Novelists From Russia

"One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work."

"Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world."

"What writers influenced me as a young man? Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer? Chekhov!"

"Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress."

"Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure."

"I read a great deal of Russian literature in translation, Tolstoi and Tourgueniev particularly and Tchekhov who had a very deep influence on me."

"Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields."

"Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one."

"In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength."

"As Chekhov said: ‘Others may be a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself drop by drop.’"

"The two that I feel I have most responded to, and probably because they have lived through, and been inspired by, times of crisis, are Chekhov and Babel. Growing up at a tilt time in India's history, during the period of India's nation-building, I was living and witnessing the struggles of Chekhovian characters. Social change-momentous, scary change-was inevitable. How adaptable was my traditional family to such mega-scale change? Chekhov's fiction really spoke to me."

"People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people."

"It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth."

"Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels.... They must not be turned into a plaything of one’s mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at."

"(there must have been other writers whom you regarded as models.) NG: In my adolescence, the Russians were tremendously important to me. More than anyone, Chekhov."

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language."

"Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is."

"Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material."

"For a man who died at 40, Anton Chekhov left an astounding legacy. Though he worked full-time as a physician — which in 19th-century Russia meant driving horse-carriages around the frigid countryside to visit badly suffering people in the middle of the night — Chekhov completed an unthinkable 600 short stories and 13 plays in his lifetime. His work inspires adoration from readers, including writers as different as Virginia Woolf and Raymond Carver."

"D.H. Lawrence, De Maupassant, Chekhov, and Hemingway were also a great influence on me when I first began to write short stories, very different as they all are. But, then who is there, what modern writer of short stories has not been influenced by those four? They created the modern short story."

"Anton Chekhov was very important to me at one time, because I saw in my earlier years the passing of my aristocratic way of life in Calcutta with the coming in of the Communist Government, as being reflected in Chekhov's literary presentation of a decadent Russian society."

"You are right to demand that an artist engage his work consciously, but you confuse two different things: solving the problem and correctly posing the question."

"I have in my head a whole army of people pleading to be let out and awaiting my commands."

"I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura."

"I'm glad you like Chekhov. He is a very great writer, immense. He picks all human arrogances clean to the bone but has an unshakable confidence in the future of humanity."

"I don’t care for success. The ideas sitting in my head are annoyed by, and envious of, that which I’ve already written."

"It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand."

"The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy."

"Listener indifference, which is reader indifference, is a trademark joke in Chekhov."

"I think the first discovery I made for myself which I didn't necessarily share with my family or my friends, but came upon myself, was Russian literature. I've always felt very much enthralled to writers like Dostoevsky, especially, and Chekhov."

"He took an English dictionary, and translating the words, and guessing their meaning, by degrees he put together the following sentence: "I drink to the health of my beloved darling, and kiss her little foot a thousand times, and am impatiently expecting her arrival." . . . His pride, his plebeian fastidiousness, was revolted. Clenching his fists and scowling with disgust, he wondered how he, the son of a village priest, brought up in a clerical school, a plain, straightforward man, a surgeon by profession--how could he have let himself be enslaved, have sunk into such shameful bondage to this weak, worthless, mercenary, low creature."

"Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen, in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a mother-of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson. Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead."

"We learn about life not from pluses alone, but from minuses as well."

"The cherry orchard is now mine!... I bought the estate on which my grandfather and father were slaves, where they were not even permitted in the kitchen."

"Brevity is the sister of talent."

"All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity."

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."

"(Is there a book that you just absolutely couldn't imagine not owning, whether or not you think you're ever going to go back and reread it?) LE: Yes: the collected stories of Chekhov. That's what I read if I'm disturbed, depressed, or can't get back to sleep. I have Chekhov next to the bed...The humanity, and the clarity, and the sense of acceptance, and I wouldn't really say kindness so much as acceptance in Chekhov's work-I go back to it constantly. The books I take with me on my book tours are always the ones that are sustaining. I take Chekhov, and I often take Middlemarch."

"I do love Chekhov dearly. I fail, however, to rationalize my feeling for him: I can easily do so in regard to the greater artist, Tolstoy, with the flash of this or that unforgettable passage […], but when I imagine Chekhov with the same detachment all I can make out is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so forth; yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet."

"He remembered how in his father's house in the village a bird would sometimes chance to fly in from the open air into the house and would struggle desperately against the window-panes and upset things; so this woman from a class utterly alien to him had flown into his life and made complete havoc of it."

"My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist."

"Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice.... My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear."

"To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!"

"She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his secret meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish object in them."

"Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds."

"I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one."

"What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all."

"When Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his overhanging eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass: "I cannot marry." "Why not?" Katya asked softly. "Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage is out of the question. An artist must be free." "But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?" "I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general." ". . . Famous authors and painters have never married.""

"After us they’ll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, “Oh! Life is so hard!” and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die."

"I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity."