Chekhov

Ed Sanders is the author of numerous poetic and prose works, and is perhaps most famous for his book The Family (on the Manson murders), but here Sanders offers a 225 page biopoem of the russian playwright and shortstory writer (not to mention physician and humanitarian and lady's man), and his book is an ambitious attempt to capture the life and times of a genius who lived through a tumultous period of his country's history, a history that chekhov shared w/ figures like Lenin, Kropotkin, various Tsars and Tsar-lackey's, not to mention other literary giants of Tolstoyan and Dostoevskyean dimensions, all of whom put in cameos in Sanders' poem, a poem which is, by the way, scholarly in its accuracy, lucid in its exposition, and entertaining in a way that few poems manage to be, which is a way of saying that even if you normally can't stand contemporary american poetry, you will dig this book, especially of course if you are familiar W/ chekhov's work and the main thrust of 19th (and early 20th) century russian fiction, and if you're not, then you would probably be advised (and I bet Sanders would agree w/ me here) to read some of Chekhov's stories first, then get Sanders' Chekhov for a behind the scenes look at the man who created some of the best fiction in the history of the planet