Turgenev understood the flow state

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children, trans. Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater (New York: New York Review Books, 2022).

Compare Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990):

The safest generalization to make … is to say that during the flow experience the sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute convention of the clock.

And:

Most flow activities do not depend on clock time; like baseball, they have their own pace, their own sequences of events marking transitions from one state to another without regard to equal intervals of duration. It is not clear whether this dimension of flow is just an epiphenomenon — a by-product of the intense concentration required for the activity at hand — or whether it is something that contributes in its own right to the positive quality of the experience. Although it seems likely that losing track of the clock is not one of the major elements of enjoyment, freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement.

Flow states aside, I highly recommend Fathers and Children. Great social satire — like a Jane Austen novel if Jane Austen had written about nihilists. And it so happens that Maya Slater’s fiction is Austen-centric.

Two more Csikszentmihalyi posts
Boredom and attention : “The flow of the mind”