'That Pleasing and Often Rewarding Genre'

Nige, proprietor of Nigeness, seems to have read my mind. Recently he discerned a possible “sign of the long overdue blog renaissance, when people finally come to their senses, abandon the delusive charms of Facebook, Instagram and X, and return to the blogosphere, natural home of that pleasing and often rewarding genre, the informal short-form essay? I doubt it, but a man can dream . . .” 

A dream I share. Almost twenty years ago I started Anecdotal Evidence rather nebulously. It was aimless and without a thesis (it still has none). Perhaps a digital commonplace book? I knew what I didn’t want it to be: a bully pulpit, a crackpot whiner’s platform or a manifesto. I knew I was writing for adults, not children of any age. Fundamentally, I wanted to share my reading with anyone who might be interested. Already, that was a modest goal. Few read books today, and if they do they’re drawn from contemporary works, genre writing, celebrity memoirs, self-help – books of no interest and a very short shelf life. The past is a much bigger, generally more interesting place than the present. Writers have a moral obligation to write well if they’re doing it publicly. To write poorly is insulting to readers. If you must, do it at home in a notebook and don’t inflict it on others. The whole point is the quality of the prose you impose on readers.

 

Aleksey Nikolayevich Pleshcheyev (1825-93) was a Russian radical poet and editor who would not be remembered today, at least among English-language readers, had he not exchanged letters with Anton Chekhov. He was among the least comprehending of Chekhov’s readers. Pleshcheyev was a “progressive,” the sort of dolt who reduces a work of literature to a digestible message. And yet, Pleshcheyev in 1888 published Chekhov’s “The Steppe,” the story that announced his literary debut. They remained friends until Pleshcheyev’s death. Perhaps his most critical role in Chekhov’s life was inspiringly negative, moving him to write some of his finest letters and articulate his writerly credo. In an October 4, 1888, letter, 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. I hate lies and violence in all of their forms . . . Pharisaism, dullwittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants’ homes and police stations. I see them in science, in literature, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no particular predilection for policemen, butchers, scientists, writers or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist.”

 

Consider how eccentric Chekhov’s stance must have seemed late in the nineteenth century in Russia, and how it remains so today in much of the West. Pleshcheyev was, in effect, a precursor to many users of Facebook, Instagram and X, to quote Nige. Tweets, etc., tend to be impulses, not clearly written, carefully reasoned observations. Their attraction is their brevity, which appeals to the lazy, their disregard of spelling and grammar, and the potential for anonymity.

 

In Chekhov the Man (1900), Kornei Chukovsky calls this letter “a gauntlet flung in the face of an entire age, a rebellion against everything it held sacred.” Five days after the letter cited above, Chekhov wrote another one to Pleshcheyev, less well known, after sending him the story “The Name-Day Party.” He writes:

 

“What is suspicious in the story is my attempt at balancing off the pluses with the minuses. But it’s not conservatism I’m balancing off with liberalism—they’re not at the heart of the matter, as far as I’m concerned—it’s the lies of my heroes with their truths.  . . . You once told me that my stories lack an element of protest, that they have neither sympathies nor antipathies. But doesn’t the story protest against lying from start to finish? Isn’t that an ideology? It isn’t? Well, I guess that means either I don’t know how to bite or I’m a flea.”

 

Start with Nigeness and begin a walking tour of the blogosphere. Much of it is a waste of electrons, of course, but there are some interesting people out there with the proper combination of brains, humility, audacity and writing ability.

 

[The quoted passages are from Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973), translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky.]