Chekhov - Eleven Stories

Anton Chekhov

Jan. 2003 · Spotify Audiobooks · Vorgelesen von Ralph Cosham

Über dieses Hörbuch

With amazing insight, Anton Chekhov wrote of the lives of the Russian common man as well as the landowner. He established the style of the modern short story and influenced many great writers, including George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.

Includes "The Black Monk" -- a tale of a man who blissfully chats with the vision of a wise, mysterious monk -- and "The Kiss," "The Helpmate," and "Expensive Lessons."

Autoren-Profil

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the provincial town of Taganrog, Ukraine, in 1860. In the mid-1880s, Chekhov became a physician, and shortly thereafter he began to write short stories. Chekhov started writing plays a few years later, mainly short comic sketches he called vaudvilles. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1896, the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg performed his first full- length drama, The Seagull. Some of Chekhov's most successful plays include The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Chekhov brought believable but complex personalizations to his characters, while exploring the conflict between the landed gentry and the oppressed peasant classes. Chekhov voiced a need for serious, even revolutionary, action, and the social stresses he described prefigured the Communist Revolution in Russia by twenty years. He is considered one of Russia's greatest playwrights. Chekhov contracted tuberculosis in 1884, and was certain he would die an early death. In 1901, he married Olga Knipper, an actress who had played leading roles in several of his plays. Chekhov died in 1904, spending his final years in Yalta. Ralph Cosham was born in England. He changed careers from a journalist to actor in the 1970s. As an actor, he performed in productions at the Arena Stage and the Shakespeare Theatre in the Washington, DC area. He also appeared in several films including Starman, Suspect, The Pelican Brief, and Shadow Conspiracy. He started narrating audiobooks in 1992 and had more than 100 audiobook recordings, some using the pseudonym Geoffrey Howard. He was best-known as the voice of Armand Gamache in Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. He won the 2013 Audie Award for Louise Penny's A Beautiful Mystery. He also narrated such classics as The Time Machine, Heart of Darkness, Frankenstein, Around the World in Eighty Days, Alice in Wonderland, and Watership Down. His version of Classic Stories and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe was awarded Best Audio of the Year for four straight years (1993-96) by Publishers Weekly. He died after an illness on September 30, 2014 at the age of 78.