`To Defend Even the Guilty'

Too late, I learned Wednesday was the centennial of the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason whose case because an international cause celebre. For a detailed look at the Dreyfus story, see Ronald Schechter’s “The Ghosts of Alfred Dreyfus” in Wednesday’s Forward. Like most Americans, I first learned of the Dreyfus case not from history class but from The Life of Emile Zola, the 1937 movie with Paul Muni as the novelist whose impassioned indictment, “J’accuse,” implicated the French army and politicians in the anti-Semitic scandal in January 1898. The Dreyfus case attracted international attention and sparked acrimonious debate across Europe and beyond. Among the opposing partisans were Anton Chekhov and his closest friend, Alexy Suvorin.

On Feb. 6, 1898, Chekhov wrote a letter from Nice to Suvorin, editor of the influential, conservative St. Petersburg newspaper Novoye Vremya. Chekhov had been publishing stories in the paper for six years. Both men were the grandsons of serfs. Despite differences that might have made friendship between others impossible, Chekhov and Suvorin reveled in each other’s company. They enjoyed fishing, canoeing and discussing literature. Both were the grandsons of serfs. Suvorin was by nature a reactionary, a bigot obsessed with wealth and power, and he and Novoye Vremye had grown increasingly anti-Dreyfus and anti-Semitic. Still, he befriended Chekhov and published some of his best stories. By the time Chekhov wrote his letter, Zola had had already fled to England to avoid being jailed for libel, and would remain there for 11 months. Chekhov wrote to his friend:

“You write that Zola has begun to disappoint you, but I must tell you that over here the general feeling is that he has been reborn as a new and improved Zola. Like turpentine, the trial has cleansed him of the stains which had previously sullied his reputation, so that he now appears before the French in all his true shining radiance, demonstrating a purity and moral grandeur that no one suspected he possessed.”

What’s noteworthy about Chekhov’s letter is its cool, evidence-mustering tone. Chekhov uses logic to dismantle Suvorin’s essentially illogical pronouncements. For almost five pages, in Penguin’s A Life in Letters (translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips), he marshals evidence gleaned from reading stenographic transcripts of the case, not newspaper accounts:

“It is quite clear to me what lies behind Zola’s stance. The main thing is that he is acting honestly, by which I mean his judgements are based not on the chimeras of others but on what he has seen for himself. It is, of course, possible to be both sincere and wrong, but the errors of the sincere do less harm than the consequences of the deliberately insincere, the prejudiced or the politically calculating. Even if Dreyfus is guilty, Zola is still right, because the writer’s task is not to accuse or pursue, but to defend even the guilty once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment. The question will be asked: what about politics, or the interests of the state? But great writers and artists should have nothing to do with politics except insofar as they themselves need protection from it.”

Their differences over the Dreyfus case effectively ended the friendship of Chekhov and Suvorin. Dreyfus was finally pardoned in 1899, after spending four and a half years on Devil’s Island. He petitioned for a retrial and on July 12, 1906, his verdict was formally annulled. Zola had died in 1902, Chekhov in 1904. Suvorin would die in 1912. Dreyfus lived until 1935.