Friday, December 15, 2017

Chekhov in My Life By Lydia Avilov

This was a quick read.

This is a journal (or may be a memoir) of Lydia Avilov and her sad love affair with Chekhov. She was herself a short story writer, and as per her wishes this was published posthumously.

She has broadly described her eight meetings with Chekhov, and her dilemma of choosing between her love, and her duties.

Chekhov was a famous man of her time, and he was known to have affairs with a lot of women (about 33 as per theguardian). So if you look at it this may not really look like a new thing but it is one of the recorded documents (or memoir) from one of those women. A women who was in dilemma, and her relationship with Chekhov never materialized because Chekhov was never really committed.

The lines from Chekhov in the book seems to coming out fluent, and well rehearsed. It is quite possible that if another woman with an affair with Chekhov might have ended up writing the same lines.

It's a quick read not to judge Chekhov but to listen to Lydia, and what she went through because of the hope she had in love.

Love

Monday, December 4, 2017

The Nineteen by Alexander Fadeyev

My readings have become more infrequent and it's becoming a bit difficult to catch with the books I started some 2 months back. Didn't really pick up anything recently.

Given that this was a relatively smaller book (about 180 Pages) this was supposed to be a quick read but took almost 2 months.

Anyways, this is definitely a great read for anybody who is or is not interested in Russian literature.

The book revolves around the difficulties, and circumstances of gorilla revolutionary.

It is difficult to be a leader but it is more difficult to take decisions which may not be of liking for everybody who get affected by these decisions. The bigger problem is that a lot of times it is not humanly possible to gauge the affect of your decisions in advance. Once you're in soup than only you know how hot it is.

But this has life been all about. You make decisions, hope it to turn out well, and if it doesn't you've to make another choice.

War is not good but a lot of times even if you don't choose war, others choose it for you. And you're left with the option either to stay low, and perish or face it irrespective of where it leads to.

Peace