My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.
It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.
In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature.
The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.
I did a film called 'Days and Nights,' which is a modern-day retelling of and inspired by Chekhov's 'The Seagull.'
Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'
Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.
Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.