"On New Year's Day, 1912, a cabaret with the cock-a-snook name Stray Dog opened in St. Petersburg, Russia, and became the place where the avant-garde met, debated, performed, and otherwise presented itself to itself. Habitues included the greatest concentration of major poets in Russian history, all born between 1800 and 1895...This book conjures their group's initial passion, humor, and revolutionary zeal." –
Booklist Praise for Schmidt: "He never translated from a language that he didn't know the way a poet knows language...He understood what it meant for words to live inside an actor's body, what it meant for language to be embodied in space by a living breathing performer."-
The Boston Phoenix "Schmidt's translations of Chekhov have been successfully staged all over the U.S. by such theatrical directors as Lee Strasberg, Elizabeth Swados, Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson. Critics have hailed these translations as making Chekhov fully accessible to American audiences. They are also accurate – Schmidt has been described as "the gold standard in Russian-English translation" by Michael Holquist of the Russian department at Yale University."-From
The Plays of Anton Chekhov