Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchsimply of Wilhelm, but of the centre of the solar system, it ought tohave been shown to Demange. All sorts of guesses were made as tothe contents of this letter, the most impossible stories circulated.Dreyfus was an officer, the military were suspect; Dreyfus was a Jew,the Jews were suspect. People began talking about militarism, aboutthe Jews. Such utterly disreputable people as Drumont held up theirheads; little by little they stirred up a regular pother on a substratumof anti-semitism, on a substratum that smelt of the shambles. Whensomething is wrong with us we look for the causes outside ourselves,and readily find them. “It’s the Frenchman’s nastiness, it’s theJews’, it’s Wilhelm’s.” Capital, brimstone, the freemasons, the Syndicate,the Jesuits—they are all bogeys, but how they relieve ouruneasiness! They are of course a bad sign. Since the French havebegun talking about the Jews, about the Syndicate, it shows they arefeeling uncomfortable, that there is a worm gnawing at them, thatthey feel the need of these bogeys to soothe their over-excited conscience.Then this Esterhazy, a duellist, in the style of Turgenev’s duellists,an insolent ruffian, who had long been an object of suspicion, andwas not respected by his comrades; the striking resemblance of hishandwriting with that of the bordereau, the Uhlan’s letters, his threatswhich for some reason he does not carry out; finally the judgment,utterly mysterious, strangely deciding that the bordereau was writtenin Esterhazy’s handwriting but not by his hand! … And the gashas been continually accumulating, there has come to be a feelingof acute tension, of overwhelming oppression. The fighting in thecourt was a purely nervous manifestation, simply the hysterical resultof that tension, and Zola’s letter and his trial are a manifestationof the same kind. What would you have? The best people, always inadvance of the nation, were bound to be the first to raise an agitation—andso it has been. The first to speak was Scherer-Kestner, ofwhom Frenchmen who know him intimately (according toKovalevsky) say that he is a “sword-blade,” so spotless and withoutblemish is he. The second is Zola, and now he is being tried.Yes, Zola is not Voltaire, and we are none of us Voltaires, but thereare in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that weare not Voltaires is least of all appropriate. Think of Korolenko,360