Preface
Journal: Cambridge University Press eBooks
Year: 2010

Shortly before Anton Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, he went for an evening carriage ride with a young writer, Ivan Bunin, who visited him frequently during his illness. They drove from the Crimean town of Yalta, where Chekhov was convalescing, to the nearby coastal village of Oreanda. A cliff-top prospect in this village is the setting of one of the most famous episodes in Chekhov's fiction: Gurov's seaside epiphany in “The Lady with the Little Dog.” In Chekhov's story, t