'For Now I Am As Lilliputian As All the Rest'

“My mood is like the weather,” Chekhov writes on April 8, 1889. “I’m not doing any work, just reading or pacing up and down. However, I don’t really mind having the time to read. It’s more enjoyable than writing. I feel that if I could live another forty years and spend the whole time reading, reading, reading and learning how to write with talent, that is to say succinctly, then in forty years’ time I would be able to blast everyone from such a big cannon that the heavens would tremble. But for now I am as Lilliputian as all the rest.” 

Chekhov is twenty-nine years old and 1889 will prove his annus miribilis, the year of his maturation as a writer, when he would write “A Boring Story,” followed soon by “Gusev,” “My Life,” “Gooseberries,” “In the Ravine,” “The Lady with the Dog” and “Ward No. 6.” Two things about the passage quoted above:

 

A familiar complaint: not enough time to read. We get creative. We read when waiting and otherwise unoccupied, in an auto repair shop, for instance, or a doctor’s waiting room. We learn to read in snatches of time and maintain continuity, unlike the luxuriant days of childhood when we could read all day.

 

Chekhov’s linkage of reading and writing. He implies that reading the masters – in his case, Leskov and Tolstoy, among others --  would help him “write with talent.” This would seem obvious but today seems to have been forgotten, with inevitable results. There may have been good writers who didn’t read but I can't think of one.

 

Further reasons to think of Chekhov as the patron saint of writers.

 

[The letter to Chekhov’s friend and editor Alexi Suvorin can be found in Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, 2004).]