My little Zabelin,
I’ve been told that you have taken offense at gibes Schechtel and I have been making.
Franz Schechtel, the architect and artist, had been a classmate of Nikolay’s at art school and became a good friend to Anton. But who told Nikolay about the gibes and who told Anton about Nikolay’s having been offended?
The faculty of taking offense is the property of noble souls alone, but even so, if it is all right to laugh at Ivanenko, me, Mishka and Nelly, then why is it wrong to laugh at you? It’s unfair…. However, if you’re not joking and really do feel you’ve been offended, I hasten to apologize.
People only laugh at what’s funny or what they don’t understand…. Take your choice. The latter of course is more flattering, but—alas!—to me, for one, you’re no riddle. It’s not hard to understand someone with whom you’ve shared the delights of Tatar caps, Voutsina, Latin and, finally, life in Moscow. And besides, your life is psychologically so uncomplicated that even a nonseminarian could understand it. Out of respect for you let me be frank. You’re angry, offended… but it’s not because of my gibes or of that good-natured chatterbox Dolgov. The fact of the matter is that you’re a decent person and you realize that you’re living a lie. And, whenever a person feels guilty, he always looks outside himself for vindication: the drunk blames his troubles [on his grief], Putyata blames the censors, the man who bolts from Yakimanka Street [where the Chekhovs were living] with lecherous intent blames the cold in the living room or gibes, and so on. If I were to abandon the family to the whims of fate, I would try to find myself an excuse in Mother’s character or my blood spitting or the like.
What’s that? Evgenia Chekhova was sacred territory. What excuse would there be in their mother’s character? Chekhov never ever said. But he wouldn’t let Nikolay blame their mother; she was Anton’s mother, too! And he couldn’t let Nikolay have the tuberculosis excuse, as he himself had it. Those were ready-made excuses, “lies,” and if Anton cut Nikolay off from those, his brother was going to have to turn back and look at himself. Doing so would reveal to him where the remedy was.
[…] You’re no riddle to me, and it is also true that you can be wildly ridiculous. You’re nothing but an ordinary mortal, and we mortals are enigmatic only when we’re stupid, and we’re ridiculous forty-eight weeks a year. Isn’t that so?11
How does one effectively argue with a sibling, talk him out of self-pity and back to decency? I don’t know of a better example than Chekhov’s:
You have often complained to me that people “don’t understand you”! Goethe and Newton did not complain of that…. Only Christ complained of it, but He was speaking of His doctrine and not of Himself…. People understand you perfectly well. And if you do not understand yourself, it is not their fault.
Chekhov was trying to shake Nikolay from his position of self-pity and egotism. He compared him to great men, with whom Nikolay would not have dreamed of comparing himself, and he aligned him with Jesus and then radically distinguished them.
Chekhov was not writing for an audience. He was writing to one absolutely particular person in the world, someone he knew better than he knew anyone else:
I assure you as a brother and as a friend I understand you and feel for you with all my heart. I know your good qualities as I know my five fingers; I value and deeply respect them. If you like, to prove that I understand you, I can enumerate those qualities. I think you are kind to the point of softness, magnanimous, unselfish, ready to share your last farthing; you have no envy nor hatred; you are simple-hearted, you pity men and beasts; you are trustful, without spite or guile, and do not remember evil….
We’ll pause here with Chekhov’s latest ellipsis. He needed Nikolay to respect himself, to appreciate himself. He needed Nikolay to trust that he saw him clearly, that he saw the best in him. His approach was through generosity, sympathy, forgiveness. And then he sprang on us (eavesdroppers!) and on Nikolay the responsibility Nikolay bore:
You have a gift from above such as other people have not: you have talent. This talent places you above millions of men, for on earth only one out of two millions is an artist. Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.
Nice touch with the toad and the Taganrog tarantula! Nikolay had something precious that needed to continue to be cultivated. Did Anton at this point foresee that his own talent in literature was the gift he would cultivate? As acts of generosity to his fellow humans, medicine fit the bill. Dr. John Coope observes that Chekhov “sometimes treats his medical work as self-evidently valuable whilst his literature was done out of self-indulgence, or justified by bringing him in an income.”12 But Chekhov’s medical talent was not one in two million. And so far, Chekhov’s literary talent has shown itself as rare as perhaps one in two billion.
You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That is your utter lack of culture. Forgive me, please, but veritas magis amicitiae [truth is a better friend]…. You see, life has its conditions. In order to feel comfortable among educated people, to be at home and happy with them, one must be cultured to a certain extent. Talent has brought you into such a circle, you belong to it, but… you are drawn away from it, and you vacillate between cultured people and the lodgers vis-a-vis. It’s the bourgeois side of you coming out, the side raised on birch thrashings beside the wine cellar and handouts, and it’s hard to overcome, terribly hard.13
That is, it was their father’s side, those “birch thrashings,” that had developed Nikolay’s worst tendencies. Did Anton hate their father so much he preferred not naming him? In writing intimately to his brother, who suffered the abuse alongside him, he could refer to the events about which they and Alexander would wince. Chekhov was working like mad to ensure that such shame didn’t return.
But how is one to be a decent person? Chekhov, whom I love as a literary artist for seeming not to give us lessons, for describing irreducible situations from which there does not seem to be a solution, had, like a doctor rather than a writer, a remedy for Nikolay:
Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions:
1. They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others.
This is what Anton had striven to attain and maintain—and his brother could not call him out on this because he and his family and friends knew it was true of him. What recent specific incidents did Anton have in mind in regard to Nikolay?
They do not make a row because of a hammer or a lost piece of India-rubber; if they live with anyone they do not regard it as a favor and, going away, they do not say “nobody can live with you.”
So we know that Nikolay did all that. What he couldn’t do was what Anton and the rest of the family could do:
They forgive noise and cold and dried-up meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.
Like bystanders in a restaurant or on a train (only less innocent as we have sidled right next to them on purpose), we know more than we have a right to know about the conditions in the Chekhov household. We know Nikolay had lost his temper over trifles; we know he had blamed his family rather than himself for the atmosphere in the apartment; we know what Anton himself had had to bear and forgive.
2. They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye does not see.14 If for instance, Pyotr knows that his father and mother are turning gray and losing sleep over seeing their Pyotr so rarely (and seeing him drunk when he does turn up), then he rushes home to them and sends his vodka to the devil. They do not sleep nights the better to help the Polevayevs, help pay their brothers’ tuition, and keep their mother decently dressed.