Lin Yutang vs. Anton Chekhov
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
Lin Yutang
1895 – 1976
Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer, linguist, and inventor. A prolific bilingual writer in both Chinese and English, he was celebrated for pioneering a humorous prose style in modern Chinese literature and for serving as a cultural bridge between China and the West, most notably through My Country and My People (1935) and his English translations of Chinese classics. As a linguist, he compiled a series of ESL textbooks for Chinese learners in the 1930s and later produced an English–Chinese dictionary in the 1970s.
"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live"
Anton Chekhov
1860 – 1904
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer, widely considered one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre.
"We learn about life not from pluses alone, but from minuses as well."
Connections
Both wrote about: