The Essay - Chekhov Essays - Xiaolu Guo

Novelist, short story writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo, reflects her personal debt to Chekhov in a Chekhovian short story of her own. The novelist, short story writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo was born in a fishing village in south China. Now resident in London, she makes unexpected connections between the lives of the Chinese peasants of her childhood and the lives of the Russian peasants as depicted by Chekhov in his short stories. In a new short story in which she imagines herself travelling as Chekhov himself to the prison island of Sakhalin, she pays tribute to all she has learned from Chekhov in his deeply humane depiction of peasant life in a bitter winter landscape.