Melancholy and its Correctives: Flaubert, Chekhov, Tolstoy
It is not strange that our response to Chekhov or to Vermeer should have the character of nostalgia. What we reflect on is the image of that world we dreamed up perhaps when we were very young, when the idea of a moral life had already been imparted to us, and we had begun to envisage what it might be, but before we had grown used to the thought that it was a fiction to be left behind (…) What strikes us about Vermeer or Chekhov is the unobtrusive manner in which life’s passage is observed. When the voices that normally obtrude upon the world are silent–chief among them our own–we feel as though these voices had hung about the world like a veil, and that for once, it has been rent; these voices, and their erstwhile concerns, were idle, and had only dissuaded us from truth.
Adrian West considers the fundamental role of guilty conscience in the melancholic pleasures of fiction.