[21] The French translation of this book is an abridgment. It is quite incomplete.
[22] This sentence has been misunderstood by some of my readers and critics. What I mean is that the Christian charity and love preached in the Gospel of St. John are reflected more sharply and fully in Dostoievsky’s books than in those of any other writer I know of.
[23] By a doctrinaire I mean not a man who has strong principles and convictions; but a man who deliberately shuts his eyes to those facts which contradict his theory, and will pursue it to the end even when by so doing the practice resulting is the contrary of his aim.
CHAPTER VII
THE PLAYS OF ANTON TCHEKOV
Anton Tchekov is chiefly known in Russia as a writer of short stories.[24] He is a kind of Russian Guy de Maupassant, without the bitter strength of the French writer, and without the quality which the French call “cynisme,” which does not mean cynicism, but ribaldry.
Tchekov’s stories deal for the greater part with the middle classes, the minor landed gentry, the minor officials, and the professional classes. Tolstoy is reported to have said that Tchekov was a photographer, a very talented photographer, it is true, but still only a photographer. But Tchekov has one quality which is difficult to find among photographers, and that is humour. His stories are frequently deliciously droll. They are also often full of pathos, and they invariably possess the peculiarly Russian quality of simplicity and unaffectedness. He never underlines his effects, he never nudges the reader’s elbow. Yet there is a certain amount of truth in Tolstoy’s criticism. Tchekov does not paint with the great sweeping brush of a Velasquez, his stories have not the great broad colouring of Maupassant, they are like mezzotints; and in some ways they resemble the new triumphs of the latest developments of artistic photography in subtle effects of light and shade, in delicate tones and half-tones, in elusive play of atmosphere.
Apart from its artistic merits or defects, Tchekov’s work is historically important and interesting. Tchekov represents the extreme period of stagnation in Russian life and literature. This epoch succeeded to a period of comparative activity following after the Russo-Turkish war. For in Russian history one will find that every war has been followed by a movement, a renascence in ideas, in political aspirations, and in literature. Tchekov’s work represents the reaction of flatness subsequent to a transitory ebullition of activity; it deals with the very class of men which naturally hankers for political activity, but which in Tchekov’s time was as naturally debarred from it.
The result was that the aspirations of these people beat their grey wings ineffectually in a vacuum. The middle class being highly educated, and, if anything, over-educated, aspiring towards political freedom, and finding its aspirations to be futile, did one of two things. It either moped, or it made the best of it. The moping sometimes expressed itself in political assassination; making the best of it meant, as a general rule, dismissing the matter from the mind, and playing vindt. Half the middle class in Russia, a man once said to me, has run to seed in playing vindt. But what else was there to do?
Tchekov, more than any other writer, has depicted for us the attitude of mind, the nature and the feelings of the whole of this generation, just as Tourgeniev depicted the preceding generation; the aspirations and the life of the men who lived in the sixties, during the tumultuous epoch which culminated in the liberation of the serfs. And nowhere can the quality of this frame of mind, and the perfume, as it were, of this period be better felt and apprehended than in the plays of Anton Tchekov; for in his plays we get not only what is most original in his work as an artist, but the quintessence of the atmosphere, the attitude of mind, and the shadow of what the Zeitgeist brought to the men of his generation.
Before analysing the dramatic work of Tchekov, it is necessary to say a few words about the Russian stage in general. The main fact about the Russian stage that differentiates it from ours, and from that of any other European country, is the absence of the modern French tradition. The tradition of the “well-made” French play, invented by Scribe, does not, and never has existed in Russia.