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 amicitia. 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. . . .
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. They do not make a row because of a hammer or a lost piece of India-rubber. . . . They forgive noise and cold and dried-up meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.
2. They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye doesn’t see. . . .
3. They respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts.
4. They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower position in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose, they behave in the street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler comrades. They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than talk.
5. They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood” or “I have become second rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false. . . .
6. They have not shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities. . . . If they do a pennyworth they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred rubles’ worth, and do not brag of having entry where others are not admitted. . . . The truly talented always keep in obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement. . . .
7. If they have talent they respect it. They sacrifice to it rest, women, wine, vanity. . . .
8. They develop aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and en-noble the sexual instinct. What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow. . . . They want, especially if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood. . . .
And so on. This is what cultured people are like. In order to be cultured and not to stand below the level of your surroundings it is not enough to have read “The Pickwick Papers” and learn a monologue from “Faust.”
What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will. . . . You must drop your vanity, you are not a child . . . you will soon be thirty. It is time!
I expect you. . . . We all expect you.
The letter to Alexander (January 2, 1889) is less a set piece, and more disturbingly immediate and intimate (it followed a visit by Chekhov to St. Petersburg, where Alexander lived):
I was seriously angry at you. . . . I was repelled by your shocking, completely unprecedented treatment of Natalia Alexandrovna [Natalia Golden, Alexander’s second common-law wife] and the cook. Forgive me please, but treating women like that, no matter who they are, is unworthy of a decent, loving human being. What heavenly or earthly power has given you the right to make them your slaves? Constant profanity of the most vile variety, a raised voice, reproaches, sudden whims at breakfast and dinner, eternal complaints about a life of forced and loathsome labor—isn’t all that an expression of blatant despotism? No matter how insignificant or guilty a woman may be, no matter how close she is to you, you have no right to sit around without pants in her presence, be drunk in her presence, utter words even factory workers don’t use when they see women nearby. . . . A man who is well bred and really loving will not permit himself to be seen without his pants by the maid or yell, “Katka, let me have the pisspot!” at the top of his lungs. . . .
Children are sacred and pure. Even thieves and crocodiles place them among the ranks of the angels. . . . You cannot with impunity use filthy language in their presence, insult your servants, or snarl at Natalia Alexandrovna: “Will you get the hell away from me! I’m not holding you here!” You must not make them the plaything of your moods, tenderly kissing them one minute and frenziedly stamping at them the next. It’s better not to love at all than to love with a despotic love. . . . You shouldn’t take the names of your children in vain, yet you have the habit of calling every kopeck you give or want to give to someone “money taken from the children.” . . . You really have to lack respect for your children or their sanctity to be able to say—when you are well fed, well dressed and tipsy every day—that all your salary goes for the children. Stop it.
Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother’s youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it’s sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool. There is no way Father can forgive himself all that now. . . .
Natalia Alexandrovna, the cook, and the children are weak and defenseless. They have no rights over you, while you have the right to throw them out the door at any moment and have a good laugh at their weakness if you so desire. Don’t let them feel that right of yours.
Anton Chekhov was a younger brother, but he writes here with the calm superiority of a firstborn. He himself has acquired the culture that Nikolai lacks; he does not sit around the house in his underwear and yell for the pisspot. The letters remind us of someone: of von Koren, in “The Duel.” They are like notes for the speeches von Koren will make about Laevsky’s hopelessness. But the priggish von Koren is not the hero of “The Duel” (as his predecessor, the priggish Dr. Lvov, is not the hero of Ivanov). Not being an actual firstborn, Chekhov evidently never felt comfortable in the firstborn’s posture of superiority, and expressed his dislike of the censorious side of himself by stacking the deck against his fictional representations of it: von Koren and Lvov are “right,” but there is something the matter with them; they are cold fish. Chekhov, in his relationship with his older brothers, brings to mind the biblical Joseph. Chekhov’s “sourceless maturity”—like Joseph’s—may well have developed during his enforced separation from the family. And like Joseph, who wept when he saw his brothers again, in spite of their unspeakable treatment of him, Chekhov’s love for his big brothers transcended his anger with them; he evidently never entirely shed his little brother’s idealization of them. Out of this family dynamic developed the weak, lovable figure who recurs throughout Chekhov’s writing and is one of its signatures. Vladimir Nabokov saw encapsulated in this figure the values lost when Russia became a totalitarian state. In Nabokov’s view (put forward in his Wellesley and Cornell lectures in the 1940s and ’50s, and collected in Lectures on Russian Literature), the Chekhov hero—“a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad and cannot exist in the Russia of the Soviets”— “combine[s] the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action. . . . Knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good.” The émigré Nabokov goes on to write, “Blessed be the country that could produce that particular type of man. . . . [The] mere fact of such men having lived and probably still living somewhere somehow in the ruthless and sordid Russia of today is a promise of better things to come for the world at large— for perhaps the most admirable among the admirable laws of Nature is the survival of the weakest.”