Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
have not enough passion and therefore not enough talent. The fire burns in
me slowly and evenly, without suddenly spluttering and flaring up, and this
is why it does not happen to me to write three or four signatures a night,
or to be so carried away by work as to prevent myself from going to bed if
I am sleepy; this is why I commit no particular follies nor do anything
particularly wise.
I am afraid that in this respect I resemble Gontcharov, whom I don’t like,
who is ten heads taller than I am in talent. I have not enough passion; add
to that this sort of lunacy: for the last two years I have for no reason at
all ceased to care about seeing my work in print, have become indifferent
to reviews, to literary conversations, to gossip, to success and failure,
to good pay--in short, I have gone downright silly. There is a sort of
stagnation in my soul. I explain it by the stagnation in my personal life.
I am not disappointed, I am not tired, I am not depressed, but simply
everything has suddenly become less interesting. I must do something to
rouse myself.
May 7.
I have read Bourget’s “Disciple” in the Russian translation. This is how it
strikes me. Bourget is a gifted, very intelligent and cultured man. He is
as thoroughly acquainted with the method of the natural sciences, and as
imbued with it as though he had taken a good degree in science or medicine.
He is not a stranger in the domain he proposes to deal with--a merit
absent in Russian writers both new and old.
... The novel is interesting. I have read it and understand why you were so
absorbed by it. It is clever, interesting, in places witty, somewhat
fantastic. As to its defects, the chief of them is his pretentious crusade
against materialism. Forgive me, but I can’t understand such crusades. They
never lead to anything and only bring needless confusion into people’s
thoughts. Whom is the crusade against, and what is its object? Where is the
enemy and what is there dangerous about him? In the first place, the
materialistic movement is not a school or tendency in the narrow
journalistic sense; it is not something passing or accidental; it is
necessary, inevitable, and beyond the power of man. All that lives on earth
is bound to be materialistic. In animals, in savages, in Moscow merchants,
all that is higher and non-animal is conditioned by an unconscious
instinct, while all the rest is material, and they of course cannot help
it. Beings of a higher order, thinking men, are also bound to be
materialists. They seek for truth in matter, for there is nowhere else to
seek for it, since they see, hear, and sense matter alone. Of necessity
they can only seek for truth where their microscopes, lancets, and knives
are of use to them. To forbid a man to follow the materialistic line of
thought is equivalent to forbidding him to seek truth. Outside matter there
is neither knowledge nor experience, and consequently there is no truth....
I think that when dissecting a corpse, the most inveterate spiritualist
will be bound to ask himself, “Where is the soul here?” And if one knows
how great is the likeness between bodily and mental diseases, and that both
are treated by the same remedies, one cannot help refusing to separate the
soul from the body.
... To speak of the danger and harm of materialism, and even more to fight
against it, is, to say the least, premature. We have not enough data to
draw up an indictment. There are many theories and suppositions, but no
facts.... The priests complain of unbelief, immorality, and so on. There is
no unbelief. People believe in something, whatever it may be....
As to immorality, it is not people like Mendeleyev but poets, abbots, and
personages regularly attending Embassy churches, who have the reputation of
being perverted debauchees, libertines, and drunkards.
In short, I cannot understand Bourget’s crusade. If, in starting upon it,
he had at the same time taken the trouble to point out to the materialists
an incorporeal God in the sky, and to point to Him in such a way that they
should see Him, that would be another matter, and I should understand what
he is driving at.
May 14, 1889.
... You want to know if the lady doctor hates you as before. Alas! she has
grown stouter and much more resigned, which I do not like at all. There are
not many women doctors left on earth. They are disappearing and dying out
like the branches in the Byelovyezhsky forest. Some die of consumption,
others become mystics, some marry widowed squadron-commanders, some still
try to stand firm, but are obviously losing heart. Probably the first
tailors and the first astrologers also died out rapidly. Life is hard on
those who have the temerity first to enter upon an unknown path. The
vanguard always has a bad time of it.
May 15, 1889.
If you have not gone abroad yet, I will answer your letter about
Bourget.... You are speaking of the “right to live” of this or that branch
of knowledge; I am speaking of peace, not of rights. I want people not to
see war where there is none. Different branches of knowledge have always
lived together in peace. Anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble
descent; they have the same purpose and the same enemy--the devil--and
there is absolutely nothing for them to fight about. There is no struggle
for existence between them. If a man knows about the circulation of the
blood, he is rich; if he also learns the history of religion and the song
“I remember a marvellous moment,” he becomes richer, not poorer--that is to
say, we are concerned with pluses alone. This is why geniuses have never
fought, and in Goethe the poet lived amicably side by side with the
scientist.
It is not branches of knowledge such as poetry and anatomy, but
errors--that is to say, men--that fight with one another. When a man fails
to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the
cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself--hence the
war with what he does not understand. In the middle ages alchemy was
gradually in a natural, peaceful way changing into chemistry, and astrology
into astronomy; the monks did not understand, saw a conflict and fought
against it. Just such a belligerent Spanish monk was our Pisarev in the
sixties.
Bourget, too, is fighting. You say he is not, and I say he is. Imagine his
novel falling into the hands of a man whose children are studying in the
faculty of science, or of a bishop who is looking for a subject for his
Sunday sermon. Will the effect be anything like peace? It will not. Or
imagine the novel catching the eye of an anatomist or a physiologist, or
any such. It will not breathe peace into anyone’s soul; it will irritate
those who know and give false ideas to those who don’t.
TO A. N. PLESHTCHEYEV.
MOSCOW,
September 30, 1889.
... I do not think I ought to change the title of the story. [Footnote: “A
Dreary Story.”] The wags who will, as you foretell, make jokes about “A
Dreary Story,” are so dull that one need not fear them; and if someone
makes a good joke I shall be glad to have given him the occasion for it.
The professor could not write about Katya’s husband because he did not know
him, and Katya does not say anything about him; besides, one of my hero’s
chief characteristics is that he cares far too little about the inner life
of those who surround him, and while people around him are weeping, making
mistakes, telling lies, he calmly talks about the theatre or literature.
Were he a different sort of man, Liza and Katya might not have come to
grief.
October, 1889.
I am afraid of those who look for a tendency between the lines, and who are
determined to regard me either as a liberal or as a conservative. I am not
a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a
monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing
more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate
lying and violence in all their forms, and am equally repelled by the
secretaries of consistories and by Notovitch and Gradovsky. Pharisaism,
stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I
see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation.... That is
why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for
scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard
trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human
body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most
absolute freedom--freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may
take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.
MOSCOW,
February 15, 1890.
I answer you, dear Alexey Nikolaevitch, at once on receiving your letter.
It was your name-day, and I forgot it!! Forgive me, dear friend, and accept
my belated congratulations.
Did you really not like the “Kreutzer Sonata”? I don’t say it is a work of
genius for all time, of that I am no judge; but to my thinking, among the
mass of all that is written now, here and abroad, one scarcely could find
anything else as powerful both in the gravity of its conception and the
beauty of its execution. To say nothing of its artistic merits, which in
places are striking, one must be grateful to the novel, if only because it
is keenly stimulating to thought. As one reads it, one can scarcely refrain
from crying out: “That’s true,” or “That’s absurd.” It is true it has some
very annoying defects. Apart from all those you enumerate, it has one for
which one cannot readily forgive the author--that is, the audacity with
which Tolstoy holds forth about what he doesn’t know and is too obstinate
to care to understand. Thus his statements about syphilis, foundling
hospitals, the aversion of women for the sexual relation, and so on, are
not merely open to dispute, but show him up as an ignoramus who has not, in
the course of his long life, taken the trouble to read two or three books
written by specialists. But yet these defects fly away like feathers in the
wind; one simply does not notice them in face of the real worth of the
story, or, if one notices them, it is only with a little vexation that the
story has not escaped the fate of all the works of man, all imperfect and
never free from blemish.
My Petersburg friends and acquaintances are angry with me? What for? For
my not having bored them enough with my presence, which has for so long
been a bore to myself! Soothe their minds. Tell them that in Petersburg
I ate a great many dinners and a great many suppers, but did not fascinate
one lady; that every day I was confident of leaving by the evening train,
that I was detained by my friends and by _The Marine Almanack_, the
whole of which I had to look through from the year 1852. While I was in
Petersburg, I got through in one month more than my young friends would in
a year. Let them be angry, though!
* * * * *
I sit all day long reading and making extracts. I have nothing in my head
or on paper except Sahalin. Mental obsession. Mania Sachalinosa.
Not long ago I dined with Madame Yermolov. [Translator’s Note: The
celebrated actress.] A wild-flower thrust into the same nosegay with the
carnation was the more fragrant for the good company it had kept. So I,
after dining with the star, was aware of a halo round my head for two days
afterwards ...
Good-bye, my dear friend; come and see us....
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MOSCOW,
February 23, 1890.
... My brother Alexandr is a slow-witted creature; he is enthusiastic over
Ornatsky’s missionary speech, in which he says that the natives do not
become Christians because they are waiting for a special ukaz (that is,