There is no work of Chekhov's that better illustrates his determination to see things as they are than the short story, "A
Tiresome Tale." A famous and distinguished scientist, knowing that he is soon to die, takes a long last look at his family, his pupils, his assistants. He had lived in the hope of leaving some- thing behind: it is now clear to him that his career has been a waste and all his official medals cannot cover the waste. "A Tire- some Tale" is not only a wonderful short story but, coming in 1889, it was a clear, fresh statement of life. The story has in it most of Chekhov, good and bad. Dr. Stepanovich is a new figure in Russian literature: a man who must see the world for what it is, without tears, without turmoil, because he believes that only truth can bring hope for the future. But Katya, the roman- tic young actress of the story, is a literary throwback. She seeks the answer to the meaning of life in the same tiresome way that so many like her have sought it before. Katya is, of course, Nina in The Seagull. The characters in "A Tiresome Tale" appear over and over again in the stories and plays. It has been said that while Chekhov was sorry for the Ninas of the world, he was also making fun of them, and never meant their troubles to be mistaken for lofty tragedy. That is true, but it is more likely that writers who walk fast always have twigs from dead wood on their clothes, always have old stones, like Katya, in their shoes. But the twigs and the stones are of no importance to the creative artist: it's the length and speed of his journey that counts. He has very little time, no matter how fast he runs, and he cannot stop along the way to sort out the good mer- chandise from the bad, the old from the new, as if he were a peddler.
In Chekhov, the conflicts and contradictions of the old with the ncw have led to an unusual number of opinions about the man himself and to many different interpretations of his plays. People see in him what they wish to see, even if they have to ignore his words; or, more frequently, they ignore the dates on which the words were written. Some critics see Chekhov as a political radical, a man who desired the overthrow of a rotting society. Other critics see him as a non-political man, an observer of the scene, a writer who presented the problem but refused to give the answer. Still others see a man who, far from criticiz- ing anything or anybody, was only saddened by a world that destroyed the delicate and punished the finely made. None of these points of view is the truth, although each has in it some- thing of the truth. But the truth about Chekhov, if you keep prejudiced hands off, is not hard to find. The words are there and they are dated.
Chekhov, like all men who grow, sometimes changed his mind. He had grown up in a time of social unrest. He was a student when student riots broke out all over the land and he saw many of the boys he knew carted off to jail or banished to Siberia. His school was rigidly controlled by the Czar's repre- sentatives and his writing was rigidly censored by the Czar's literary bureaucrats. It was a time of revolt and feelings ran high on both sides. Chekhov took little part in the revolt—of that there can be no question—and many Russian intellectuals criticized him for what he didn't do or say. But he went his own way, he took his own method. In a time when it was dangerous to hint that Russia was not the most blessed of lands he was sharply critical, in his stories, of the society around him. He condemned the rotten life of the peasant, the filth and squalor of village life, the meanness of the bureaucracy, the empty pretensions of the landed gentry, the lack of any true spiritual guidance from the church, the cruelty and degradation that were implicit in poverty. He needed no political party, no group, no platform to dictate these themes. As a young man he felt the needle of his more radical friends, and he answered them: "I should like to be a free artist and that is all. ... I consider a label or a trademark to be a prejudice." But when, two years later, a Moscow magazine took him too literally and called him a "writer without principles," he got into one of the few angry passions of his life. The letter to Lavrov, the editor of the mag- azine, has a kind of illogic, and a pettish, defensive quality which is unlike Chekhov. Magarshack, in his good book,
Chekhov the Dramatist, says: "This letter is important in that it reveals the inner conflict that was going on in Chekhov's mind at that particular time. Indeed, his defense against Lav- rov's criticism is rather lame, and the fury of the letter must be ascribed to his own realization of its lameness. Chekhov defends himself against an accusation which obviously hurt him to the quick . . . and he advanced the curious plea that he was really a doctor and not a writer at all, and that even as a writer he had so far got along excellently with his friends/' Lavrov's charge struck something painful. The youthful "I should like to be a free artist" was no longer true, but he didn't know how to say so. The desire to be a free artist was always to be with him, but the "that is all" period was over forever. At the age of thirty-two he wrote to Suvorin that the Russian artist lacked something. "\Vriters who are immortal or just plain good . . . have one very important trait in common: they are going some- where and they call you with them. . . . Some of them, accord- ing to how great they are, have aims that concern their own times more cIosely, such as the abolition of serfdom, the libera- tion of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka. Others have more remote aims, such as God, life beyond the grave, human happiness and so on. (In) the best of them . . . every line is permeated, as with juice, by a consciousness of an aim, you feel in addition to life as it is, also life as it should be. . . . But what about us? \Ve have neither near nor remote aims and our souls are as flat and bare as a billiard table. \Ve have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we deny the existence of God. . . . But he who wants nothing, hopes for nothing and fears nothing cannot be an artist."
These two letters are so far apart in feeling because the times had changed. Now, in the i8go's, the intellectuals were disillu- sioned and resigned. Chekhov disliked these men and disap- proved of their cowardice and their callous social irresponsi- bility. He was growing older and his requirements for himself and for others hung on a higher peg, and were of a different nature. (It is not a disgrace in Europe to grow older, and the
European artist need not cling to the ideas and ideals of his youth.) Truth was still the goal, but now Chekhov knew it could be bare and impotent standing by itself. He had found out that the writer must not only find the truth but he must wrap it up and take it somewhere. Chekhov, like most natural writers, never knew how he got it there, nor why, nor what made him take it in a given direction. Nor did he ever bother to find out. But somewhere he was taking his own kind of truth, and the somewhere was increasingly good.
There can be no doubt, on the evidence, that Chekhov was a man of deep social ideals and an uncommon sense of social responsibility. This has been true of almost every good writer who ever lived and it does not matter that the ideal sometimes seems to be a denial of ideal, or that it springs from hate, or has roots in snobbishness, or insanity, or alcohol, or just plain meanness. What comes out in the work is all that matters. The great work of art has always had what Chekhov called the aim, the ideal, and none of us coming after the artist has the right to define or limit his ideal by imposing upon him the moral and political standards of our time. We have the right to find in books what we need to find, but certainly we have no right to refashion the writer's beliefs to suit our own. This happens too often with us, and is a form of vanity.
If Chekhov had written only short stories or novels or poetry the opinions of his critics and his interpreters wouldn't matter very much. The printed work would be there and nobody could stand between it and us unless we allowed them to. It would be interesting to know that Mr. X. from Moscow disagreed with Mr. Y. from New York, but, in the end, the biographer, the critic, the teacher, and those who write such introductions as this, cannot do permanent harm to a printed work.