When poet Edward Sanders, founder of New York’s famous Peace Eye Book Store as well as of the 60’s folk-rock group The Fugs, undertook to write a drama based on the life of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, he started with a poem. Hoping that a poem would engender dialogue and chorus refrains, Sanders’ finished product was. . . a poem. Delving into the life of the classic Russian author, Sanders was so taken with his subject that he realized “a verse biography of Chekhov could extend to five or ten thousand pages” and his poem (really a series of short poems about the short life and revolutionary times of the author of “The Seagull”) grew and grew.

While Chekhov is slightly shorter than those five to ten thousand pages, it does contain “surprisingly detailed information about the social, political, and intellectual phenomena of Chekhov’s Russia” (Booklist) and is written in verse that would do Pushkin proud. A must for any student of Chekhov, Russia or, for that matter, literature.

Succeeds brilliantly in telling Chekhov’s complex, fascinating life story.


Edward Sanders wrote his first poem on jail-cell toilet paper after being arrested for protesting the launch of nuclear submarines in 1961. Political protest remains an intrinsic part of his poetic vision to this day. In 1976, Sanders founded Investigative Poetry; the principles of this movement appear most prominently in his History in Verse series.
Sanders’ signature is an imaginative compression of historical fact into poetic myth; his mode of “compacted history.” Angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny, Sanders’ reinventions of historical worlds offer a moving masque of time constructed out of multiple narrative aspects and tones, skillfully and variously implemented by rhetorical techniques of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic. “Poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history,” Ed Sanders proclaimed in his momentous 1976 manifesto on Investigative Poetics. Dedicated since then to a “relentless pursuit of data,” Sanders has distinguished himself as the historically engaged poet of his generation, the one poet of imagination whose work also brings us an important vision of a world existing outside itself.