'Who Needs Your Stories?'

Have you ever read something – it might be a poem or a history book, almost anything – and encountered a phrase or sentence so self-contained and dense with meaning, in words so perfectly arranged, that you stop reading, ponder and write it down? You may not even continue with the remainder of the work. It happens to me not often enough. The passage stands as a discrete creation, sufficient unto itself, aphorism-like, even out of context. You’ve sifted from the surrounding text a nugget you commit to memory and wish to share with others. Consider this, by Dana Gioia: 

“One purpose of literature is to register the complexity of our response to people, ideas, and events.”

 

Dana has sent me a copy of his latest book, Poetry As Enchantment and Other Essays (Paul Dry Books, 2024). It includes “Class Struggle: Donald Davie at Stanford,” a profile of the English poet and critic befriended by Dana. “My intention,” he writes, “is to portray him accurately. He would have flinched at a sentimental or platitudinous memoir. ‘Speak of me as I am,’ he would have said, ‘Nothing extenuate,’” followed by the excerpt transcribed above.

 

The writer I thought of immediately was Anton Chekhov, who was nagged in his day by critics, editors and common readers for not writing ideological tracts. He was accused of being morally irresponsible. In his well-known letter to Aleksey Pleshcheyev on Oct. 4, 1888, Chekhov writes:

 

“The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.”

 

Further evidence of Chekhov’s  anti-ideological bent is supplied by the Russian painter Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939), who wrote a brief memoir, “My Encounters with Chekhov,” published in English in 1973 (trans. Tatiana Kusubova) and included in The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-1972 (1977), edited by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel Jr. The scene is a Moscow hotel room in 1883. The players are Korovin, Chekhov (twenty-three and studying for his final exam to become a doctor) and other students. The exchange could have been recorded this morning on an American college campus:

 

“The students were different from Anton Pavlovich. They loved to argue, and they were in some peculiar way opposed to just about everything.

 

“’If you have no convictions,’ said one student turning to Chekhov, ‘you can’t be a writer.’

 

“No one can say, ‘I have no convictions,’ said another. ‘I can’t understand how anyone could not have convictions.’

 

“’I have no convictions,’ replied Chekhov.

 

“‘You claim to be a man without convictions, but how can you write a work of literature without any ideology? Don’t you have an ideology?’

 

“‘I have no ideology and no convictions,’ answered Chekhov.

 

“These students had an odd way of arguing. They were apparently displeased with Anton Pavlovich. It was clear that they could not fit him into the didactic turn of their outlook or into their moralizing ideology. They wanted to guide, to instruct, to lead, and to influence. They knew everything. They understood everything. And Anton Pavlovich was plainly bored by it all.

 

“‘Who needs your stories? Where do they lead? They don’t oppose anything. They contain no ideas. The Russian Bulletin, say, would have no use for you. Your stories are entertaining and nothing else.’

 

“‘Nothing else,’ answered Anton Pavlovich.”

 

Karlinsky’s introduction to Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973) and his comments throughout are the best place to start learning about Chekhov’s resistance to ideology and politics generally.

 

The essential word in Dana’s sentence quoted above is “complexity.” Ideologues and other busybodies aren’t interested in complexity. Their understanding of the world is quite simple, thank you.