'Cloyingly Full of Philowisdomizing'

On the cusp of his great artistic flowering in 1888, immediately after writing “The Steppe,” Anton Chekhov published his long story “Lights” (trans. Constance Garnett) in the Saint Petersburg magazine Northern Herald. In a May 3 letter to the promising young writer Ivan Leontyev (pseudonym: Ivan Shcheglov), Chekhov confesses he is “a little ashamed of it. It’s awfully boring and cloyingly full of philowisdomizing. I feel bad about it, but there’s nothing I can do: I need money as much as air.” 

Readers are cautioned when weighing Chekhov’s assessments of his work. He is allergic to hints of pretentiousness and presumption, often deflects both praise and criticism, and defends his writing as a way to earn a living and support his family. He was still only twenty-eight years old. On May 29, Shcheglov writes in a letter to Chekhov:

 

“I was not entirely satisfied with your latest story ‘Lights.’ Of course I swallowed it in one gulp, there is no question about that, because everything you write is so appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed. But that finale ‘You can’t figure out anything in this world . . .’ is abrupt; it is certainly the writer’s job to figure what goes on in the heart of his hero, otherwise his psychology will remain unclear.”

  

A typical complaint about Chekhov’s stories, then and now. He was a doctor but refused to write as though fiction were science. His characters, like us, remain mysteries to themselves and others. He is no practitioner of “depth psychology” – that silly oxymoron. On June 9, less than two weeks later, Chekhov replies to Shcheglov:

 

“I permit myself not to agree with you about my ‘Lights.’ It is not the psychologist’s job to understand things that he in fact does not understand. Let us not be charlatans and let us state openly that you can’t figure out anything in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.”

 

The great Chekhov scholar Vladimir Kataev devotes an entire chapter to “Lights” in If Only We Could Know! (trans. Harvey Pitcher, Ivan R. Dee, 2002). He carefully delineates the roles of Ananyev, von Shtenberg and the unnamed narrator. Kataev writes: “Chekhov’s intention was not to confirm an ‘elementary moral truth’; on the contrary, he rejected elementary moral truths in order to reveal the complexity of what to everyone else seemed simple and self-evident.” Chekhov’s story is clear and accessible. What it reveals is muddily complicated.

 

I often thought of “Lights” and other middle-period Chekhov stories while reading Isaac Bashevis Singer’s just-published Old Truths and New Clichés: Essays (ed. David Stromberg, Princeton University Press, 2022). Singer’s understanding of fiction combines the role of a traditional storyteller with what Stromberg calls “a modernist writer with intellectual leanings like Albert Camus and Vladimir Nabokov.” When citing examples of great fiction, Singer invariably mentions Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Maupassant – and Chekhov. In the title essay Singer writes:

 

“Writers who believe that literature is a branch of psychology often remain psychologists in literature and litterateurs in psychology. Good novels contain a lot of facts about human behavior, but when literature builds its structure on Freud or any psychological master, it must fail. A great number of modern novels are sadly similar to the tales of those who are psychoanalyzed. This type of novel is a mixture of a confession and a boast. On the whole, ‘case histories’ cannot be substitutes for artful stories.”

 

[The passages from the Shcheglov and Chekhov letters are translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973).]