If Trigorin Were Alive Today He’d Be a Blogger
Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man—he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought—I must write, I must write, I must write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth—I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can’t help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that?
Oh, it’s a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I don’t forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano—I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope, I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the color worn by widows, I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary storeroom, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write once more.
And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots! Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I’m being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking. He’s irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone.
Yes, writing is a pleasure to me, and so is reading the proofs, but no sooner does a book leave the press than it becomes odious to me; it’s not what I meant it to be; I made a mistake to write it at all; I am provoked and discouraged. Then the public reads it and says: “Yes, it is pretty and clever, but not nearly as good as Tolstoi,” or “It is a lovely thing, but not as good as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons,” and so it will always be. To my dying day I shall hear people say: “Pretty and clever, pretty and clever,” and nothing more; and when I am gone, those that knew me will say as they pass my grave: “Here lies Trigorin, a fairly good writer, but no Turgenev.”
—Act Two, The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1895)
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