David Magarshack – författare

What is Chekhov’s method of ensuring audience participation? What does his stage direction ‘through tears’ mean? What happens between the first and second acts of The Seagull? Is there any reason for the despondency in Chekhov’s drama? This book, first published in 1972, discusses these questions and many other issues around Chekhov’s last four plays. David Magarshack, the leading translator and biography of many of Russia’s greatest writers, closely examines Chekhov’s work for the relevant facts about his writing, and demonstrates that no reliance should be placed on the so-called subtext which can introduce all sorts of irrelevancies arising from pre-conceived ideas about the plays. A careful reading of Chekhov’s text itself is all that is needed to correct the familiar distortions of his characters and themes.

What is Chekhov’s method of ensuring audience participation? What does his stage direction ‘through tears’ mean? What happens between the first and second acts of The Seagull? Is there any reason for the despondency in Chekhov’s drama? This book, first published in 1972, discusses these questions and many other issues around Chekhov’s last four plays. David Magarshack, the leading translator and biography of many of Russia’s greatest writers, closely examines Chekhov’s work for the relevant facts about his writing, and demonstrates that no reliance should be placed on the so-called subtext which can introduce all sorts of irrelevancies arising from pre-conceived ideas about the plays. A careful reading of Chekhov’s text itself is all that is needed to correct the familiar distortions of his characters and themes.

Konstantin Stanislavsky is one of the colossi not simply of Russian, but American and European theatre. The works of the creator of the Stanislavsky System - which later gave rise to the Method - have tended to shroud him in mystique, leading his followers to revere him as a saint and his detractors to dismiss him out of hand. As Irving Wardle says in his foreword to this edition (1986), David Magarshack's biography - first published in 1950 - offers 'a vigorous, highly readable narrative that succeeds in demystifying the working of the Moscow Art Theatre, and in removing Stanislavsky from his pedestal without cutting him down to size. To his autobiographical writings, Magarshack supplied the companion piece - A Life - and as such it remains unsuperseded.'

The discovery of Sir Robert Boniface's body on the floor of his blue limousine was made quite accidentally on a sultry Friday evening towards the end of June. The industrial and financial tycoon, and former stalwart of the British Cabinet, had been shot in the head and left in the quiet Vale of Health alongside London's Hampstead Heath. Nearby, a rejected portrait of Sir Robert is found riddled with bullets in the studio of the now- missing romantic artist Matt Caldwell.As it hurtles towards its feverish denouement under the bells of the capital's most famous clock, this closely observed and stylish study of both character and motive transports the reader from the Stock Exchange to Scotland Yard. It asks the question of what it means to be crooked and how immense power corrupts.First published in 1934, this novel is now extremely rare, and is long overdue its rediscovery.