Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Anton ChekhovNovember, 1888.In the November number of the Syeverny Vyestnik there is an articleby the poet Merezhkovsky about your humble servant. It is along article. I commend to your attention the end of it; it is characteristic.Merezhkovsky is still very young, a student—of science Ibelieve. Those who have assimilated the wisdom of the scientificmethod and learned to think scientifically experience many alluringtemptations. Archimedes wanted to turn the earth round, and thepresent day hot-heads want by science to conceive the inconceivable,to discover the physical laws of creative art, to detect the lawsand the formulae which are instinctively felt by the artist and arefollowed by him in creating music, novels, pictures, etc. Such formulaeprobably exist in nature. We know that A, B, C, do, re, mi,fa, sol, are found in nature, and so are curves, straight lines, circles,squares, green, blue, and red …. We know that in certain combinationsall this produces a melody, or a poem or a picture, just assimple chemical substances in certain combinations produce a tree,or a stone, or the sea; but all we know is that the combination exists,while the law of it is hidden from us. Those who are masters of thescientific method feel in their souls that a piece of music and a treehave something in common, that both are built up in accordancewith equally uniform and simple laws. Hence the question: Whatare these laws? And hence the temptation to work out a physiologyof creative art (like Boborykin), or in the case of younger and morediffident writers, to base their arguments on nature and on the lawsof nature (Merezhkovsky). There probably is such a thing as thephysiology of creative art, but we must nip in the bud our dreams ofdiscovering it. If the critics take up a scientific attitude no good willcome of it: they will waste a dozen years, write a lot of rubbish,make the subject more obscure than ever—and nothing more. It isalways a good thing to think scientifically, but the trouble is thatscientific thinking about creative art will be bound to degenerate inthe end into searching for the “cells” or the “centres” which controlthe creative faculty. Some stolid German will discover these cellssomewhere in the occipital lobes, another German will agree withhim, a third will disagree, and a Russian will glance through the95