Chekhov and the Meaning of Life with Rosamund Bartlett

You ask what life is. That is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot and there is nothing more to know.

Thus wrote Chekhov to his wife just before he died. This talk will explore how his deceptively simple stories and plays offer as profound a meditation on existential questions as the weighty novels of his contemporaries, as well as a recipe for how to live that continues to be relevant today.

Rosamund Bartlett is the author of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, a biography inspired by her experience of translating Chekhov for the anthology About Love and Other Stories, published by Oxford World’s Classics. She also edited Chekhov: A Life in Letters for Penguin Classics and is leading the Better Read Literary Tours Russian Classics tour to Moscow and St. Petersburg in September 2019.