The covers of Oxford author Rosamund Bartlett's most recent two books on Chekhov feature little known but mesmerising pictures of Anton Chekhov. This was very much part of Rosamund's plan.

<image large="03wt10-155.jpg" small="03wt10-80.jpg" type="portrait">Rosamund Bartlett</image>

She said: "I really didn't want the covers of any of these books to reinforce the conventional image of Chekhov. There are many pictures of him that have been used so many times. I was particularly concerned in the biography to show the different sides of his personality: the young man, what he might have done and what he might have become if he had not got ill."

Anton Chekhov died at 44 from tuberculosis -- a playwright and writer truly in his prime. Bartlett has obviously been conducting a love affair with Russia and all things Russian for many years.

"I started learning Russian at school. I was good at languages but not much good at anything else. I spent quite a time resisting Russian and didn't want to do the A level." But she ended up with a degree in Russian from Durham University. "I rather went to seed and didn't bother much with my A levels, and only got accepted to do Russian with French, rather than the other way around because it was easier to get in." Russia has since become a ruling passion. She said: "That happens to a lot of people who study Russian. I think it is to do with the extraordinary intimacy that is contained within the language. It is totally different to English. Just talking to people is a very different process.

"People are very open there. You have very intimate relationships with people, and it all stems from the language. Reading Chekhov's stories, for example, the language is very understated and modest, but it is also incredibly intimate."

Bartlett has also translated a volume of Chekhov's short stories for the World's Classics series at Oxford University Press and so has a profound knowledge of Chekhov's writings. Does she think we are reading in translation a different story to the one he wrote in Russian?

"It is inevitably different. But what I have tried to do in the translation of the stories, which I don't think anyone has really paid very much attention to before, is to reproduce the rhythms of his prose, so I think I have managed to convey some of its atmosphere.

"He has always been translated as a 19th-century realist, which he is, but he also has a foot in the modernist camp. He paid great attention to punctuation, with deliberate long sentences to create breathing and a kind of music."

She believes many translators have previously ignored this aspect of Chekhov and seen his extraordinarily long sentences as a kind of clumsiness to be tidied up, rather than a conscious construction.

"Chekhov was a meticulous short-story writer and he chose to construct his stories in a very deliberate way."

After her degree at Durham, Bartlett came to Oxford to study for a doctorate. She is not only a specialist in Russian literature, but has also written and lectured on music, her first book being an exploration of the effect of Wagner's music on Russia and Russian culture, published by Cambridge University Press. The two spheres -- music and Russia -- have been wrestling for Bartlett's attention ever since. And now?

"I think I have now surrendered to Russian, embraced it, and I feel that is my vocation in life, to be a proselytiser for Russian culture. I'm interested in the language of art, the interrelationships of them. "Chekhov was a musician, and others who have translated him have obviously had a bit of a tin ear. I was particularly alert to the musicality of the prose."

As well as teaching at Durham University, she also lectures on cultural trips to Russia, which allows frequent trips to her second home.

She has been searching for ways in which her study and her writing can cross cultural boundaries and the spurious artistic boundaries which are pronounced by experts in each field.

"I see myself as a cultural historian, but there aren't any cultural history departments."

As with all human and social structures, we do like our pigeonholes, which make things nice and tidy and easy to comprehend, but Bartlett is obviously not going to stay in any one pigeonhole.

"I've made my path very difficult for myself, but you have to be true to yourself don't you?" she asks.

I'm sure Chekhov would have sympathised with that.

Chekhov: Scenes From A Life is published by Simon & Shuster at £20.

PHILIPPA BOSTON