"I quite agree with you, Konstantin Ivanych," said Yulia Sergeyevna. "One writer describes a lovers' tryst, another describes infidelity, a third one —a reunion after separation. Can't they find any other subjects? There are, after all, many people who are ill, unhappy, worn out by poverty, who must be disgusted to have to read about such things."
Laptev was disturbed to hear his wife, a young woman of not quite twenty-two, speak of love so seriouslv and coldlv. He could guess why this was so.
"If poetry does not solve the problems that you consider important," said Yartsev, "why don't you try books on technology, on police and financial law or read scientific essavs? Whv should Romeo and Juliet have to deal with academic freedom or with sanitary conditions in prisons, instead of with love, when you can find any number of articles and handbooks 011 these other subjects?"
"But look here, you exaggerate!" Konstantin interrupted him. "We are not speaking of such giants as Shakespeare or Goethe. We speak of scores of talented and average writers who would be of much more use were they to leave love alone and take up indoctrinating the masses with knowledge and humanitarian ideas."
Some of the central issues of Russian intellectual history arc encapsulated in this brief dialogue. Konstantin's views 011 the uses of literature arc a minute summary of one of the basic theses of Peter Lavrov's Historical Letters (1870, final version 1891), which is perhaps the most representative, influential and widely read single document of Russian nineteenth- century anti-government dissent (it is available in English in a brilliantly idiomatic translation by James P. Scanlan, who has also contributed an illuminating introductory essay). Yulia's reasons for rejecting literature that deals with love (and, by implication, with other personal and psychological themes) are a simple-minded paraphrase of the reasons advanced by the Populist critics of Chekhov's time when they dismissed Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as socially irrelevant. Yartsev's mention of Shakespeare is a dodge, used repeatedly since Belinsky's time, to appeal to the prestige of recognized foreign classics in order to secure some freedom of expression for Russian literature. This dodge never worked, however: it was all very well for E. T. A. Hoffmann to write fantasies, because he was a foreign writer acknowledged throughout Western Europe, but a Russian writer, Vladimir Odoyevsky, who tried treating subjects similar to Hoffmann's, was condemned to literary death on the spot by Belinsky. Later on, in the 1870s, the defenders of Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Snow Maiden (it was attacked not for its insipid and mawkish poetry, but for bringing mythological creatures to the stage, which was contrary to the principles of realism) unsuccessfully cited the precedents of Shakespeare's The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream, but were told by the utilitarians that a man of Shakespeare's stature could permit himself a few aberrations; Shakespeare, after all, did not have the obligation to help the downtrodden Russian people which every Russian writer automatically had.
It was easy enough to see that the literary views of Russian radical utilitarians were primitive and simplistic. Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyev- sky all saw and said as much. But Chekhov saw more. He saw that the men whom most of his contemporaries considered champions of freedom and giants of literary criticism were not any kind of literary critics at all, and that this whole critical dynasty, with the possible exception of Belinsky, neither liked nor understood literature. While the entire Russian intelligentsia, save for its most reactionary segment, worshiped these critics and their tradition because of their opposition to the tsarist regime, Chekhov almost alone seemed to realize that men who fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means and who pursue their goals with ruthless and single-minded fanaticism are not likely to further the cause of freedom and bring about democracy in literature or in any other area. It took both courage and vision to discern this oppressive strain in the mainstream of Russian radical dissent, although even Chekhov could not foresee the catastrophic effect on twentieth-century Russian literature and its writers of the officially imposed revival of radical-utilitarian criteria and literary ethics in Soviet times (backed by state-supported judicial enforcement of these views).
Chekhov's quarrel with the presuppositions of his epoch was fought in subdued and civilized tones, without ranting and without proselytizing. He preferred his literary work to speak for itself and reserved his polemics for his private correspondence and for an occasional editorial article, published, as a rule, anonymously. His natural mode of expression was understatement rather than diatribe. In fact, he would again and again overestimate the perceptive powers of his reading audience and even of close personal friends and have to explain his views and intentions all over after having stated them precisely and clearly in a story or in a personal letter. The total misunderstanding of the meaning of the play Ivanov by many people closely associated with its production is only the most spectacular example of this sort of thing in Chekhov's correspondence. Chekhov's letters of the late 1880s are particularly rich in intellectual drama because he has to articulate his private ideas on the rights of the individual and of literature and on personal freedom to friends who in literary matters live and breathe the utilitarian traditions of their age, regardless of their social position or political orientation. The wealthy and mystical-minded society lady Maria Kiselyova, in objecting to "Mire" (Letter 9) used the same didactic-utilitarian approach that the liberal editor Vukol Lavrov was to take a few years later in condemning Chekhov's "lack of principles." Indeed, for all the political polarization in nineteenth-century Russian society, by Chekhov's time the demand that all literature be didactic and contain some instantly obvious and certifiably relevant social idea became the norm for everyone, moderates and conservatives included. In Chekhov's story "In the Landau," a snobbish aristocratic young army officer, who moves in circles close to the imperial court, offhandedly condemns Turgenev for not having written about "freedom of the press or about social consciousness." And, in real life, a committee of three liberal professors of literature who were asked in 1899 by the management of the government-owned Imperial Theaters to judge the suitability of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya for presentation in official theaters turned the play down, among other reasons, for its lack of social relevance.
As long as Chekhov published his humorous and satirical early stories in humor magazines, serious and influential critics could afford to ignore him. But in 1886-88, when his startlingly original, seriously conceived mature stories began to appear in the leading literary journals, an alarm was sounded. The structural originality of "Heartache," "Anyuta" and "The Steppe" was seen as an affront to Russian realism, a betrayal of the most cherished traditions of Turgenev, Grigorovich and the simplistically understood Gogol. Above all, Chekhov's eschewing of all easily paraphrasable social tendentiousness, his preference for dealing with social realities rather than with social theories, was seen as subversive to their cause by the entrenched utilitarians.
The principal keepers of the Belinskian-Chemyshevskian flame in the 1880s were the facile and prolific Populist hack Alexander Skabichevsky (1838-1910) and the more serious political thinker and journalist Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842-1904). Because of their doctrinaire differences with the Russian Marxists and with Lenin, these men are styled "Populist critics" in Soviet literary histories and reference books and are denied the adulation accorded their predecessors of the 1860s, who are now described as "Revolutionary Democrats." But in actual fact, Skabichevsky and, to a lesser degree, Mikhailovsky form an important bridge between the utilitarians of the sixties and Russian Marxist criticism, both before and after the October Revolution. Reading Skabichevsky's sarcastic articles on War and Peace and Anna Karenina, with their sneers at Tolstoy's lack of social awareness and purpose and their insistence that a few changes in the political system could instantly solve all of Anna's and Vronsky's emotional problems, today's Soviet readers should have an overwhelming sense of deja vu: this is exactly the tone, the method and the literary ethics of all those denunciatory articles that they have been reading for the last five decades about Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and so many others. And, since the main source of Soviet-Marxist aesthetics is Chernyshevsky and his various successors rather than anything Marx or Engels ever wrote, the similarities have logical and obvious causes.