Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

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Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchGod, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on.The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, throughevery line’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel,besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivatesyou. And we? We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that—nothingat all …. Flog us and we can do no more! We have neither immediatenor remote aims, and in our soul there is a great empty space.We have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we have noGod, we are not afraid of ghosts, and I personally am not afraideven of death and blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes fornothing, and fears nothing, cannot be an artist. Whether it is adisease or not—what it is does not matter; but we ought to recognizethat our position is worse than a governor’s. I don’t know howit will be with us in ten or twenty years—then circumstances maybe different, but meanwhile it would be rash to expect of us anythingof real value, apart from the question whether we have talentor not. We write mechanically, merely obeying the long-establishedarrangement in accordance with which some men go into the governmentservice, others into trade, others write …. Grigorovitchand you think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not toconceal from myself my disease, and not to deceive myself, and notto cover up my own emptiness with other people’s rags, such as theideas of the sixties, and so on. I am not going to throw myself likeGarshin over the banisters, but I am not going to flatter myself withhopes of a better future either. I am not to blame for my disease,and it’s not for me to cure myself, for this disease, it must be supposed,has some good purpose hidden from us, and is not sent invain ….316
Anton ChekhovFebruary, 1893.My God! What a glorious thing “Fathers and Children” is! It ispositively terrifying. Bazarov’s illness is so powerfully done that Ifelt ill and had a sensation as though I had caught the infectionfrom him. And the end of Bazarov? And the old men? And Kukshina?It’s beyond words. It’s simply a work of genius. I don’t like the wholeof “On the Eve,” only Elena’s father and the end. The end is full oftragedy. “The Dog” is very good, the language is wonderful in it.Please read it if you have forgotten it. “Acia” is charming, “A QuietBackwater” is too compressed and not satisfactory. I don’t like“Smoke” at all. “The House of Gentlefolk” is weaker than “Fathersand Children,” but the end is like a miracle, too. Except for the oldwoman in “Fathers and Children”—that is, Bazarov’s mother—andthe mothers as a rule, especially the society ladies, who are, however,all alike (Liza’s mother, Elena’s mother), and Lavretsky’s mother,who had been a serf, and the humble peasant woman, all Turgenev’sgirls and women are insufferable in their artificiality, and—forgivemy saying it—falsity. Liza and Elena are not Russian girls, but somesort of Pythian prophetesses, full of extravagant pretensions. Irinain “Smoke,” Madame Odintsov in “Fathers and Children,” all thelionesses, in fact, fiery, alluring, insatiable creatures for ever cravingfor something, are all nonsensical. When one thinks of Tolstoy’s“Anna Karenin,” all these young ladies of Turgenev’s, with their seductiveshoulders, fade away into nothing. The negative types ofwomen where Turgenev is slightly caricaturing (Kukshina) or jesting(the descriptions of balls) are wonderfully drawn, and so successful,that, as the saying is, you can’t pick a hole in it.The descriptions of nature are fine, but … I feel that we havealready got out of the way of such descriptions and that we needsomething different ….317
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