in the prime of life—only sixty-five last January. Even with the handicap of bodily death he is much in the literary movement as an example, as an influence, as a theorist. Yet he adequately arrived on the scene only within the last ten years. Except for a few stories and two or three plays—"The Sea-Gull" was translated by Isabel Hapgood in 1905, and "The Cherry Orchard" by Mr. Mandell, 1908, in the "Yale Courant"—his main circulation here begins sharply in 1915 and 1916, with the revived interest in the Russians occasioned by the World War.
Behind the Chekhov revival in England—from which our own is obviously imported—one sees, beside those experienced "Russians" R. E. C. Long and the Garnetts, the influence of S. S. Koteliansky and a series of significant literary collaborators of the younger set: Gilbert Cannan, Leonard and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield and her husband, Mr. Middleton Murry. The Russian seed has fallen on fertile English ground.
Gilbert Cannan assisted Mr. Koteliansky in translating "The House With the Mezzanine and Other Stories," 1917; and I seem to scent Chekhov in Mr. Cannan's own "Stucco House," 1918. Virginia Woolf goes into ecstasies of admiration over Chekhov and "the Russian point of view" in her collection of essays, "The Common Reader." And the lecturer in Russian literature at King's College, University of London, Prince Mirsky, in his admirably lucid brief survey, "Modern Russian Literature," 1925, declares that "the late Katherine Mansfield was probably the most faithful and at the same times the most original of his (Chekhov's) disciples."
To the group of English Chekhovians one must add
