Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart

This is a lock down novel set in the early days of the COVID pandemic. A group of artists who are friends, rivals, and companions escape New York City for the country and live together in an uneasy disharmonious way. While the literary reference that seemed to come to mind as a parallel is Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of tales traded by characters waiting out the Black Death in a Tuscan villa, it is actually the plays of Anton Chekhov, particularly Uncle Vanya, that appear to have inspired this. The author is Russian, after all. A handful of characters are cooped up together in a rundown country estate, complaining about cold samovars and unfulfilled dreams, falling in love and drinking too much and confronting one another over ancient betrayals; Chekhov’s dramatic elements modernized and remembered.