fiction, not fact.

Andrea Barrett, from Dust and Light:

Here’s a passage from a letter Anton Chekhov wrote on December 9, 1890, to his friend Alexi Suvorin, describing his journey back from Sakhalin:

When we left Hong Kong the ship began to roll. The vessel was empty and made thirty-eight-degree swings, so we were afraid it would capsize. I am not prone to seasickness—that discovery came as a pleasant surprise. On the way to Singapore the bodies of two people were thrown into the sea. When you see a dead man wrapped in sailcloth fly twisting into the water, and when you recall that it is several versts to the bottom, a terrifying feeling comes over you and you are suddenly gripped by the thought that you too will die and be thrown into the sea.

There’s nothing there about how, from this little seed, Chekhov made his beautiful story “Gusev.” In that, Gusev, a poor and ignorant discharged soldier dying of tuberculosis, is confined to the hospital cabin on a ship returning from the Far East. He’s dreaming, remembering, thinking about his home, his brother, his brother’s children, his early life. Pavel Ivanovich, in the hammock next to him, meanwhile complains bitterly about the condition of soldiers and sailors, the injustices of their entire world. Another of their companions dies while playing cards. Pavel Ivanovich complains some more. But Gusev, by then, “was looking at the little window and was not listening. A boat was swaying on the transparent, soft, turquoise water all bathed in hot, dazzling sunshine. In it there were naked Chinamen holding up cages with canaries and calling out, ‘It sings, it sings!'”

A few more days pass. Gusev continues to remember his life; Pavel Ivanovich dies. Before long Gusev dies as well. The story, in another writer’s hands, might have ended there. But instead Chekhov recounts how Gusev is sewn up in sailcoth, so that “he looked like a carrot or a radish,” and slid into the sea—where in a passage of great beauty, he sinks down through shoals of fish, becomes a plaything for a curious shark, and continues his journey to the bottom even as, overhead, “The sky turned a soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colors for which it is hard to find a name in human speech.”

Fiction, not fact; the story turns on the tone, the language, the miraculous shift in point of view until we’ve left everything human behind and the ocean scowls at the radiant sky. Reading Chekhov’s letter couldn’t teach me how that magic happened, but it taught me that the story had a seed; that a “real” writer might use in his work something he had seen and felt, and that it might be transformed. I don’t so much want to know the details of the transformative process—actually, I do want to know them, but by now I understand that that’s just nosiness, and that the details won’t apply to me—but I want to know that the process by which material is transformed into art happens to others. That the transformation is possible.