Skabichevsky's initial comment on Chekhov's more serious work was that this writer was a mindless literary clown who would eventually die in the gutter, forgotten by everyone. Skabichevsky lived long enough to witness Chekhov's later popularity and the general acceptance of his work; he accordingly toned down his hostility, especially when the impact of Chekhov's views had been neutralized by his being represented by the reductionist critics as the elegiac bard of a vanishing social order. But Mikhailovsky, the most popular and influential critic of the period, staked his entire literary reputation on discrediting Chekhov in the eyes of enlightened and liberal readers; his failure to achieve this goal was the most momentous failure of the entire tradition he represented, and it was this failure that probably opened the door for the eventual liberation of Russian literature from utilitarian dictatorship during the Symbolist and Futurist periods. It is typical of Chekhov's personality that he managed to maintain cordial personal relations with Mikhailovsky and even nominated him for election to the Russian Imperial Academy. In an age when the views of Nikolai Mikhailovsky represented for the majority of thinking Russians the ultimate in literary wisdom (this is perceptively stressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in several episodes in August 1914) it was Chekhov who, in the course of a conversation with a young radical student, formulated the truest possible characterization of this critic: "Mikhailovsky is an important sociologist and a failed critic; by his very nature he is incapable of understanding what imaginative literature is."
Mikhailovsky's stubborn rejection of Chekhov, his refusal to recognize that there was a humanitarian side to Chekhov's literary art, is usually regarded in Chekhov scholarship as a grotesque failure of literary taste, especially since Mikhailovsky was later to acclaim Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreyev as being socially aware in ways that Chekhov for him was not. Yet perhaps in sticking to his guns to the last Mikhailovsky showed more honesty and more perception of Chekhov's true significance than did his successors of the turn of the century, who preferred to love a mournful and despondent Chekhov created in their own image rather than face the full implications of what Chekhov actually represented. For, in his own quiet and gentle way, Chekhov is one of the most profoundly subversive writers who ever lived. He is as subversive of the sociological presuppositions of a Russian Populist such as Mikhailovsky as of the Christian mysticism of a Lev Shestov, whose widely circulated essay on Chekhov draws heavily on Mikhailovsky's earlier articles and cites some of the same examples to indict Chekhov from a position of Christian metaphysics.
The letters in the present volume provide numerous examples of the ways in which Chekhov's adherence to his "holy of holies . . . the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and from lies" (Letter 23) could undercut the fundamental assumptions of the Russian Empire, its dissident critics and, in fact, the very basis of Western Judeo-Christian civilization. In this respect the letters themselves are eloquent enough. However, in order to point out the essential affinity between the views expressed in the letters and Chekhov's stories and plays, it might be worthwhile to concentrate for a moment on the reflection in his creative writing of the three spheres of human activity which have always supposedly been safer to practice than to discuss: religion, politics and sex. Twentieth- century thinkers, such as Aldous Huxley in The Devils of Loudun and H. Rattray Taylor in Sex and History, have convincingly demonstrated that the basic human impulse from which religious, political and sexual activities all spring is often one and the same, and they have gone a long way toward explaining why repression in any one of these areas inevitably leads to repression in the other two. A study of the various forms of censorship exercised over Russian literature for the past two centuries should convince anyone that every curtailment of political expression and every liberalization is sure to be followed or accompanied by a corresponding increase or decrease of freedom in dealing with religious and sexual topics as well.
"Between the statements 'God exists' and There is no God' lies a whole vast field, which a true sage crosses with difficulty. But a Russian usually knows only one of these two extremes; what lies between them is of no interest to him and he usually knows nothing or very little." This maxim is to be found in Anton Chekhov's private notebooks not once, but several times. The tyrannical and pharisaic religious upbringing which Chekhov's father forced on his children resulted in a loss of faith by every single one of them once they became adults. While Anton did not turn into the kind of militant atheist that his older brother Alexander eventually became, there is no doubt that he was a nonbeliever in the last decades of his life. But his early religious upbringing never quite left him and it is very much in evidence both in his correspondence (with its frequent quotations from the Bible and from Orthodox prayers and its lapses into an ecclesiastical Old Church Slavic style for purposes of either solemnity or irony) and in the religious themes of many of his short stories. The Russian clergy appear in Chekhov's stories as frequently as do other social groups. In this Chekhov differs markedly from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who, for all their preoccupation with religion, never thought of making an Orthodox priest, deacon or monk a central character in a work of fiction as Chekhov did in "The Bishop," "On Easter Eve," "Saintly Simplicity," "A Nightmare" and so many other stories. Most of these men of the Church are presented as full-blooded human beings with their own joys and problems; but we also find in Chekhov an occasional mean, dehumanized cleric, such as the heartless priest who appears briefly toward the end of "In the Ravine" or the nasty and vicious one who provides the comic element in "It Was Not Fated."
Chekhov's own favorite among the hundreds of stories he wrote was "The Student," a very brief story that, in moving and utterly simple terms, states the case for the importance of religious traditions and religious experience for the continuation of civilization. In Chekhov's last prose masterpiece, "The Bishop," the churchman-hero, sustained by his faith, faces the prospect of his own death with understanding and dignity, whereas a man much closer to Chekhov's own spiritual outlook, the professor of medicine in "A Dreary Story," who has no faith to lean on, deteriorates and withdraws from the life around him. The religious solace sought and found by Sonya in Uncle Vanya and by Yulia in "Three Years" are depicted by Chekhov with the utmost sympathy and understanding. And it was the nonbeliever Chekhov who, in the character of Lipa in "In the Ravine," created one of the most persuasive portraits of a meek Christian saint in Russian literature, comparable only to the similar creation of another nonbeliever, Turgenev's Lukeria in "The Living Relic."