'The War with What He Does Not Understand'

“. . . I am closer to the ‘life of the spirit’ than you are. You are talking about the right of one or another type of knowledge to exist, whereas I’m talking about peace, not rights. I want people not to see war where there isn’t any. Different branches of knowledge have always lived together in peace.” 

For Chekhov as for Nabokov, science and art, reason and imagination, could dwell in the Peaceable Kingdom of Human Thought without cancelling each other. No need for mutual hostilities. Those blessed with Keats’ “Negative Capability” are not intimidated by alien thinking. Chekhov is writing on May 15, 1889, to his editor and occasional friend, Alexi Suvorin. The pair would differ, especially when it came to the Dreyfus Affair (Chekhov was a Dreyfusard and admirer of Zola; Suvorin was casually anti-Semitic), but remained cautious friends. The letter continues:

 

“Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent: they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil—and there is absolutely no reason for them to fight. There is no struggle for existence going on between them. If a man knows the theory of the circulatory system, he is rich. If he learns the history of religion and the song ‘I remember a Marvelous Moment’ in addition, he is the richer, not the poorer, for it.”

 

Do I think alchemy and the vaporings of Madame Blavatsky are ridiculous? Was Yeats credulous and prone to embrace any occult nonsense he encountered while remaining a poet of genius? You bet. Never look for consistency among humans. But I have no desire to correct people who believe silly things; nor did Chekhov. For a nineteenth-century Russian, and even by the standards of our own time and place, he was remarkably tolerant, unthreatened, open-minded and at ease with himself. As he puts it to Suvorin:

 

“It is not branches of knowledge that war with one another, not poetry with anatomy; it is delusions, that is, people. When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels discord within. Instead of looking for the causes of this discord within himself as he should, he looks outside. Hence the war with what he does not understand.”

 

[The translators of the letter are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973). In a footnote to the song mentioned above, they write: “An art song by Mikhail Glinka, which is the setting of one of Alexander Pushkin’s most popular lyrics.”]