'Literature Is at a Standstill'

“I’m at home now. Before Easter I spent two weeks in Ostroumov’s clinic coughing blood. The doctor diagnosed apical lesions in my lungs. I feel splendid.”

I haven’t visited a library since March 17, and I was getting itchy. I have a roomful of books but needed a transfusion, so I ordered old reliables -- the three Library of America volumes of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and the new Chekhov collection, Fifty-Two Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

The passage at the top is from a letter Chekhov wrote to the novelist Alexander Ertel on this date, April 17, in 1897. That same year he wrote “The Petcheneg” and “In the Cart” (both included in the Pevear/Volokhonsky collection), among other stories. Chekhov continues:

“There’s no news. Literature is at a standstill. A lot of tea and cheap wine is being consumed in editorial offices without much pleasure, for no other reason, apparently, than there’s nothing better to do. Tolstoy’s writing on art.”

Tolstoy had visited Chekhov at the clinic on March 28. Chekhov rejected two of the themes of Tolstoy’s soon-to-be-published What Is Art? Here they are, as paraphrased by Simon Karlinsky: 1.) “[T]he idea that in order to be good, moral and ‘infectious,’ a work of art has to be instantly comprehensible to an illiterate peasant or to a child.” 2.) “[T]he concomitant notion that all the arts and especially painting and music were going through a period of utter decline throughout the Western world at the end of the nineteenth century.” Chekhov writes to Ertel:

“His idea is not new; it’s been reiterated in various forms by clever old men in every century. Old men have always been inclined to think the end of the world is at hand and to assert that morals have fallen to the ne plus ultra, that art has grown shallow and threadbare, that people have grown weak, and so on and so forth.”

Beyond argument, Chekhov’s first criticism of Tolstoy’s screed is correct. In a few years the Bolsheviks would resurrect the simplistic notion with a different emphasis in the form of socialist realism. Art = childish agitprop, a tedious and repellent idea. About the decline of art Tolstoy was merely premature. That wouldn’t begin for perhaps another half-century. Consider this sample of the writers of fiction still at work in 1897: besides Tolstoy and Chekhov, Henry James, Kipling and Conrad. In the April issue of Commentary, Joseph Epstein writes about the ongoing enervation of fiction, its declines into anemic irrelevance:

“If you admire fiction and consider it at its best richer than philosophy and novelists as the true historians of the present, but, like me, find yourself easily resisting contemporary novels, the reason, I believe, is that recent novels no longer do many of the things that once made them so glorious. They want a certain weight, gravity, seriousness that has marked the best fiction over the centuries. They have turned away from telling grand stories issuing onto great themes. Some may admire the cleverness or the sensitivity of certain living novelists, but none seems as God-like in his or her omniscience and evocative power as the great Russian or Victorian or French or American novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Art, we know, is not on the same onward and upward progress curve as science and technology, but might it, in the novel, be demonstrably regressing?”

[The passages from Chekhov’s letter were translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973).]