Russian influence

The last story in Elephant, a selection of Raymond Carver stories, is an imagining of Tchekov's death, over a glass of champagne, which led me back to Aldo Buzzi Tchekov in Sondrio, followed by JM Coetzee's imagining of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg. Reading in January has a russian influence. Follow it. 

Chekhov died at forty-four. Since the age of twenty-eight, he had suffered from insomnia, and he treated it by drinking a bottle of beer every night, often of bad quality. He thought that he was descended from the artisan Andrei Chokhov, who cast the colossal cannon (the czar of cannons, which never succeeded in firing) that is in the garden of the Kremlin, near the czar of bells, an enormous bell, broken during casting, which never succeeded in ringing—symbols, in Chekhov's words, of that "Russian tendency to spend money in the construction of every kind of uselessness when the most pressing human needs are not yet satisfied".