Anton Chekhov

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

Eisenberger, “Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain: Behavioral and Neural Evidence,” Psychological Science, vol. 21 (2010), 931–7. 60 “Our sensitivity to social rejection”: Lieberman, Social, 67. 61 “assemblage of reasonable beings”: Augustine of Hippo, Wikiquote, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo. 62 “common hatred for something”: Anton Chekhov, Wikiquote, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anton_Chekhov#Note-Book_of_Anton_Chekhov_(1921). 63 “If you hang around a place long enough”: Toffler and Reingold, Final Accounting, loc. 3986–90, Kindle. Conclusion 1 650 million users: L. Ceci, “Number of TikTok Users Worldwide from 2018 to 2022,” Statista, September 5, 2022, www.statista.com/statistics/1327116/number-of-global-tiktok-users/. 2 “most popular app”: Meghan Bobrowsky, Salvador Rodriguez, Sarah E.

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Augustine said in The City of God, “a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love.” The flip side, as expressed by the playwright Anton Chekhov, is that “love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.” Ultimate research suggests a very different way to look at the issue: whether we love the people around us or hate them, what unites them and us into a coherent group is what we’ve collectively decided to punish with painful social rejection—with the threat or reality of ostracism from the group.

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations
by Garson O'Toole
Published 1 Apr 2017

Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/epNgsd. 9. Michael Powell, ed., The Mammoth Book of Great British Humor (London: Constable and Robinson, 2010), 351. Accessed in Google Books, https://goo.gl/WKGhPY, and Amazon, https://goo.gl/5ZGXUt. A reader wrote to QI complaining that the above quotation had been attributed to Anton Chekhov, the Russian master of short stories and drama, but that he had acquired zero evidence to support this claim. “I even asked my Slavicist friend to look for it in the original Russian works, and she was unable to find it,” my client intoned. “Would you please examine its provenance?” QI believes that this quotation and ascription are mistaken.

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The statement was ascribed, however, to the American dramatist Odets.2 A character in a Hollywood film of the 1950’s casually drops this line: “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” The screenplay was by Clifford Odets, America’s chief inheritor of the dramatic tradition of Anton Chekhov, and in that one line, he epitomized the lesson of his master. QI conjectures that the quotation above was constructed from a flawed memory of the line in The Country Girl. The textbook referred to a screenplay by Odets, but as noted previously, the screenplay was by Seaton, and the play by Odets.

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An inattentive or confused reader might misunderstand the above excerpt and assign the quotation to Chekhov instead of Odets. The first instance of the misattribution to Chekhov that QI has found was printed in a 1981 compilation called The Fitzhenry and Whiteside Book of Quotations. No citation was specified for the quotation:4 Any idiot can face a crisis—it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out. —Anton Chekhov This influential reference work has been released in many editions and revised several times. The same quote is present in the 1986 enlarged edition of The Fitzhenry and Whiteside Book of Quotations and in the renamed 1987 edition of the Barnes and Noble Book of Quotations.5 These volumes act as powerful vectors for transmission of the statement coupled with the Chekhov ascription.

Thinking in Numbers
by Daniel Tammet
Published 15 Aug 2012

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 444 73742 4 Extract from The Lottery Ticket by Anton Chekhov; Extracts from Lolita by Vladamir Nabokov © Vladamir Nabokov, published by Orion Books is used by permission; Extract of interview with Vladamir Nabokov was taken from the BBC programme, Bookstand and is used with permission; Extracts by Julio Cortazar from Hopscotch, © Julio Cortazar, published by Random House New York; Quote from The Master’s Eye translated by Jean de la Fontaine; Quote from Under the Glacier by Halldor Laxness, © Halldor Laxness, published by Vintage Books, an imprint of Random House New York.

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Lying, but talking and laughing and eating together. Lying instead of sitting. It was like a scene from a book that I had not read and that had not been written. How many such scenes are there to occupy our dreams, our lives, the pages of a book? Infinitely many. Like Elíasson’s sleepwriter, Anton Chekhov faithfully nurtured a little notebook throughout his remarkable career, though we can suppose that he used his mostly during waking hours. Filled with his day-to-day observations of existence’s minutiae, the pages preserve glimpses of ‘ordinary’ life’s infinite permutations. ‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’

Think Like a Freak
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 11 May 2014

All we’ve been doing in this book, really, is telling stories—about a hot-dog-eating champion, an ulcer detective, a man who wanted to give free surgery to the world’s poorest children. There are of course a million variations in how a given story can be told: the ratio of narrative to data; the pace and flow and tone; the point of the narrative arc at which you “cut into” the story, as the great writer-doctor Anton Chekhov noted. We have been telling these stories in an effort to persuade you to think like a Freak. Perhaps we haven’t been entirely successful, but the fact you have read this far suggests we haven’t failed altogether. In that case, we invite you to listen to one more story. It’s about a classic piece of advice that just about everyone has received at one point or another—and why you should ignore it.

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The Brady Bunch: Drawn from a report by Kelton Research, “Motive Marketing: Ten Commandments Survey” (September 2007); and Reuters Wire, “Americans Know Big Macs Better Than Ten Commandments,” Reuters.com, October 12, 2007. 187 CONSIDER ONE MORE STORY FROM THE BIBLE: This can be found in II Samuel: 12. We are indebted to Jonathan Rosen for bringing to our attention how perfectly this story illustrated our point. Some of the words used to tell it here are his, as we could not improve upon them. 188 ANTON CHEKHOV AND WHERE TO “CUT INTO” A STORY: For this insight, we are indebted to a long-ago writing seminar taught by the great Richard Locke. CHAPTER 9: THE UPSIDE OF QUITTING 190 CHURCHILL AND “NEVER GIVE IN”: Transcript provided by the Churchill Centre at www.winstonchurchill.org. 190 “A QUITTER NEVER WINS, AND A WINNER NEVER QUITS”: In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book Think and Grow Rich.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

During his trips to the airport he brought gifts. They included a Lonely Planet guide to Russia, and a guide to Moscow. The lawyer also selected several classics ‘to help Snowden understand the mentality of the Russian people’: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a collection of stories by Anton Chekhov, and writings by the historian Nikolai Karamzin. Snowden quickly polished off Crime and Punishment. After reading selections from Karamzin, a 19th-century writer who penned the first comprehensive history of the Russian state, he asked for the author’s complete works. Kucherena also gave him a book on the Cyrillic alphabet to help him learn Russian, and brought a change of clothes.

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That involves a huge amount of scoping of material.’ The journalists who published the Snowden revelations had been involved in the most thrilling story of their careers. It was in the public interest. Now, it seemed, they were suspects. Epilogue: Exile Somewhere near Moscow 2014–? ‘Even in Siberia there is happiness.’ ANTON CHEKHOV, In Exile For nine weeks Edward Snowden was mostly invisible. There was the odd photo – of a young man pushing a shopping trolley across a Moscow street. (Surely a fake? The man looked nothing like him!) Another leaked image was more convincing. It showed Snowden on a tourist boat cruising along the Moscow River.

Ukraine
by Lonely Planet

Siege mentality apart, Cupid is a lovely Lviv-styled knaypa (pub) with an attached bookshop – a favourite drinking den for nationalist-leaning and cosmopolitan bohemians alike. Palata No.6 Pub (Палата No.6; Ward No.6; 486 5152; vul Vorovskoho 31A; noon-2am; Universytet) For a healthy dose of insanity sneak into this well-hidden bar named after Anton Chekhov’s story about life in a madhouse. Dressed in doctors’ white robes, stern-looking waiters nurse you with excellent steaks (mains 40uah to 60uah) and with giant syringes pour vodka into your glass. A perfect cure for the maddening quotidian. Baraban Pub (Барабан ; Drum; Click here ; vul Prorizna 4A; beer 14uah, mains 40-60uah; 11am-11pm; Maydan Nezalezhnosti) This popular journo hang-out is hard to find, but a colourful cast of regulars manages to do so on a nightly basis.

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Yalta ЯЛТА 0654 / pop 80,500 Yalta’s air – an invigorating blend of sea and pine forest sprinkled with mountain chill – has always been its main asset. Back in the 19th century, doctors in St Petersburg had one remedy for poor-lunged aristocrats: Yalta. That is how the Russian royal family and other dignitaries, such as playwright Anton Chekhov, ended up here. Old parts of Yalta are still full of modest and not-so-modest former dachas of the tsarist-era intelligentsia , while the coast around the city is dotted with the luxurious palaces of the aristocracy. But back in 1913, a Russian travel guide remarked that Yalta was a long way from the Riviera in terms of comforts and civilization.

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Yalta Top Sights Lenin's EmbankmentB3 Sights 1Alexander Nevsky CathedralD2 2Catholic ChurchB2 3History MuseumC3 4Statue of LeninE3 Sleeping 5BristolF3 6KrymF3 7OreandaC4 8OtdykhG4 9Vremena GodaG2 10White EagleB2 Eating 11ApelsinC3 12Khutorok La MerF4 13NobuC4 14PelmennayaF4 15SmakC3 16Teatralnoye CaféD3 Drinking 17PintaF3 18PintaC3 Entertainment 19Chekhov Theatre of Russian DramaC3 Sights & Activities Chekhov House-Museum Museum (www.chekhov.com.ua; vul Kirova 112; adult/student 30/15uah; 10am-5pm, last entry 4.30pm Tue-Sun Jun-Sep, Wed-Sun Sep-May) With many of Yalta’s attractions a short distance away, the Chekhov House-Museum is the only must-see in town. It’s sort of The Cherry Orchard incarnate. Not only did Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) pen that classic play here, the lush garden would appeal to the most horticulturally challenged audience. A long-term tuberculosis sufferer, the great Russian dramatist spent much of his last five years in Yalta. He designed the white dacha and garden himself and when he wasn’t producing plays like Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, he was a legendary host and bon vivant , welcoming the Russian singer Feodor Chaliapin, composer Rachmaninov and writers Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy.

How to Write Like Tolstoy: A Journey Into the Minds of Our Greatest Writers
by Richard Cohen
Published 16 May 2016

Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?” And finally: “Will you honor the King’s English?” One author who would never have made the club, had it been instituted in his day, was Anton Chekhov, who in 1884 employed a narrator who turns out to be the murderer in a 180-page melodrama, The Shooting Party, his one novel. *4 I admit this is my interpretation. Is the governess in fact mad, or is she correct in thinking that her two young charges are consorting with a pair of malevolent spirits?

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Writing well is a matter of getting the balance right—between getting the ideal word or phrase and working the text too hard so that it appears self-conscious or labored; between saying enough for the reader to understand and saying not too much; making sure the reader attends to the song, not the singer. So much of revision is small changes and knowing when and what to omit. Hemingway once wryly observed that half of what he wrote he left out. Anton Chekhov, besieged by writers wanting his opinion on their work, would advise them all, “Cut, cut, cut!” “Writing a book is like building a coral reef,” P. G. Wodehouse considered. “One goes on adding tiny bits. I must say the result is much better. With my stuff it is largely a matter of adding color and seeing that I don’t let anything through that’s at all flat.”

The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Published 1 Aug 2002

Barrie, 0-553-21178-1 BRADBURY CLASSIC STORIES, Ray Bradbury, 0-553-28637-4 THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, Ray Bradbury, 0-553-27822-3 JANE EYRE, Charlotte Brontë, 0-553-21140-4 VILLETTE, Charlotte Brontë, 0-553-21243-5 WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Brontë, 0-553-21258-3 THE SECRET GARDEN, Frances Hodgson Burnett, 0-553-21201-X ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND & THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, Lewis Carroll, 0-553-21345-8 MY ÁNTONIA, Willa Cather, 0-553-21418-7 O PIONEERS!, Willa Cather, 0-553-21358-X THE CANTERBURY TALES, Geoffrey Chaucer, 0-553-21082-3 STORIES, Anton Chekhov, 0-553-38100-8 THE AWAKENING, Kate Chopin, 0-553-21330-X THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins, 0-553-21263-X HEART OF DARKNESS and THE SECRET SHARER, Joseph Conrad, 0-553-21214-1 LORD JIM, Joseph Conrad, 0-553-21361-X THE DEERSLAYER, James Fenimore Cooper, 0-553-21085-8 THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, James Fenimore Cooper, 0-553-21329-6 MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, Stephen Crane, 0-553-21355-5 THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, Stephen Crane, 0-553-21011-4 INFERNO, Dante, 0-553-21339-3 PARADISO, Dante, 0-553-21204-4 PURGATORIO, Dante, 0-553-21344-X THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, Charles Darwin, 0-553-21463-2 MOLL FLANDERS, Daniel Defoe, 0-553-21328-8 ROBINSON CRUSOE, Daniel Defoe, 0-553-21373-3 BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21223-0 A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21244-3 DAVID COPPERFIELD, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21189-7 GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21342-3 HARD TIMES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21016-5 OLIVER TWIST, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21102-1 THE PICKWICK PAPERS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21123-4 A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21176-5 THREE SOLDIERS, John Dos Passos, 0-553-21456-X THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21216-8 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21175-7 THE ETERNAL HUSBAND AND OTHER STORIES, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21444-6 THE IDIOT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21352-0 NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21144-7 SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL I, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 0-553-21241-9 SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL II, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 0-553-21242-7 SISTER CARRIE, Theodore Dreiser, 0-553-21374-1 THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, W.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2020

But to underline the larger point I am trying to make: Instead of policing each other’s influences and enjoyments for evidence of “cultural appropriation,” we should all strive to emulate the curiosity and rigor of the great Christian revolutionary intellectual Cornel West, who explores the echoes between Anton Chekhov and the blues with no interest in drawing artificial lines between cultures. In making this point, I’m not claiming that there is nothing wrong with some of the things people have labeled “cultural appropriation.” Jay-Z was absolutely right to get “what they did to the Cold Crush”—and to get himself on the cover of Fortune Magazine.

Red Plenty
by Francis Spufford
Published 1 Jan 2007

For a general exploration of what Soviet intellectuals under Khrushchev knew about the world, see Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 7 But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture: for Marx’s vision of the alienated dance of the commodities, and its philosophical roots and imaginative implications, see Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York, 1940), ch. 15, and Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 226–74. 8 Machine-Tractor Station: the rural depots, with their own specialised workforce, where the equipment for mechanised farming was kept (until Khrushchev disastrously sold the machinery to the collective farms, which had no budget to maintain it). For the sorry history of Soviet agriculture, see Alec Nove, Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, final edition (London, 1992). 9 It looked like the set for some Chekhov story: specifically, ‘Peasants’, in Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896– 1904, translated by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2004) – though Emil appears to be thinking of ‘Gooseberries’ in the same collection. See also Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001). A portrait of Soviet peasant life more contemporary with Emil’s walk (but no less depressing) is Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Matryona’s House’, in Matryona’s House and Other Stories, translated by Michael Glenny (London: Penguin, 1975). 10 A good Kazan Muslim: the implication here is that, at least on his father’s side, Emil Arslanovich is a Tatar.

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For a general exploration of what Soviet intellectuals under Khrushchev knew about the world, see Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 7 But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture: for Marx’s vision of the alienated dance of the commodities, and its philosophical roots and imaginative implications, see Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York, 1940), ch. 15, and Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, pp. 226–74. 8 Machine-Tractor Station: the rural depots, with their own specialised workforce, where the equipment for mechanised farming was kept (until Khrushchev disastrously sold the machinery to the collective farms, which had no budget to maintain it). For the sorry history of Soviet agriculture, see Alec Nove, Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, final edition (London, 1992). 9 It looked like the set for some Chekhov story: specifically, ‘Peasants’, in Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896– 1904, translated by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2004) – though Emil appears to be thinking of ‘Gooseberries’ in the same collection. See also Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001). A portrait of Soviet peasant life more contemporary with Emil’s walk (but no less depressing) is Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Matryona’s House’, in Matryona’s House and Other Stories, translated by Michael Glenny (London: Penguin, 1975). 10 A good Kazan Muslim: the implication here is that, at least on his father’s side, Emil Arslanovich is a Tatar.

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Kiselyova, The Collapse of the Soviet Union: The View from the Information Society (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1995) Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Volume III: End of Millennium (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) Martin Cave, Computers and Economic Planning: The Soviet Experience (Cambridge: CUP, 1980) Janet G. Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia Since 1928, RAND Corporation report R-371-PR (Santa Monica CA, October 1963) Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896–1904, translated by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2004) L. G. Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia: An Essay on the Social Structure and Roles of Soviet Intellectuals During the 1960s (London: RKP, 1973) Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror- Famine (London: Pimlico, 2002) Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler, translated by Hugh Aplin (London: Hesperus Press, 2006) Vera S.

Little Failure: A Memoir
by Gary Shteyngart
Published 7 Jan 2014

While I will retain my Russian, my parents will struggle with the new language, nothing being more instructive than having a child prattle on in English at the dinner table. Not to mention that after borrowing $9,600 for one floor of 252-67 Sixty-Third Avenue we cannot afford a television, so instead of The Dukes of Hazzard, I turn to the collected works of Anton Chekhov, eight battered volumes of which still sit on my bookshelves. Without television there is absolutely nothing to talk about with any of the children at school. It turns out these little porkers have very little interest in “Gooseberries” or “Lady with Lapdog,” and it is impossible in the early 1980s to hear a sentence spoken by a child without an allusion to something shown on TV.

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My parents aren’t telling me to become a writer—everyone knows that immigrant children have to go into law, medicine, or maybe that strange new category known only as “computer”—but placing the bookcase in my room sends the unmistakable message that I am our family’s future and that I have to be the best of the best. Which I will be, Mama and Papa, I swear. The bookcase contains the collected works of Anton Chekhov in eight dark blue volumes with the author’s seagull-like signature across every volume’s cover, and most of the collected works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin. In front of the Russian greats stands a siddur (the Jewish daily prayer book), enclosed in a plastic case and coated with fake silver and fake emeralds.

The Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Published 1 Jan 1975

Aziz Nesin, who was across the room mournfully nibbling an American embassy vol-au-vent, has written fifty-eight books. Most are collections of short stories. They are said to be hilarious, but none has been translated into English. 'I have no doubt about it,' Yashar said. 'Aziz Nesin is a greater comic writer than Anton Chekhov!' Aziz Nesin, hearing his name, looked up and smiled sadly. 'Come to my house,' said Yashar. 'We go swimming, eh? Eat some fish? I will tell you the whole story.' 'How will I find your house?' I had asked Yashar the previous day. He said, 'Ask any child. The old people don't know me, but all the little ones do.

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I said I was an admirer of Zamyatin, but they had not heard of the author of We (a novel that inspired Orwell to write 1984, which it resembles), who died in Paris in the twenties trying to write a biography of Attila the Hun. I asked if there were any novelists in Khabarovsk. 'Chekhov was here,' said Nastasya. In 1890, Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin, an island of convicts, 700 miles from Khabarovsk. But in Siberia all distances are relative: Sakhalin was right next door. 'Who else do you like?' I asked. Nastasya said, 'Now you want to ask me about Solzhenitsyn.' 'I wasn't going to,' I said. 'But since you mentioned him, what do you think?'

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use
by Bobbi Bly
Published 18 Mar 2009

Cutting the branches off a neighbor’s tree that went over the fence into your yard is, at most, a TORT, not a felony. tortuous (TORE-chew-us), adjective Intricate and indirect; not straightforward. “[Critics] don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and TORTUOUS to write a bad one.” – Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist totem (TOH-tuhm), noun Anything that serves as a venerated symbol. Our various formal and informal gardens are TOTEMS to our emphasis on the importance of the natural world. tout (TOWT), verb To publicize in a boastful, extravagant manner. Eloise TOUTED the excellence of her family’s new personal chef to a gauche and distasteful degree.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
by Alain de Botton
Published 6 Mar 2012

(illustration credit 4.12) Our favourite secular books do not alert us to how inadequate a one-off linear reading of them will prove. They do not identify the particular days of the year on which we ought to reconsider them, as the holy books do – in the latter case with 200 others around us and an organ playing in the background. There is arguably as much wisdom to be found in the stories of Anton Chekhov as in the Gospels, but collections of the former are not bound with calendars reminding readers to schedule a regular review of their insights. We would face grave accusations of eccentricity if we attempted to construct liturgies from the works of secular authors. At best, we haphazardly underline a few of the sentences that we most admire in them and which we may once in a while chance upon in an idle moment waiting for a taxi.

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe
by Marcus Chown
Published 22 Apr 2019

Since such a space technology is still over the horizon, we will simply have to keep our fingers crossed that we are not as unlucky as the dinosaurs. And ponder what we would do if we suddenly realized we had only ten seconds to live! 14. SECRET OF SUNLIGHT Contrary to expectations, the earth does not have an energy crisis “Only entropy comes easy.” —ANTON CHEKHOV HOW MUCH ENERGY DOES the earth trap from the sun? The answer is, surprisingly, none. All of the solar energy intercepted by our planet is radiated back into space.1 Were this not the case, the earth would simply get ever hotter until its surface became a molten goo. So, if it is not solar energy that is ultimately powering every living thing on Earth, not to mention our global technological civilization, what is it?

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016

We find it in the Greek pantheon, and in many other stories we tell ourselves. Storytelling, in fact, allows us to indulge our desires for either biological or physics thinking. Some stories are finely crafted machines with no extraneous parts; everything fits together. We see this in “Chekhov’s Gun,” dramatist Anton Chekhov’s principle that any element introduced in a story must be crucial to advancing the plot. A loaded rifle introduced early in the first act of a play must go off by the third. On the other hand, there are some stories in which color is added, creating a richness of experience without necessarily moving the plot along.

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
by Robin Wright
Published 28 Feb 2008

And when they imprisoned me for six years, the cost was higher to them.” EIGHT IRAN The Reactionaries If you cry “Forward!” you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don’t you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite? —RUSSIAN PLAYWRIGHT ANTON CHEKHOV The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. —AMERICAN POLITICAL THEORIST HANNAH ARENDT Islam’s priests will wield enormous political influence during the Middle East’s turbulent transitions. Many already do. They fill a void created by the imprisonment, exile, or execution of secular democrats and other opponents.

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“So many people thought the conservatives might at least be able to do something economically.” Many Iranians did not initially take Ahmandinejad seriously. Some saw him as a bit of a bumpkin. As mayor, he had banned billboard ads featuring Western celebrities, such as British soccer star David Beckham. He closed down cultural centers that had performed the works of Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, and Victor Hugo and converted them into religious education centers. Tehran’s ever-frenzied grapevine speculated that he would segregate, by sex, all public elevators, parks, and even sidewalks. An Iranian friend recounted a joke that had Ahmadinejad standing in front of a mirror combing his hair and repeating, “OK, male lice to the left, female lice to the right.”

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age
by Claudia Hammond
Published 5 Dec 2019

Of course, if you are hoping for distraction not every book will suffice. In a study where people suffering from chronic pain read short stories or poems in a group, it was the most challenging and thought-provoking literature which the participants found best distracted them from their agonies. The more intriguing and puzzling the story, such as those by Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence and Raymond Carver, the more absorbed they felt, and the less they noticed their pain.17 Nell divided his ludic readers into two types: those who read to escape from their world, who blotted out all thoughts of what was going in their lives; and those who did the opposite, who wanted to heighten their own consciousness and used reading about the lives of others as a way of reflecting on their own.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Attending investors probably believed that his closeness to his successor might provide valuable insights into the Fed's future policy. The sixty-year-old Bernanke gave the impression that he did not expect official rates to increase to their long-term average of around 4 percent in his lifetime. There is in fact little agreement on the appropriate policy response. As Russian playwright and doctor Anton Chekhov wrote in The Cherry Orchard, “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.”22 Policymakers are making it up as they go along. The measures are basically of limited use but are presented to a credulous public as sound policy. At the start of the GFC, the choice was always pain now or agony later.

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World
by Andrew Leigh
Published 14 Sep 2018

The trial was a success, and streptomycin today remains one of the drugs that is used to treat tuberculosis. In the past two centuries alone, tuberculosis has killed more than 1 billion people – more than the combined toll from all the wars and famines in that time.13 Among the victims of ‘the white plague’ were Frédéric Chopin, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Emily Brontë, George Orwell and Eleanor Roosevelt. Today, tuberculosis still accounts for more than a million deaths worldwide each year. Strains of the disease that are resistant to streptomycin and other antibiotics are becoming increasingly prevalent. Austin Bradford Hill didn’t eliminate the disease that nearly killed him.

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work
by Joanna Biggs
Published 8 Apr 2015

First published in 2015 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3 Holford Yard Bevin Way London WC1X 9HD www.serpentstail.com eISBN 978 1 78283 014 6 To Mum IRINA: A time will come when everyone will know what all this is for, why there is this misery; there will be no mysteries and, meanwhile, we have got to live … we have got to work, only to work! Tomorrow I’ll go alone; I’ll teach in the school, and I’ll give all my life to those who may need me. Now it’s autumn; soon winter will come and cover us with snow, and I will work, I will work. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters CONTENTS IN DOVER MAKING: potter, shoemaker, robot SELLING: fishmonger, creative director, councillor, homesteader, legal aid lawyer SERVING: sex worker, baristas, call centre adviser, special adviser LEADING: company director, stay-at-home mum, hereditary lord ENTERTAINING: dancer, footballer, giggle doctor THINKING: scientist, question writer, professor CARING: care worker, cleaner, crofter REPAIRING: rabbi, army major, nurse STARTING: apprentice, intern, technologist, unemployed, on workfare AT SCHOOL References Acknowledgements IN DOVER IN THE COLD BACK ROOM of a charity shop, a group of volunteers are working.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

See Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). The use of “leaved” and “conceived” borrows from Philip Larkin, “Long Lion Days,” in Larkin, The Complete Poems, 323. “devours everything in its path”: See Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, in Anton Chekhov, Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen (New York: Viking Penguin, 1959), 363. “Human Capital Management”: Kevin Roose, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014), 35, and “Human Capital Management,” Goldman Sachs, accessed July 16, 2018, www.goldmansachs.com/careers/divisions/human-capital-management/.

The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture
by Orlando Figes
Published 7 Oct 2019

Pianistically trite with brilliant effects that were not hard to play, the piece remained a bestseller until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it became a symbol of provincial mediocrity (‘And tomorrow morning I won’t have to listen to that “Maiden’s Prayer” any more,’ says Irina, bound for Moscow, in the final act of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, as its saccharine melody wafts into the garden from a drawing-room).89 Louise Farrenc (1804–75) and Louise Bertin (1805–77) were exceptional in overcoming the obstacles preventing women from composing music in larger forms – Farrenc wrote orchestral works, Bertin operas – but they had considerable advantages.

…

Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 56–7; Borchard, ‘“Ma chère petite Clara”’, p. 136. 86. Anna Eugénie Schoen-René, America’s Musical Inheritance (New York, 1941), p. 134. 87. BMO, NLA 357, Pauline Viardot to Henri Heugel, 21 Feb. 1882. 88. Marix-Spire, ‘Vicissitudes d’un opera-comique’, p. 66. 89. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, in Plays, trans. Peter Carson (London, 2002), p. 265. 90. François-Joseph Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique: Supplément et complément (Paris, 1878), p. 314. See further, Bea Friedland, Louise Farrenc, 1804–1875: Composer, Performer, Scholar (Ann Arbor, 1980). 91.

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
by Rose George
Published 13 Oct 2008

The great architect Le Corbusier considered the toilet to be “one of the most beautiful objects industry has ever invented”; and Rudyard Kipling found sewers more compelling than literature. Drains are “a great and glorious thing,” he wrote in 1886, “and I study ’em and write about ’em when I can.” A decent primer on sanitary engineering, he wrote, “is worth more than all the tomes of sacred smut ever produced.” Anton Chekhov was moved to write about the dreadful sanitation in the far-eastern Russian isle of Sakhalin. And Sigmund Freud thought the study of excretion essential and its neglect a stupidity. In the foreword to Scatologic Rites of All Nations, an impressive ethnography of excrement by the amateur anthropologist—and U.S. army captain—John Bourke, Freud wrote that “to make [the role of excretions in human life] more accessible . . . is not only a courageous but also a meritorious undertaking.”

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

At the time it was controversial: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” AT&T’s supporters said. Hindsight shows the antitrust authorities were right to intervene, as the breakup of AT&T quickened innovation and lowered long-distance prices. Competition can be liberating. In The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov conveys the thrill of winning. The estate of impoverished aristocrats (the cherry orchard of the title) was auctioned off. Lopakhin, a businessman of humble origins, described the bidding: “I bid forty. Him—forty-five. Me—fifty-five. So he’s going up in fives, me in tens…Well that was that. I bid the mortgage plus ninety, and there it stayed.

Cultureshock Paris
by Cultureshock Staff
Published 6 Oct 2010

No matter what you wish to watch, you’ll probably find it, from international classics in elegant and historical surroundings to offbeat performances in funky, non-mainstream storefronts. The Comédie Française itself now performs at three venues (see its website), with an expanded repertoire ranging from the classics of Molière, Racine and Corneille to works by playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett and Anton Chekhov. These are performed in French of course, although there are performances in the original language from time to time. For current and upcoming productions at some 60 theatres in all parts of the city, access www. canaltheatre.com.  La Cartoucherie in the beautiful Bois de Vincennes at the eastern edge of Paris is a complex of eight theatres, staging an imaginative range of international works, both classics and avant-garde.  L’Odéon, Théâtre de l’Europe in place de l’Odéon, 75006; http://www.theatre-odeon.fr.

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square
by James Traub
Published 1 Jan 2004

He had invented something he called Super-Theatrics, based on the insight that “you could deejay or sample any style of theater onto any text.” One of his first productions at Show World was Pervy Verse, which he described as “a retelling of The Bacchae in fetish gear.” He put on a production of Waiting for Godot, as well as all twelve of Anton Chekhov’s early comedies, which Chekhov had called vaudevilles. He staged a “Ridicu-fest” to honor Ludlam’s work. Nada Show World’s first hit was God of Vengeance, a 1910 Yiddish play by Sholem Asch that takes place in a brothel. The play had attracted a supremely odd combination of blue-haired ladies and Hasidic Jews; the latter invariably arrived without their identifying hat or overcoat, for God of Vengeance was a notorious play that had been banned for blasphemy.

Rust: The Longest War
by Jonathan Waldman
Published 10 Mar 2015

Where the Streets Are Paved with Zinc 8. Ten Thousand Mustachioed Men 9. Pigging the Pipe 10. Between Snake Oil and Rolexes 11. The Future Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments About Jonathan Waldman For Mom and Dad, and whoever bought that stupid sailboat Only entropy comes easy. —ANTON CHEKHOV PREFACE: A JANKY OLD BOAT They say a lot of things about boats. They say a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into. They say boat stands for “bring out another thousand.” They say that the pleasures of owning and sailing a boat are comparable to standing, fully clothed, in a cold shower while tearing up twenty-dollar bills.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

As entropy increases, things become more randomly arranged. If left to continue forever, this eventually leads to an evenly distributed system, a completely randomly arranged system—clothes and toys anywhere and everywhere! In a closed system, like our kids’ rooms, entropy doesn’t just decrease on its own. Russian playwright Anton Chekhov put it like this: “Only entropy comes easy.” If our kids don’t make an effort to clean up, the room just gets messier and messier. The natural increase of entropy over time in a closed system is known as the second law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the study of heat. If you consider our universe as the biggest closed system, this law leads to a plausible end state of our universe as a homogenous gas, evenly distributed everywhere, commonly known as the heat death of the universe.

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age
by Robert D. Kaplan
Published 11 Apr 2022

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Pirenne, Mohammed & Charlemagne, p. 120. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 4 (New York: Everyman’s Library, [1776–1788] 1910), p. 160. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Anton Chekhov, “A Dreary Story,” in My Life and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Everyman’s Library, [1889] 1992). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: SophiaOmni, [1912] 2014), pp. 163 and 216. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 T.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

Until I left for Northern California in September, I lived with Betty Olson and her husband, Thomas Paul, a retired naval hospital corpsman and a consummate talk radio addict. With their children grown and gone, the Olsons opened their home to me, caring for me like one of their own. Mrs. Olson took me to my first professional plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the round at the Old Globe theater in Balboa Park and Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the La Jolla Playhouse, and encouraged me to read books by Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, sparking a new love for Latin-American magical realism. She bought me a blue satin dress and some rhinestone jewelry for my senior prom. But most important, the Olsons never fought, never raised their voices, and never once made me feel unwanted, unwelcomed, or unloved.

Moscow, December 25th, 1991
by Conor O'Clery
Published 31 Jul 2011

On Moscow television on November 30 Yeltsin said he could not imagine a union without Ukraine, but that Russia could not sign a union treaty if Ukraine didn’t. The die was cast. The Soviet president could not bring himself to believe that Ukraine would vote for independence. Most Russians felt they and Ukrainians were politically and culturally of the same stock—Slavs descended from the once united Rus people. Classic Russian writers like Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Bulgakov placed their tales in Ukraine. Gogol and Shevchenko were born there. So too was Brezhnev. Gorbachev and his wife both had Ukrainian blood. They believed Ukraine was to Russia what Bavaria was to Germany. It had been part of greater Russia since the “Eternal Peace” between Russia and Poland three centuries earlier, when Kiev and the Cossack lands east of the Dnieper went over to Russian rule.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism
by Harm J. De Blij
Published 15 Nov 2007

As Figure 11-3 shows, the Russian Far East incorporates one real island, named Sakhalin, and this is an important component of this region's physical as well as cultural geography. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the Russians and the Japanese repeatedly fought over Sakhalin Island, and not until the end of World War II was Soviet control confirmed. When the Russians held it, they used Sakhalin as a penal colony (the great writer Anton Chekhov in one of his books described the terrible conditions under which prisoners lived), but during Soviet times Sakhalin became an increasingly important source of fuels ranging from oil in the north to coal in the south. In post-Soviet years additional finds of oil reserves have made Sakhalin Island a key constituent of the commodity-based Russian economy.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

Art is a particular example of a general rule: pick any arena – from science and engineering to literature and culture – and this city is the origin of an innovation that changed the way we see the world. The units we use to measure both temperature (Kelvin) and power (Watt) take their names from Glaswegian inventors. In addition to cutting-edge art the city’s many theatres were known for supporting challenging new work by Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen. It was a connected and dense city with travel made easy thanks to the 1896 launch of the world’s third – and most advanced – underground train. In 1927 a local inventor linked cameras in London to a screen in Glasgow’s Central Hotel, creating the world’s first television broadcast.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

This Is What Democracy Looks Like PART 5 THE OTHER CHEEK 16. Drinking Tea with Terrorists 17. The Best Remedy for Hate, Injustice and Prejudice 18. When the Soldiers Came Out of the Trenches Epilogue Acknowledgements Notes Index A Note on the Author ‘Man will become better when you show him what he is like.’ Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) PROLOGUE On the eve of the Second World War, the British Army Command found itself facing an existential threat. London was in grave danger. The city, according to a certain Winston Churchill, formed ‘the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous fat cow, a valuable fat cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey’.1 The beast of prey was, of course, Adolf Hitler and his war machine.

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World
by Anthony Sattin
Published 25 May 2022

China’s great North Plain runs from the Yan Mountains to the Tongbai and Dabie mountains and has been the centre of Han culture since the earliest days. But most significant for my story of nomads is the Great Eurasian Steppe. ‘A wide boundless plain encircled by a chain of low hills’21 is how Anton Chekhov describes the steppes. ‘Huddling together and peeping out from behind one another, these hills melted together into rising ground, which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the lilac distance; one drives on and on and cannot discern where it begins or where it ends.’ For once, this is not writer’s hyperbole: Eurasia accounts for over a third of the planet’s landmass and its overwhelming vastness, one of the steppes’ most dominant features, really does run ‘on and on’.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
by Ryan North
Published 17 Sep 2018

Kilns show up around 6000 BCE, but there is nothing preventing you from constructing them at any given point in history, except knowing how to do it. And since you just learned how to do that, you’ve got no excuse for waiting! Do it right now!* 10.4.3: GLASS Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. —You (also, Anton Chekhov) WHAT IT IS A strong, heat-resistant, nonreactive, infinitely recyclable noncrystalline amorphous solid* that you can see through, which actually makes it one of the most insanely useful substances on the planet BEFORE IT WAS INVENTED If you needed corrective lenses, you wouldn’t get them and would instead spend your entire life not seeing things clearly.

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World
by Tom Burgis
Published 7 Sep 2020

Cast of Characters In London Nigel Wilkins Head of compliance at the London office of the Swiss bank BSI, later on the staff of the City of London regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority Charlotte Martin Nigel’s companion Trefor Williams Ex-UK special forces, investigator at the private intelligence firm Diligence Ron Wahid Bangladeshi-American founder of the private intelligence firm Arcanum Neil Gerrard Lawyer at the City firm Dechert The Trio Alexander Machkevitch aka Sasha Kyrgyz-born member of the Trio of Central Asian billionaires behind Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) Patokh Chodiev Uzbek-born member of the Trio Alijan Ibragimov Kyrgyz-Uighur member of the Trio Mehmet Dalman British-Cypriot City financier, ENRC director then chairman Victor Hanna The Trio’s man in Africa Shawn McCormick Ex-US intelligence official hired by ENRC The khan Nursultan Nazarbayev Ruler of Kazakhstan since 1989, president until 2019 then chair of the Security Council Rakhat Aliyev aka Sugar Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, later in exile Timur Kulibayev Nazarbayev’s other son-in-law, billionaire Kenes Rakishev Kulibayev’s protégé The oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov Kazakh ex-minister, tycoon and founder of BTA Bank Peter Sahlas Canadian lawyer retained by Ablyazov Madina Ablyazova Ablyazov’s daughter, in Geneva Iliyas Khrapunov Madina’s husband Leila Khrapunova Kazakh businesswoman, Iliyas’s mother Viktor Khrapunov Kazakh politician, Iliyas’s stepfather Bota Jardemalie Harvard-trained Kazakh lawyer at BTA Bank The gangsters Semyon Mogilevich aka Seva aka the Brainy Don Moscow’s premier criminal moneyman Sergei Mikhailov aka Mikhas Boss of the Solntsevskaya Bratva, a Russian crime syndicate In Africa Billy Rautenbach Zimbabwean businessman, backer of Robert Mugabe’s regime Robert Mugabe Ruler of Zimbabwe, 1980–2017 Emmerson Mnangagwa aka the Crocodile Mugabe’s security chief, then successor Joseph Kabila President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, 2001–2019 Augustin Katumba Mwanke Kabila’s right-hand man, died in 2012 Dan Gertler Israeli mining tycoon close to Kabila and Katumba In North America Felix Sater Russian-American fraudster, money launderer, spy and real estate developer Tevfik Arif Kazakh founder of the New York real estate venture where Sater worked, Bayrock Boris Birshtein Soviet-era moneyman residing in Toronto Alex Shnaider Russian-Canadian billionaire, Birshtein’s protégé and, for a time, son-in-law Epigraph Every man lives his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog Part I Crisis The secret of a great fortune with no apparent cause is a crime that has been forgotten because it was done properly Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot 1 The Thief Kensington, January 2008 Moral courage, yes, but it was also mischief, a quality discernible in the creases at the corners of his eyes, that made Nigel Wilkins decide to steal the secrets of a Swiss bank.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

Fires could of course be started deliberately: an analysis of 114 cases of rural arson in Bavaria between 1879 and 1900 has shown how these surprisingly frequent crimes were motivated by feelings of resentment against mean farmers or brutal employers, older brothers inheriting the property, abusive parents, or revenge for real or imagined slights. One man accused of setting fire to the family mill after it had been inherited by his older brother confessed: ‘I committed the arson … because I was angry with my brother because he treated me and my mother badly.’ The playwright Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) began his sketch of rural life, Muzhiki, published in 1897, with a village fire, portraying the male peasants standing around dumbfounded with ‘a helpless expression and tears in their eyes’, while the women of the village ran around crying hysterically, or wailing ‘as if they were at a funeral’.

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The best-selling of these ‘boulevard newspapers’ was the Moscow Sheet, whose editor Nicholas Pastukhov (1831–1911), a former innkeeper described by one of his own journalists as an ‘illiterate editor who in the midst of illiterate readers … knew how to speak their language’. A rival penny paper in St Petersburg was dismissed in 1870 as ‘a sort of junkyard of all sorts of rumours, gossip, and news’. The young writer Anton Chekhov was told by his editor that ‘we’ll grab the readers with stupidities and then instruct them with learned articles’. In practice, the latter continued to be in short supply. In France local newspapers began to be produced from the 1870s onwards, though they were read mainly by the middle classes at first; in 1896, however, the police described one such paper, L’Avenir du Cantal, as ‘much read by the peasant’.

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made
by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas
Published 28 Feb 2012

Hoping to write a biography of the great nineteenth-century writer, Kennan read all thirty volumes of his works and six volumes of his “inimitable” letters. “There could, as it happened, have been no finer grounding in the atmosphere of prerevolutionary Russia,” he later noted. He sent unsolicited to the Yale Review an article titled “Anton Chekhov and the Bolsheviks.” Said the State Department officer charged with clearing the essay: “If Yale can stand it, I can.” Yale apparently could not. Citing his desire to study the Chekhov archives, Kennan applied for permission to visit Moscow in the summer of 1932. The State Department denied the request, declaring that the young Russian specialists should visit that country only when they could do so in an official capacity.

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.: appearance of, 85, 86, 697 articles by, 55–56, 368, 580, 673, 708 athletic abilities of, 86–87 Bohlen and, 493, 494, 499, 512–13, 529–30, 720–21 books by, 89, 590 childhood and heritage of, 50–54 death of, 719 early employment of, 56–57, 85 essays by, 55–56 Harriman and, 22, 40, 85–86, 135, 463–64, 500–11, 519–20, 532, 540–41, 546–48, 583–85, 598, 601, 606, 610–11, 634–35, 681–83, 692–93, 708–9, 715, 719 health problems of, 558, 649–50, 718 independence of, 53, 54–55, 131–32, 465 intelligence of, 87, 131, 132 journal of, 126 Kennan, and, 327–28, 471–72, 474, 477, 485, 487–91, 495–96, 499, 512, 529–30, 542–43, 551–53, 580–81, 599, 668–69, 724 Lovett and, 417–18, 465–66, 493–94, 509, 539, 542, 544–46, 549, 556, 581, 592–93, 594, 716–17 McCloy and, 186, 324–25, 334, 493, 513–15, 518, 592, 614 memoirs of, 22, 51, 54, 126, 136, 393, 530, 537–39, 548, 656, 679, 693, 716, 720–21, 724 mustache of, 132, 465, 547, 652, 697 pragmatism of, 126, 128, 136, 137–38, 323, 686, 697 press conferences of, 323, 372, 409–10, 412–13, 490 press coverage of, 368, 409, 494, 506, 545, 581, 646, 681 problem-solving technique of, 324 school years of, 22, 30, 39–40, 54–57, 80, 85–89 speeches of, 133, 135, 136, 185, 339–40, 360, 368, 394–95, 409–10, 428, 477–78, 488, 491, 506, 530, 547, 598, 610, 612 Acheson, Edward C, 50–53, 134 Acheson, Eleanor Gooderham, 51, 53, 55 Acheson, Jane, 418, 708 Acheson, Margot, 53, 86 Achilles, Thodore, 447 Adams, John Quincy, 29 Adams, Sherman, 577 Adenauer, Konrad, 201, 513, 514, 516, 517–18 Agee, James, 315–16 Aiken, George, 685 air power, Lovett’s commitment to, 18, 21, 91–92, 202–9 Allison, John, 528 Alsop, Joseph, 171, 409, 431–32, 453, 463, 545, 546, 581, 623, 643, 698 Alsop, Stewart, 546 “American Century, The” (Luce), 25 Americans for Democratic Action, 27 Amherst College, 68–70 Andropov, Yuri, 20, 728–29 Anglo–American coalition, Churchill’s iron curtain speech and, 362–64 “Anton Chekhov and the Bolsheviks” (Kennan), 154 Arden (Harrimans’ estate), 43–45, 63, 106–7, 285 arms control, 435, 577, 737 Acheson on, 33, 324–26, 356–62 espionage and, 327–28, 357 Lilienthal proposal for, 358–59 McCloy on, 357–62, 599 Stimson on, 303, 318–21, 324, 325–26 Truman and, 325–26, 342–46 see also nuclear test ban arms race, 34, 435–36, 553, 722–23 Armstrong, Hamilton Fish, 385, 420 Arneson, Gordon, 487 Arnold, Henry (“Hap”), 194, 201, 206, 458 Astor, Vincent, 113, 193 Atlantic Conference (1941), 210–12, 237 atom bomb, 18–19 Berlin blockade and, 460 East–West cooperation on, 33, 302–5, 318–21, 324, 325–28, 343–45, 385 Harriman on, 379 Hiroshima attacked, 314–16, 485 Interim Committee on, 274–75, 293, 294–95, 297, 302, 304, 310–11 Kennan on use of, 375, 435–36, 553, 722–23 McCloy on use of, 293–97, 300, 301, 303, 310–12, 315 Soviet Union and, 327–28, 480–81, 486–87, 489, 496 Stimson and, 271, 273–74, 277–78, 280–81, 293–97, 300, 301, 303–4, 308–13, 315, 318–21, 324–26, 327 testing of, 297, 301–2, 304–5, 310, 630–33 see also arms control; nuclear weapons atomic arms control covenant, 319–20 Atomic Energy Commission, 486 Attlee, Clement, 543 Auchincloss, Louis, 30, 673 Auschwitz, proposed bombing of, 200–201, 235–36 Austin, Warren, 523 Baldwin, Hanson, 315, 420 Baldwin, Ray, 53 Balkans, postwar spheres of influence in, 241–43, 246, 262 Ball, George, 207–8, 429–30, 484, 606, 628 Acheson and, 648–49, 674, 697 Harriman and, 657 Johnson and, 643, 645–46, 648–49 Vietnam War and, 637–39, 643, 647–49, 680, 700, 711 Baltimore Sun, 134, 137 Barry, Philip and Ellen, 109 Bartlett, Charles, 639 Baruch, Bernard, 264n, 360–61 Battle, Lucius, 478–79, 491, 494, 532–33, 563, 612, 685, 697 Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), 574–75, 612, 622 Beale, Joseph, 71, 93 Bears in the Caviar (Thayer), 168 Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken, Lord, 212–14, 217, 234, 603 Belmont, August, 484 Benchley, Robert, 109–10 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 80–81 Berger, Sam, 711–12 Beria, Lavrenty, 576 Berlin: devastation of, 386 Kennan in, 147–48, 152, 177–78, 190 Lovett’s peace offensive in, 459–60 McCloy in, 305–6 Soviet blockade of, 455–61, 472–73 Berlin, Isaiah, 579 Berlin airlift, 458–61 Berlin crisis (1961), 600, 605 Acheson and, 606, 609–16 Bohlen and, 615 J.

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
by Misha Glenny
Published 7 Apr 2008

Idlewild had a maritime equivalent in 1990s Ukraine—Odessa. As I stroll along Primorsky Boulevard from Sergei Eisenstein’s famous steps toward the Opera House, Odessa looks magnificent as it hugs the northern Black Sea coast. Indeed, the recent reconstruction of the center is so evocative of a glamorous past that I can imagine Anton Chekhov, Isadora Duncan, and their fashionable friends sweeping in and out of the Londonskaya Hotel, where they used to stay. A century ago a visit to Odessa was de rigueur for the moneyed classes of Russia and Europe alike. This elegant illusion is maintained as I walk up Derebasovskaya Street, where peddlers are wooing tourists by performing with live snakes and crocodiles (less harmful than some of the other reptiles that creep around here).

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
by Gabor Mate and Peter A. Levine
Published 5 Jan 2010

ALICE MILLER Breaking Down the Wall of Silence In the search for truth human beings take two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them forward. And who knows? Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last. ANTON CHEKHOV The Duel AUTHOR’S NOTE The persons, quotes, case examples and life histories in this book are all authentic; no embellishing details have been added and no “composite” characters have been created. To protect privacy, pseudonyms are used for All my patients, except for two people who directly requested to be named.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

It is highly likely that networks controlling vital infrastructure facilities in the USA and many other countries are already crammed with such codes). However, we should not confuse ability with motivation. Though cyber warfare introduces new means of destruction, it doesn’t necessarily add new incentives to use them. Over the last seventy years humankind has broken not only the Law of the Jungle, but also the Chekhov Law. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout history, if kings and emperors acquired some new weapon, sooner or later they were tempted to use it. Since 1945, however, humankind has learned to resist this temptation. The gun that appeared in the first act of the Cold War was never fired.

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State
by Barton Gellman
Published 20 May 2020

“if revealed, would cause”: Paul Ohm, “Don’t Build a Database of Ruin,” Harvard Business Review, August 23, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/08/dont-build-a-database-of-ruin. Chekhov’s famous admonition: The best-known version is: “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). Chekhov meant that a playwright should not break an implicit promise to the audience, but the expectations behind that promise have their roots in observed experience of the world. Most weapons are used eventually. In surveillance as in war, capabilities once invented are put to use.

A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
Published 5 Sep 2016

the Count ventured after a brief silence. “Yes,” said Mishka with a careless wave of his hat. “But I came a day early at Shalamov’s request. . . .” An acquaintance from their university days, Viktor Shalamov was now the senior editor at Goslitizdat. It was his idea to have Mishka edit their forthcoming volumes of Anton Chekhov’s collected letters—a project that Mishka had been slaving over since 1934. “Ah,” said the Count brightly. “You must be nearly done.” “Nearly done,” Mishka repeated with a laugh. “You’re quite right, Sasha. I am nearly done. In fact, all that remains is to remove a word.” Here is what had unfolded: Early that morning, Mikhail Mindich had arrived in Moscow on the overnight train from Leningrad.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

But the potential of the therapy has regulators and researchers and much of the mental health community feeling hopeful. “I believe this could revolutionize mental health care,” Watts told me. Her conviction is shared by every other psychedelic researcher I interviewed. * * * • • • “IF MANY REMEDIES are prescribed for an illness,” wrote Anton Chekhov, who was a physician as well as a writer, “you may be certain that the illness has no cure.” But what about the reverse of Chekhov’s statement? What are we to make of a single remedy being prescribed for a great many illnesses? How could it be that psychedelic therapy might be helpful for disorders as different as depression, addiction, the anxiety of the cancer patient, not to mention obsessive-compulsive disorder (about which there has been one encouraging study) and eating disorders (which Hopkins now plans to study)?

Bleeding Edge: A Novel
by Thomas Pynchon
Published 16 Sep 2013

And he’s out the door. Maxine and Tallis stand looking at each other. The King croons on. “I was going to advise ‘Dump him,’” Maxine pensive, “while shaking you back and forth . . . but now I think I’ll just settle for the shaking part.” • • • HORST IS NODDED OUT on the couch in front of The Anton Chekhov Story, starring Edward Norton, with Peter Sarsgaard as Stanislavski. Maxine tries to tiptoe on into the kitchen, but Horst, not being domestic, tuned to motel rhythms even in his sleep, flounders awake. “Maxi, what the heck.” “Sorry, didn’t mean to—” “Where’ve you been all night?” Not yet having slid far enough into delusion to answer this literally, “I was hanging out with Tallis, she and the schmuck just parted ways, she’s got a new place, she was happy to have some company.”

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

Like all organisms, we metabolize energy and resources in a highly efficient way in order to combat the continuous fight against the inevitable production of entropy in the form of waste products and dissipative forces that cause physical damage. As we begin to lose the multiple localized battles against entropy we age, ultimately losing the war and succumbing to death. Entropy kills. Or as the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov poignantly remarked, “Only entropy comes easy.” A central feature of how life is sustained is the transportation of metabolic energy through space-filling networks across all scales to service and feed cells, mitochondria, respiratory complexes, genomes, and other functional intracellular units, as symbolized here.

Hands-On Machine Learning With Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems
by Aurélien Géron
Published 13 Mar 2017

Thanks to Grégoire Mesnil, who reviewed Part II and contributed very interesting practical advice on training neural networks. Thanks as well to Eddy Hung, Salim Sémaoune, Karim Matrah, Ingrid von Glehn, Iain Smears, and Vincent Guilbeau for reviewing Part I and making many useful suggestions. And I also wish to thank my father-in-law, Michel Tessier, former mathematics teacher and now a great translator of Anton Chekhov, for helping me iron out some of the mathematics and notations in this book and reviewing the linear algebra Jupyter notebook. And of course, a gigantic “thank you” to my dear brother Sylvain, who reviewed every single chapter, tested every line of code, provided feedback on virtually every section, and encouraged me from the first line to the last.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

That level of lending gave each landowner’s property in European Russia, from peasant to Grand Duke, an average capital value of about ten rubles or fifteen dollars an acre. By chance, that was almost exactly the value of land in the United States according to the 1850 census, a period when its rural economy was beginning to turn on the afterburners of industrialization. Writing at the same time as Lenin but with rather more humanity, Anton Chekhov gently lamented and laughed at the impact of this increasingly energetic, capitalist use of land on the Oblomovan outlook of old-fashioned aristocrats. In The Cherry Orchard, the past is represented by the charming fecklessness of the orchard’s owner, Madame Ranevskaya, who is incapable of dealing with the fact that the land must be sold off to pay her debts; the future is the emotionally inept Lopahkin, the family’s former serf, now a wealthy businessman, who buys the estate and chops down the cherry trees to build vacation homes.

The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union
by Serhii Plokhy
Published 12 May 2014

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, German reunification under way, and Mikhail Gorbachev adopting the “Sinatra doctrine,” which allowed Moscow’s East European clients to “do it their way” and eventually leave the Kremlin’s embrace, the conflict at the core of the Cold War was resolved. Soviet troops began to leave East Germany and other countries of the region. But the nuclear arsenals were virtually unaffected by these changes in the political climate. The famous Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once remarked that if there was a gun onstage in the first act of a play, it would be fired in the next. The two superpowers had placed plenty of nuclear arms on the world stage. Sooner or later there would be a second act involving different actors who might want to fire them. Nuclear arms were an integral element of the Cold War, responsible both for its most dangerous turns and for the fact that the two superpowers, the first to possess atomic weapons, never entered into a direct, open conflict—the risk of nuclear annihilation was too great.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

In the extreme, an encyclopedia entry could tell you every possible fact about a person or place, leaving nothing out—but such an entry would be too unwieldy to be useful. The usefulness of most professional summaries is that someone with perspective has used their best judgment about what, in the scheme of things, should be included. The person most involved in editing the entry on Charles Dickens may have no connection to the person writing the entry on Anton Chekhov, and so we end up with idiosyncratic articles that don’t give equivalent weight to their lives, their works, their influences, and their historical place. For scientific, medical, and technical topics, even in peer-reviewed journals, the information sources aren’t always clearly on display.

The Rough Guide to New York City
by Martin Dunford
Published 2 Jan 2009

Later members included the Barrymores, Frank Sinatra, and (oddly) Sir Winston Churchill, while more recent inductees are Morgan Freeman and Liv Ullmann.These days it seems to be the club that is trying to keep regular society out – rather than vice versa. The club does, however, host a year-round program of lunch-hour theater called UNION S QUARE , GRAM E RC Y PARK | The Flatiron District Food for Thought, featuring one-act plays by writers as diverse as Anton Chekhov and Tony Kushner and supplemented by a light buffet lunch. The program often feels more like an exclusive salon featuring marquee-name actors, making advance booking highly recommended (shows twice per week on Mon, Wed, Thurs, or Fri; lunch 12.30pm, show 1.30pm; $75; T 212/362-2560, W www.foodforthought productions.com).

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

Mooney 2005; see also Pinker 2008b. 6. Lamar Smith and the House Science Committee: J. D. Trout, “The House Science Committee Hates Science and Should Be Disbanded,” Salon, May 17, 2016. 7. J. Mervis, “Updated: U.S. House Passes Controversial Bill on NSF Research,” Science, Feb. 11, 2016. 8. From Note-book of Anton Chekhov. The quote continues, “What is national is no longer science.” 9. J. Lears, “Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris,” The Nation, April 27, 2011. 10. L. Kass, “Keeping Life Human: Science, Religion, and the Soul,” Wriston Lecture, Manhattan Institute, Oct. 18, 2007, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/2007-wriston-lecture-keeping-life-human-science-religion-and-soul-8894.html.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

When his company announced that it would abandon a strategy of making good products in favor of a “desperate strategy of mergers, business spin-offs, fruitless partnerships, and random reorganizations” and an accelerated “program of paying the good employees to leave,” the stock price went up by three points.32 CHAPTER 35 Deliberate or Emergent If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure. —Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard THE QUESTION OF whether senior management really could give a business strategic direction was turned into one of the more influential dichotomies in the field, that between deliberate or emergent strategies. Henry Mintzberg, who was responsible for the most sustained challenge to the so-called design model of strategy, stressed the possibility of a continuing, intelligent learning response to a changing environment.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Published 18 Dec 2007

He knew that for Dirac life was physics and nothing else; by contrast, his own interests were extravagantly catholic. He still loved French literature, and while in Göttingen he found time to read Paul Claudel’s dramatic comedy Jeune Fille Violaine, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story collections, The Sensible Thing and Winter Dreams, Anton Chekhov’s play Ivanov and the works of Johann Hölderlin and Stefan Zweig. When he discovered that two friends were regularly reading Dante in the original Italian, Robert disappeared from Göttingen’s cafés for a month and returned with enough Italian to read Dante aloud. Dirac was unimpressed, grumbling, “Why do you waste time on such trash?

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

Moscow’s Muir and Mirrielees delivered across the Russian empire from Poland to Vladivostok, as long as items were worth 50 roubles or more. In 1894, the Bon Marché distributed 1.5 million catalogues, half to the provinces, another 15 per cent abroad. It sent packages worth 40 million francs a year to provincial towns and villages.91 Pieces of urban fashion and comfort could be had thousands of miles away from the metropole. When Anton Chekhov was recovering from tuberculosis in Yalta in the late 1890s, he continued to get his hats, detachable collars, curtains and stoves from Muir and Mirrielees.92 American writers, preoccupied with the melting pot, have emphasized the role of the department store in fusing a new national identity.