God knows what I would give to be in Babkino for a couple of days, says he, probably forgetting how bored he was the last few days there.
A. Chekhov
To MARIA KISELEVA
January 14, 1887, Moscow
Dear Maria Vladimirovna,
Your "Larka" is very nice; it has some roughness, but its con- ciseness and masculine style redeem it entirely. Since I don't want to set myself up as sole judge of your literary child, I am sending it to Suvorin, an extremely understanding person. I will send you his opinion in due course. And now permit me to dig into your criticism of me. Even your praise of my "On the Road" has not appeased the wrath I feel as an author, and I hasten to avenge myself for "Mire." Be careful and hold fast to your chair so as not to fall into a faint. Well, here goes.
Every critical article, even an unjustifiably abusive one, is customarily met with a silent nod—that is literary etiquette.
Khludova was a wealthy widow.
Answering is not admissible and those who do so are properly reproached for inordinate vanity. But since your criticism is, as you said, a sort of "conversation in the evening at Babkino, on the porch, or the terrace of the main house, with Ma-Pa,1 your dog Counterfeiter and Levitan present." And because you pass over the story's literary aspects and because you carry the ques- tion onto general ground, I am therefore not sinning against etiquette if I allow myself to continue our conversation.
Let me say first of all that I, even as you, do not like literature of the kind we are discussing. As a reader and a man on the street, I am inclined to shy away from it, but if you ask my honest and sincere opinion, I will tell you that the question of its right to exist is still a moot one and not decided by anyone. Neither you, nor I, nor all the world's critics have any reliable data on which to base their right to reject such literature. I do not know who is right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, the ancient classical writers generally, who were not afraid of bur- rowing in the "manure pile," but who were morally better balanced than we; or our contemporary writers, who are strait- laced on paper but coldly cynical in their souls and lives. I don't know who it is that has bad taste: the Greeks maybe, who were not ashamed to sing of love as it really exists in all the beauty of nature, or the readers of Gaboriau, Marlitt and Pierre Bobo.2 Like questions concerning non-resistance to evil, free will and so on, this one can only be decided in the future. \Ve can only make mention of it, but we can't settle it because it is outside the limits of our sphere of competence. Quoting chapter and verse from Turgenev and Tolstoy, who avoided the "ma- nure pile," does not clarify this question. Their fastidiousness does not demonstrate anything, for certainly even before their time there was a generation of writers who considered as beneath
Ma-Pa was a nickname of Maria Padovna, Chekhov's sister. He usually called her Masha.
Gaboriau, French writer of crime stores; Marlitt, pen-name of a German writer of popular novels; Bobo, nickname for Boborykin, Russian playwright and novelist.
their notice not only "male and female scoundrels" but even descriptions of peasants or officials lower in rank than the head of a small department. Yes indeed, a single period, no matter how fruitful, does not give us the right to draw a conclusion in favor of one or another trend. Talk about the degenerating in- fluence of that trend does not resolve the question either. Every- thing in this world is relative and approximate. There are peo- ple who can be corrupted even by children's literature, who with particular pleasure skim through the Psalms and Proverbs on the lookout for piquant passages; there are also some who, the more they acquaint themselves with the sordidness of life, become all the cleaner. Publicists, jurists and physicians, ab- sorbed in all the secrets of human frailty, are not regarded as immoral; and very often realistic writers are more moral than highly placed ecclesiastics. Yes, and in the last analysis no sort of literature can surpass real life in its cynicism; you cannot intoxicate with one glassful a person who has already drunk his way through a whole barrel.
2. It is true that the world teems with "scoundrels—male and female." Human nature is imperfect and it would there- fore be strange to observe only the righteous in this world. Cer- tainly, to believe that literature bears the responsibility for digging up the "pearls" from the heap of muck would mean rejecting literature itself. Literature is called artistic when it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is absolute and honest truth. To constrict its function to such a specialty as digging for "pearls" is as fatal for it as if you wcre to require Levitan to draw a tree and omit the dirty bark and yellowing foliage. I agree that the "pearl" theory is a good thing, but surely a man of letters is not a pastry cook, nor an expert on cosmetics, nor an entertainer; he is a responsible person, under contract to his conscience and the consciousness of his duty; being in for a penny he has to be in for a pound, and no matter how distress- ing he finds it, he is in duty bound to battle with his fastidious- ness and soil his imagination with the grime of life. He is like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a reporter, out of a feeling of squeamishness or from the desire to give pleasure to his readers, would describe only honest city administrators, high-minded matrons and virtuous railroad magnates?
To chemists there is nothing unclean in this world. A man of letters should be as objective as a chemist; he has to renounce ordinary subjectivity and realize that manure piles play a very respectable role in a landscape and that evil passions are as in- herent in life as good ones.
Literary men are the children of their age, and so like all the rest of the lot must subordinate themselves to external con- ditions of living together. They must be absolutely decent. That is all we have the right to require from the realists. However, you have nothing to say against the presentation and form of "Mire." Accordingly, I must have been decent.
I confess that I rarely commune with my conscience when I write. This can be explained by habit and the triviality of my efforts. And that is why I don't take myself into consideration when I express this or that opinion on literature.
You write: "Were I the editor, I would have returned the article to you for your own good." Then why don't you go further? Why don't you hold responsible the editors who print such stories? Why not sternly take to task the Government Press Administration for not banning immoral papers?
Sad would be the fate of literature (whether serious or trivial) if it were delivered over to the mercy of personal views. That's first. Second, there is no police body which could consider itself competent on matters of literature. I agree that one cannot get along without restraint and the big stick, for sharpers will crawl even into literature, but no matter how you try, you can devise no better police for literature than criticism and the consciences of the authors themselves. People have been trying to invent some such thing since the creation of the world, but no one has yet discovered anything better.
Here you would wish me to suffer a loss of 115 rubles and have the editor humiliate me. Others, among them your father, are ecstatic over the story. Still others send Suvorin abusive letters, slandering the paper, me, etc., in every possible way. Who is right? Who is the real judge?
6. Further you write, "Leave the writing of such stuff to poor- spirited and unfortunate scribblers like . . ." May Allah forgive you if you wrote those lines in earnest! A condescendingly scornful tone toward little people merely because they are little does no honor to the human heart. In literature the low ranks are as indispensable as they are in the army--one's good sense says so, and the heart should repeat it even more emphatically.