'The Whole Time Reading, Reading, Reading'

“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 just as Lilliputian as all the rest.” 

Another reason to love Anton Chekhov. He is writing to his editor and friend Alexy Suvorin on April 8, 1889. He had already written “A Nasty  Story,” “A Dreary Story,” “The Steppe,” and “Kashtanka,” and would soon write “Gusev,” “The Duel” and “Ward No. 6.” What we might interpret as false modesty in most writers rings with genuine humility in Chekhov. He saw himself as a perpetual apprentice, always learning. He memorably states what I take as literary gospel: writers read. We’re all part of a grand, mutually instructive tradition. A writer who doesn’t read is like a piano player wearing mittens.

 

Christmas was bountiful, as usual. Among the bookish gifts, I was given subscriptions to The Claremont Review of Books and The Los Angeles Review of Book, and two books:

 

Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin  Frank and the new translation (by Charlotte Mandell) of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. Frank concludes his introduction:

 

“The critic’s sense of a book is always partial and provisional, but so long as it doesn’t set out to substitute an interpretation or explanation for the book itself – well, then it may provide a glimpse of both the book in action and the action of reading the book—that hoped-for moment of encounter.”

 

[The letter quoted at  the top can be found in Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004), edited by Rosamund Bartlett and translated by Bartlett and Anthony Phillips.