19th century
michael.pennington
The Russians have always been good at writers' houses. The Soviets especially. When I first saw Tolstoy's house his blue smock was hanging behind the door, a manuscript was on his desk but the chair pushed back as if he'd nipped out for a moment and would be back. It was a frankly theatrical effect and the better for it. Like Tolstoy’s, Chekhov's two houses - one in Melikhovo near Moscow and the other in Yalta in the south - were well funded and maintained and imaginatively presented in those days. Only the last is true now.When I went to Melikhovo in 1997 it was in the hands of dedicated Read more ...
michael.pennington
In a life so short it is always a shock to remember the fact. Chekhov lost more friends than most people do by 60, but he has gained hundreds of thousands who love that fugitive figure, its guardedly attentive attitude, the merciless word in the right place, the moral force lightly carried: one thinks of him in the most unexpected corners of life.Unavailable to account for himself, he has become the invention of his admirers, who may prefer him wary or exuberant, skittishly lyrical, coldly severe, charming or implacable, walking like a girl or tough as old boots. Some get excited by the new Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Thirteen years ago, I visited the magnificent Morgan Library & Museum with the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, whom I was profiling for The New York Times. She was starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, and it made sense for us to view the Morgan’s exhibition of Brontë juvenilia together. Gainsbourg seemed haunted by the show; I know I was. It was the sight of the tiny writing, the tiny gloves (Charlotte Brontë’s), and the locks of thin blondish Brontë hair - close enough to touch - under the glass cabinets. One could feel the siblings’ unquiet slumbers.There’s none of William Blake’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’ll always be Austen on the telly. As the Bard is to the boards, so is Saint Jane to the box. The six novels were published (though not all written) in a seven-year period in the 1810s. In a rather shorter tranche of the 1990s they were all adapted for the (mostly small) screen. They’ve now just been done again, on the whole rather less well than the first time round.And such is the public’s greed for stories from Austen’s world of box-hedged romantic decorum that these days even the authoress gets pressganged into starring as herself. Her early life was covered in Becoming Jane, her Read more ...