'In This World You Can’t Figure Anything Out'

A reader sends an email with this subject line -- “Socrates, Voltaire & Chekhov” -- and writes: “I don’t suppose those 3 have often been grouped in the same sentence, Patrick, but in effect Chekhov did so in one of his letters.” It’s dated May 30, 1888, and he’s writing to his editor and on-again-off-again friend Aleksei Suvorin. Chekhov and his family are staying at a summer cottage on an estate in Sumy, a town in northeastern Ukraine. The letter is five pages long and Chekhov devotes a paragraph to each of the six members of their host family. Of the matriarch he writes: “The mother is a kind, plump old woman who has known her share of suffering. She reads Schopenhauer and goes to church but only to services honoring her favorite saints.” 

In a nutshell we know this woman – provincial but a reader, among the faithful but selectively so. She might show up in one of his stories or plays, a minor character but fully, deftly formed. Chekhov couldn’t stop studying people. He’s a physician and a diagnostician of human strengths and foolishness. Here’s one of the daughters:

 

“She doesn’t cut her hair, wears a corset and a bustle, and takes an active interest in running the household. She loves to sing and laugh and wouldn’t turn down even  the most banal love affair even though she has read Marx’s Das Kapital, but there’s not much chance of her getting married, she’s so homely.”

 

We might think of this as gossip with a sympathetic but satirical edge. Here’s one of her brothers: “The second son is a young man obsessed with the idea that Tchaikovsky is a genius. He is a pianist, and yearns for a Tolstoyan life.”

 

Suvorin had expressed misgivings about a recent story by Chekhov, “Lights” (trans. Constance Garnett), published in the Saint Petersburg magazine Northern Herald. With reservations, Chekhov agrees. Then he goes on the offensive and formulates the thoughts that would baffle and even anger many of his contemporary readers and critics:

 

“In my opinion, it is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc.; His job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge  of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness.”

 

He goes on: “Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language. . . . It’s about time that everyone who writes—especially genuinely literary artists—admitted that in this world you can’t figure anything out. Socrates admitted it once upon a time, and Voltaire was wont to admit it. The crowd thinks it knows and understands everything; the stupider it is, the broader it imagines its outlook. But, if a writer whom the crowd believes takes it upon himself to declare he understands nothing of what he sees, that alone will constitute a major gain in the realm of thought and a major step forward.”   

 

This prompted my reader to write: “The more I reread about Chekhov’s life, the higher I rank him among the history of great human beings.” If writers were to call for patron saints, I might nominate for beatification Spinoza, Dr. Johnson and Chekhov.

 

[All quotes are from Letters of Anton Chekhov (trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, 1973).]