
3.0
I listened to this book on tape (from Audible) and parts of it were hard going. Either the narrator or the writing has a flat, relentless quality to it, hard to tell which The book grew on me though. By the end I thought the tone was actually appropriate to the tragic, relentless aspects of Checkov's life: his brutal childhood, his almost comically dysfunctional family (if it weren't so tragic), the waste of his tremendous talent through disease. Some of the reviewers below mention they felt the author did not like his subject. I didn't feel that. What I thought the book was excellent at was showing the obstacles both large and small that Checkov overcame to become the great writer he was. Amazing to me was how contolled Russian society was, even before the Revolution and also how very many women pursued Checkov around the country. He seemed to have been irresistible.
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