“Wrote four pages – it’s hard to beat their insignificance”
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On November 13, 1862, Lewis Carroll wrote in his diary: “Started writing the tale of Alice, I hope to finish it by Christmas.” A month and a half for “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was not enough for Carroll – the work took two and a half years, but the result glorified the author all over the world. Weekend remembered how other writers started work on great books and what hopes they placed on them.
one
“I have finally set to work seriously on my new story, which will surpass “On the Eve” in size. It is hoped that her fate will be better. And yet, it’s all in the hands of the urn of fate, as one of my university friends used to say.
Ivan Turgenev – Pavel Annenkov, November 19, 1860
The “New Tale”, work on which was completed eight months after this letter, justified Turgenev’s hopes: the novel “Fathers and Sons” really surpassed “On the Eve” in size and social impact – it caused a lively controversy among contemporaries, became Turgenev’s most famous novel and still part of the school curriculum.
2
“I started writing Dead Souls. The plot stretched out into a long novel and, it seems, will be very funny. But now he stopped him at the third chapter. I’m looking for a good call-to-letter with whom I can get along briefly. I want to show in this novel, at least from one side, all of Rus’.
Nikolai Gogol to Alexander Pushkin, October 7, 1835
Gogol completed the first volume of Dead Souls almost five years after that, the second is known only in drafts and sketches, and the third was never written. Nevertheless, the plan to show “all Rus’ from one side” came true, and Belinsky even put Dead Souls at the top of Russian literature.
3
“I started writing a novel about the future. Wrote about 50 pages, and God knows when I’ll finish. However, I started it.”
George Orwell to Humphrey Slater, late September 1947
Orwell finished the draft version of 1984 within a month, but it took another year and a half to finalize and rewrite. The book became a cult almost immediately after its publication and indeed, in a sense, turned out to be about the future, in any case, many future generations found and continue to find terrible signs of their time in it.
four
“I got to the middle. I’m afraid it will be a strange book; a blubber is a blubber, and although oil can be obtained from it, the poetic flows from it as heavily as the juice from a frozen maple. To make something out of this, you need a fantasy as clumsy as the leaping whales. However, no matter what, I intend to tell the truth.”
Herman Melville to Richard Henry Dane, Jr., May 1, 1850
Melville wrote the first half of Moby Dick relatively quickly – he began work on the novel in February 1850. It took a year and a half to complete the second one. Contemporaries did not appreciate the novel: the first edition was published in England with a large number of errors and omissions of entire fragments, critics scolded the novel, and for 40 years a circulation of 3,200 copies was hardly sold out. Glory came to “Moby Dick” and its author already in the 20th century.
5
“I started writing today. There is no clear plot in my head – only the mood and a sense of a certain style. Everything arose from a visual image – a woman stands on the edge of the Cobb Pier and looks mysteriously towards the sea.
John Fowles, diary, January 25, 1967
The first draft of The French Lieutenant’s Mistress was ready in nine months, but Fowles finalized it until the novel was published in 1969. Critics immediately appreciated the mood and style of the novel, and over the next 53 years it went through at least 25 reprints in English.
6
“Yesterday and today I wrote four pages – it is difficult to surpass their insignificance”
Franz Kafka, diary, August 7, 1914
Kafka worked on the novel for half a year, almost completely wrote it, then quit his job, in 1916 he made an attempt to return to it, but could not. The Trial was published posthumously in 1925 by his friend Max Brod and became one of the most famous German novels of the 20th century.
7
“I am writing a play, which I will probably finish not earlier than at the end of November. I write it not without pleasure, although I lie terribly against the conditions of the stage. Comedy, three female roles, six male roles, four acts, landscape (view of the lake); a lot of talk about literature, little action, five pounds of love”
Anton Chekhov – Alexander Suvorin, October 21, 1895
Chekhov wrote the play in just a month – on November 18, 1895, The Seagull was ready. Its first production at the Alexandrinsky Theater was a failure, critics scolded both the performance and the play itself, but three years later, an extremely successful production at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater made The Seagull a symbol of the Russian drama theater.
eight
“I either plunge like a diver into working on a new book, then, like a leapfrog player, I jump to Home Reading”
Charles Dickens to William Charles Macready, June 30, 1855
It took Dickens two years to write Little Dorrit, but the novel was published in installments as it was written from 1855 to 1857. Unlike previous Dickens books, Little Dorrit was criticized by contemporaries for its lack of jokes, pessimism, and grim realism.
9
“I have just started work. I am writing a short story, it will bring us little gold and silver, but it will be bright as a pearl.
Arkady Gaidar – to his wife, July 1, 1939
How long it took Gaidar to write the story “Chuk and Gek” is not exactly known; it was published six months later, for the New Year holidays. Gaidar’s hopes were largely justified: “Chuk and Gek” became a turning point in his career – after a series of “ideologically harmful” books (“The Blue Cup”, “The Fate of the Drummer”), he finally created a work that satisfied the Soviet authorities. Inspired by success, the very next year he wrote “Timur and his team.”
ten
“Yesterday <...> began to write “Natalie Stankevich”, wrote after dinner until almost one, drank cognac at the same time, slept little, now he hasn’t gone out into the air yet (and now it’s almost five), he wrote everything – in a word, I’m behaving very stupidly ”
Ivan Bunin, diary, March 19, 1941
Bunin wrote the story of a love triangle in a noble estate in just seven days. An unhealthy lifestyle and stupid behavior justified themselves: “Natalie” became one of the central works of the “Dark Alleys” cycle.
eleven
“It’s not hot at all here, it’s even cool, there are no fireplaces in the hotel, the water pipes are cold. But the wine is free – however, rather nasty; full of food. I started a novel, it’s going great, at first – about one took root, and then – about some fictional people who, more than anything in the world, want to get married – however, not for long ”
Evelyn Waugh as Mary and Dorothy Lygon, January 1934
Waugh took only six months to work on the novel A Handful of Ashes, and in the summer of 1934 it was published in Harper’s Bazaar. Critics have received the novel coolly, calling it “a study of futility in which the hero is so helpless that he should not even try to help,” but posterity rated “A Handful of Ashes” higher, and the novel regularly finds itself on lists of the best novels in the English language.
12
“Yesterday I wrote two pages for the first time since the final Yes in Ulysses. Finding a pen, I copied them out in legible handwriting on a double sheet, so that I could read them later.
James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, March 10, 1923
It took Joyce 13 years to write Finnegans Wake, a one-night stand in Dublin. The new experiment with automatic writing turned out to be too complicated for contemporaries: Vladimir Nabokov, for example, wrote that “this is some kind of shapeless gray mass of fake folklore, not a book, but a cold pudding, incessant snoring from the next room.”
13
“Rejoice, puma, I’m rummaging through different things with a pencil and writing a new book that after everything that happened, it’s good if you know that maybe you will make someone a little happy”
Erich Maria Remarque – Marlene Dietrich, November 23, 1938
Work on the book “Love thy neighbor”, which opened his emigrant tetralogy, Remarque began at the end of April 1938, and finished in February 1939. All this time, he continued an affair with Marlene Dietrich, but he remarried his ex-wife, dancer Jutta Zambona, to get her out of Nazi Germany, so he knew firsthand how to “make someone a little happy”.
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