Novellas take Anton Chekov’s characters to new adventures

Catherine Browder, an associate faculty member in creative writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, is undeniably a fan of Anton Chekhov.

Her latest book, “Now We Can All Go Home: Three Novellas in Homage to Chekhov,” begins where Chekhov’s plays end, thrusting the Russian writer’s most famous characters into startling new contexts and trials.

Call it homage. Call it fan fiction. Whatever you call it, it’s worth a read.

The first novella, “A Visitor from Kharkov,” is tightly plotted and emotionally rich, following Alexander Sebryakov and his young wife, Yelena, as they make a new home and a hypnotic new acquaintance.

“Kharkov” picks up from the weary climax of “Uncle Vanya,” but Browder satisfies more than an impulse for epilogue. In her care, Yelena blooms from shallow set dressing to a vibrant, competent woman withering in her marriage to a bloviating bore.

Chekhov fans will find Browder’s theatrical riffs rewarding, but even unfamiliar readers will admire her musical prose and her characters’ fertile interior landscapes. If Browder stumbles, she does so in faithfulness, not invention. “Our Side of the Lake” reads more lethargically than the others, due in part to a narrator reliving the events of “The Seagull” through a detached and distant lens.

Browder is at her confident best when she frees Chekhov’s characters from their contextual tethers and allows pulsing new conflict to emerge. The three Prozorov sisters may never return to their cherished Moscow, but “Now We Can All Go Home” consoles readers with a suitable prize: a peek behind a closed curtain at an imaginative new end.

Liz Cook, Special to The Star

This story was originally published April 25, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Novellas take Anton Chekov’s characters to new adventures."