Newspaper Article

After Chekhov A novel that captures his method and values

Reviewed by David Walton, An author whose "Evening Out" won a Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction

1990

Overview

When the Revolution came, Maria Pavlovna trudged through one Moscow office after another, appealing to functionaries to have the villa declared a Soviet museum. Now, with German troops about to march into Yalta, she is busily removing the portraits of Lenin, Gorky and Tolstoy, replacing them with Gerhart Hauptmann and a photograph of Chekhov with a dachshund, putting into prominent view the German translations of Chekhov's work and his correspondence with German writers. W.D. Wetherell's \"Chekhov's Sister\" is something Chekhov never wrote, a novel-a Chekhovian novel made up of dialogue and stage directions and prose episodes that have the understatement and heightened realism of a Chekhov short story. Outside the villa a young man named Peter Sergeich Kunin stands watching for the appearance of the German troops. An aspiring writer, embarrassed by his clubfoot, Kunin emulates Chekhov. And \"since all the pilgrimages of youth are literal ones,\" he has become a medical student, grown a beard, affected a monocle and a double-breasted overcoat with the collar turned up, and journeyed to Yalta, where he has become a protege of Maria Pavlovna.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC