In a recent issue of The New Yorker there’s a reprint of the lecture given by author Orhan Pamuk as he accepted the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. He makes some interesting points about life and literature, but there’s one sentence in the middle that stopped me. He wrote:

“I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with the same feeling of inauthenticity and Chekhovian provinciality, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, insecurity, and degradation as I do.”

I can accept the part about insecurity and degradation (although I hope Pamuk doesn’t feel too insecure and degraded – after all, he just won the Nobel Prize. I mean, think of the groupies.)

But the phrase about the majority of people on the earth feeling Chekhovian provinciality had me spilling my soup. I think I understand Chekhovian provinciality. The Russian playwright Chekov’s stage works, like “Three Sisters,” featured characters who lived out in the hinterland but pined for Moscow, dreaming that living in a great metropolis would satisfy their inner longing.

But does the majority of the earth’s population share this feeling? Does the Malaysian rice farmer, or the Spanish school teacher living in a small town, feel a deep sense of emptiness because they don’t live in a major population center? Do all those Americans who are camped in the suburbs wonder how full their life would be if they felt the heat of the metropole? Do the Brazilian tribesman long for the beat of Rio? I think not.

I’m probably being too literal. Perhaps Pamuk meant that the majority of people long for something they don’t have, something that seems far away. That’s certainly true. But I don’t think that longing translates into a feeling that can be called “Chekhovian provinciality.” I’m guessing that one only feels something so high-flown if one is reasonably privileged. If you’re struggling to keep fed – which the majority of the earth is – you’re not worrying about provinciality, Chekhovian or otherwise.