Donald R Rayfield

Dead Souls (New York Review Books Classics)

An NYRB Classics OriginalThe first of the great Russian novels and one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature, Dead Souls is the tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con man who causes consternation in a small Russian town when he shows up out of nowhere proposing to buy title to serf...

Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study Of Chekhov'S Prose And Drama

Of all Russian writers, Chekhov is one of the best liked and most easily appreciated. Yet he is also one of the most elusive. Here Donald Rayfield reveals the layers of meaning on which the great dramatist's stories and plays are built. He examines his brief twenty-year creative life, from medical s...

Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia

Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, Georgia is a country of rainforests and swamps, snow and glaciers, and semi-arid plains. It has ski resorts and mineral springs, monuments and an oil pipeline. It also has one of the longest and most turbulent histories in the Christian o...

Anton Chekhov: A Life

Anton Chekhov's life was short, intense, and dominated by battles, both with his dependents and with the tuberculosis that killed him at age forty-four. The traditional image of Chekhov is that of the restrained artist torn between medicine and literature. But Donald Rayfield's biography reveals the...

Kvachi (Georgian Literature)

This is, in brief, the story of a swindler, a Georgian Felix Krull, or perhaps a cynical Don Quixote, named Kvachi Kvachantiradze: womanizer, cheat, perpetrator of insurance fraud, bank-robber, associate of Rasputin, filmmaker, revolutionary, and pimp. Though originally denounced as pornographic, Kv...

Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and The Wood Demon (Critical Studies in Russian Literature)

Uncle Vania is Chekhov's best loved and perhaps his best composed play, yet this is the first book to be solely devoted to it in any language. Donald Rayfield brings his twenty years of research and writing and a century of others' critical studies to focus on Chekhov's art. He offers a close readin...

The Literature of Georgia - A History

This is the first comprehensive and objective history in English of the literature of Georgia, revealed to be unique among those of the former Byzantine and Russian empires, both in its quality and its 1500 years’ history. It is examined in the context of the extraordinarily diverse influences which...

A Man Was Going Down the Road

Set in Vani, the semi-legendary capital of Colchis (as western Georgia was called in antiquity), Otar Chiladze’s first novel of 1972 explores the Georgian ramifications of the myth of Jason, the Golden Fleece and Medea, weaving his own inventions with Greek myth and history. (Daedalus and Icarus, as...

Dald Rayfield

Donald Rayfield (born 1942) is professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about ...

The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-1891

Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art

The Literature of Georgia: A History

Chekhov, the Evolution of His Art

The Dream of Lhasa : The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839-88): Explorer of Central Asia

Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov's Prose and Drama

Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him