'Chekhov Saved Me But Also Ruined Me'

Recently I woke from a dream adapted from Nostromo and directed by Joseph Conrad. Something about Martin Decoud in the lifeboat, weighted down with silver ingots. The dream, typically, was fragmentary and out of focus. This is only the second time I can remember having a dream lifted from a work of fiction. The other involved Leopold Bloom embracing Rudy, his dead infant son. Do I find profound significance in these nighttime theatricals? That both involve death? Not really. They tell me that fiction, like one’s "real" life, is raw material for the subconscious, and perhaps that I know these novels nearly as well as my own life. There’s a touch of pride in knowing Conrad and Joyce are among the greatest writers, longtime favorites, and that Joyce Carol Oates hasn’t infected my subconscious. 

In her latest post at The Little White Attic, “My Personal Library,” Di Nguyen examines the books she owns – a common practice among serious readers -- and writes:

 

“Sometimes I try to find some pattern behind the writers who speak the most to me, but can’t find any. I like both sane writers (Jane Austen, Chekhov, Tolstoy) and mad writers (Emily Bronte, Melville, Akutagawa); both warm writers (Chekhov, Molière, Dickens) and cold writers (Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark). I think I like writers preoccupied with the subject of death, but Jane Austen leaves it offstage. I think I like writers with a sense of humour, but does Tolstoy make anyone laugh? (Maybe twice in War and Peace). I think I like writers who see some goodness and nobility in humanity and don’t just depict us all as base and bestial, but why do I like Flannery O’Connor?”

 

These are the sort of questions I ask myself. Like Di, I see no pattern. This says something about me but also about the great library of fiction, the way it reflects, after sufficient reading, the infinite complexity of human beings, our capacity for humility and love, duplicity and evil, our essentially contradictory nature. Di writes:

 

“[D]uring that difficult period of my life, I found solace in Chekhov and found myself moving away from Austen—she didn’t write about the subjects that were preoccupying me. But now looking back, I can’t help wondering if I was making a mess of things because I absorbed Chekhov’s pessimism and accepted that human relationships were messy and my life was over and there’s no happiness on earth. I was going through volumes and volumes of Chekhov—how many stories did I read? Chekhov saved me but also ruined me.”

 

In a letter to his sister, shortly before committing suicide, Martin Decoud writes: “[A]ll this is life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.”