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Things are slipping away. Forests are flattened in the name of progress, vulgarians are at the gate, hardly anyone feels easy about the future and, more than ever, better parties [...]

The article focuses on the book "Chekhov's Plays: An Opening Into Eternity," by Richard Gilman. Author Anton Chekhov, while hardly a pamphleteer, was a clear-eyed participant in the real world. The educated son of a grocer and, as Gilman reminds that the grandson of a serf; he made more money from his writing than from his medical practice with the poor. He denied his own tuberculosis as long as he could. In 1899, he even traveled across Siberia to study harsh conditions in a prison for deported convicts; he later published a study of his findings. That generosity is everywhere in Chekhov's dealings with his characters. How truly satisfying to learn from Gilman's careful selection of letters that the writer he describes as having perhaps the most exquisite sensibility of all also lived with it.