Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
cannot be represented like this:
[Transcriber’s note: The line graph in the print version depicts a wavy
horizontal “line” with minimal variation in the vertical direction. The
ASCII diagram below gives a rough approximation.]
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It is very unequal. Over-tired people never lose the capacity for becoming
extremely excited, but cannot keep it up for long, and each excitement is
followed by still greater apathy.... Graphically, it could be represented
like this:
[Transcriber’s note: The line graph in the print version depicts a series
of wavy horizontal segments punctuated by sharp “dips,” each horizontal
segment a little lower than the one before. The ASCII illustration below
gives a rough approximation.]
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The fall, as you see, is not continuous but broken. Sasha declares her love
and Ivanov cries out in ecstasy, “A new life!”--and next morning he
believes in this new life as little as he does in spooks (the monologue in
Act III.); his wife insults him, and, fearfully worked up and beside
himself with anger, he flings a cruel insult at her. He is called a
scoundrel. This is either fatal to his tottering brain, or stimulates him
to a fresh paroxysm and he pronounces sentence on himself.
Not to tire you out altogether I pass now to Dr. Lvov. He is the type of an
honest, straightforward, hotheaded, but narrow and uncompromising man.
Clever people say of such men: “He is stupid but his heart is in the right
place.” Anything like width of outlook or unreflecting feeling is foreign
to Lvov. He is the embodiment of a programme, a walking tendency. He looks
through a narrow frame at every person and event, he judges everything
according to preconceived notions. Those who shout, “Make way for honest
labour!” are an object of worship to him; those who do not shout it are
scoundrels and exploiters. There is no middle. He has been brought up on
Mihailov’s [Translator’s Note: The author of second-rate works inculcating
civic virtue with a revolutionary bias.] novels; at the theatre he has seen
on the stage “new men,” i.e., the exploiters and sons of our age, painted
by the modern playwrights. He has stored it all up, and so much so, that
when he reads “Rudin” he is sure to be asking himself, “Is Rudin a
scoundrel or not?” Literature and the stage have so educated him that he
approaches every character in real life and in fiction with this
question.... It is not enough for him that all men are sinners. He wants
saints and villains!
He was prejudiced before he came to the district. He at once classed all
the rich peasants as exploiters, and Ivanov, whom he could not understand,
as a scoundrel. Why, the man has a sick wife and he goes to see a rich lady
neighbour--of course he is a scoundrel! It is obvious that he is killing
his wife in order to marry an heiress.
Lvov is honest and straightforward, and he blurts out the truth without
sparing himself. If necessary, he will throw a bomb at a carriage, give a
school inspector a blow in the face, or call a man a scoundrel. He will not
stop at anything. He never feels remorse--it is his mission as “an honest
worker” to fight “the powers of darkness”!
Such people are useful, and are for the most part attractive. To caricature
them, even in the interests of the play, is unfair and, indeed,
unnecessary. True, a caricature is more striking, and therefore easier to
understand, but it is better to put your colour on too faint than too
strong.
Now about the women. What do they love Ivanov for? Sarra loves him because
he is a fine man, because he has enthusiasm, because he is brilliant and
speaks with as much heat as Lvov does (Act I., Scene 7). She loves him so
long as he is excited and interesting; but when he begins to grow misty in
her eyes, and to lose definiteness of outline, she ceases to understand
him, and at the end of Act III. speaks out plainly and sharply.
Sasha is a young woman of the newest type. She is well-educated,
intelligent, honest, and so on. In the realm of the blind a one-eyed man is
king, and so she favours Ivanov in spite of his being thirty-five. He is
better than anyone else. She knew him when she was a child and saw his work
close at hand, at the period before he was exhausted. He is a friend of her
father’s.
She is a female who is not won by the vivid plumage of the male, not by
their courage and dexterity, but by their complaints, whinings and
failures. She is the sort of girl who loves a man when he is going
downhill. The moment Ivanov loses heart the young lady is on the spot!
That’s just what she was waiting for. Just think of it, she now has such
a holy, such a grateful task before her! She will raise up the fallen
one, set him on his feet, make him happy.... It is not Ivanov she loves,
but this task. Argenton in Daudet’s book says, “Life is not a novel.”
Sasha does not know this. She does not know that for Ivanov love is only
a fresh complication, an extra stab in the back. And what comes of it?
She struggles with him for a whole year and, instead of being raised, he
sinks lower and lower.
... In my description of Ivanov there often occurs the word “Russian.”
Don’t be cross about it. When I was writing the play I had in mind only
the things that really matter--that is, only the typical Russian
characteristics. Thus the extreme excitability, the feeling of guilt, the
liability to become exhausted are purely Russian. Germans are never
excited, and that is why Germany knows nothing of disappointed,
superfluous, or over-tired people.... The excitability of the French is
always maintained at one and the same level, and makes no sudden bounds
or falls, and so a Frenchman is normally excited down to a decrepit old
age. In other words, the French do not have to waste their strength in
over-excitement; they spend their powers sensibly, and do not go bankrupt.
... Ivanov and Lvov appear to my imagination to be living people. I tell
you honestly, in all conscience, these men were born in my head, not by
accident, not out of sea foam, or preconceived “intellectual” ideas. They
are the result of observing and studying life. They stand in my brain, and
I feel that I have not falsified the truth nor exaggerated it a jot. If on
paper they have not come out clear and living, the fault is not in them but
in me, for not being able to express my thoughts. It shows it is too early
for me to begin writing plays.
* * * * *
January 7, 1889.
... I have been cherishing the bold dream of summing up all that has
hitherto been written about whining, miserable people, and with my Ivanov
saying the last word. It seemed to me that all Russian novelists and
playwrights were drawn to depict despondent men, but that they all wrote
instinctively, having no definite image or views on the subject. As far as
my design goes I was on the right track, but the execution is good for
nothing. I ought to have waited! I am glad I did not listen to Grigorovitch
two or three years ago, and write a novel! I can just imagine what a lot of
good material I should have spoiled. He says: “Talent and freshness
overcome everything.” It is more true to say that talent and freshness can
spoil a great deal. In addition to plenty of material and talent, one wants
something else which is no less important. One wants to be mature--that is
one thing; and for another the _feeling of personal freedom_ is
essential, and that feeling has only recently begun to develop in me. I
used not to have it before; its place was successfully filled by my
frivolity, carelessness, and lack of respect for my work.
What writers belonging to the upper class have received from nature for
nothing, plebeians acquire at the cost of their youth. Write a story of how
a young man, the son of a serf, who has served in a shop, sung in a choir,
been at a high school and a university, who has been brought up to respect
everyone of higher rank and position, to kiss priests’ hands, to reverence
other people’s ideas, to be thankful for every morsel of bread, who has
been many times whipped, who has trudged from one pupil to another without
goloshes, who has been used to fighting, and tormenting animals, who has
liked dining with his rich relations, and been hypocritical before God and
men from the mere consciousness of his own insignificance--write how this
young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking
one beautiful morning he feels that he has no longer a slave’s blood in his
veins but a real man’s....
March 5, 1889.
... Last night I drove out of town and listened to the gypsies. They sing
well, the wild creatures. Their singing reminds me of a train falling off a
high bank in a violent snow-storm: there is a lot of turmoil, screeching
and banging.
... I bought Dostoevsky in your shop and am now reading him. It is fine,
but very long and indiscreet. It is over-pretentious.
* * * * *
SUMY,
LINTVARYOVS’ ESTATE,
May, 1889.
... Among other things I am reading Gontcharov and wondering. I wonder how
I could have considered Gontcharov a first-rate writer. His “Oblomov” is
not really good. Oblomov himself is exaggerated and is not so striking as
to make it worth while to write a whole book about him. A flabby sluggard
like so many, a commonplace, petty nature without any complexity in it: to
raise this person to the rank of a social type is to make too much of him.
I ask myself, what would Oblomov be if he had not been a sluggard? And I
answer that he would not have been anything. And if so, let him snore in
peace. The other characters are trivial, with a flavour of Leikin about
them; they are taken at random, and are half unreal. They are not
characteristic of the epoch and give one nothing new. Stoltz does not
inspire me with any confidence. The author says he is a splendid fellow,
but I don’t believe him. He is a sly brute, who thinks very well of himself
and is very complacent. He is half unreal, and three-quarters on stilts.
Olga is unreal and is dragged in by the tail. And the chief trouble is that
the whole novel is cold, cold, cold. I scratch out Gontcharov from the list
of my demi-gods.
But how direct, how powerful is Gogol, and what an artist he is! His
“Marriage” alone is worth two hundred thousand roubles. It is simply
delicious, and that is all about it. He is the greatest of Russian writers.
In “The Inspector General” the first act is the best, in “The Marriage” the
third act is the worst. I am going to read it aloud to my people.
* * * * *
May 4, 1889.
... Nature is an excellent sedative. It pacifies--that is, it makes one
indifferent. And it is essential in this world to be indifferent. Only
those who are indifferent are able to see things clearly, to be just and to
work. Of course, I am only speaking of intelligent people of fine natures;
the empty and selfish are indifferent enough any way.
You say that I have grown lazy. That does not mean that I am now lazier
than I used to be. I work now as much as I did three or five years ago. To
work and to look as though I were working from nine in the morning till
dinner, and from evening tea till bedtime has become a habit with me, and
in that respect I am just like a government clerk. And if my work does not
produce two novels a month or an income of ten thousand, it is not my
laziness that is at fault, but my fundamental, psychological peculiarities.
I do not care enough for money to succeed in medicine, and for literature I