Anton Tchekhov, and Other Essays

Part 1

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ANTON TCHEKHOV

AND OTHER ESSAIS

LEON SHESTOV

TRANSLATED BY

S. KOTELIANSKY AND J. M. MURRY

MAUNSEL AND CO. LTD.

DUBLIN AND LONDON

1916

CONTENTS

ANTON TCHEKHOV (CREATION FROM THE VOID) THE GIFT OF PROPHECY PENULTIMATE WORDS THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

INTRODUCTION

It is not to be denied that Russian thought is chiefly manifested in the great Russian novelists. Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekhov made explicit in their works conceptions of the world which yield nothing in definiteness to the philosophic schemes of the great dogmatists of old, and perhaps may be regarded as even superior to them in that by their nature they emphasise a relation of which the professional philosopher is too often careless--the intimate connection between philosophy and life. They attacked fearlessly and with a high devotion of which we English readers are slowly becoming sensible the fundamental problem of all philosophy worthy the name. They were preoccupied with the answer to the question: Is life worth living? And the great assumption which they made, at least in the beginning of the quest, was that to live life must mean to live it wholly. To live was not to pass by life on the other side, not suppress the deep or even the dark passions of body or soul, not to lull by some lying and narcotic phrase the urgent questions of the mind, not to deny life. To them life was the sum of all human potentialities. They accepted them all, loved them all, and strove to find a place for them all in a pattern in which none should be distorted. They failed, but not one of them fainted by the way, and there was not one of them but with his latest breath bravely held to his belief that there was a way and that the way might be found. Tolstoi went out alone to die, yet more manifestly than he had lived, a seeker after the secret; death overtook Dostoevsky in his supreme attempt to wrest a hope for mankind out of the abyss of the imagined future; and Tchekhov died when his most delicate fingers had been finally eager in lighting The Cherry Orchard with the tremulous glint of laughing tears, which may perhaps be the ultimate secret of the process which leaves us all bewildered and full of pity and wonder.

There were great men and great philosophers. It may be that this cruelly conscious world will henceforward recognise no man as great unless he has greatly sought: for to seek and not to think is the essence of philosophy. To have greatly sought, I say, should be the measure of man's greatness in the strange world of which there will be only a tense, sorrowful, disillusioned remnant when this grim ordeal is over. It should be so: and we, who are, according to our strength, faithful to humanity, must also strive according to our strength to make it so. We are not, and we shall not be, great men: but we have the elements of greatness. We have an impulse to honesty, to think honestly, to see honestly, and to speak the truth to ourselves in the lonely hours. It is only an impulse, which, in these barren, bitter, years, so quickly withers and dies. It is almost that we dare not be honest now. Our hearts are dead: we cannot wake the old wounds again. And yet if anything of this generation that suffered is to remain, if we are to hand any spark of the fire which once burned so brightly, if we are to be human still, then we must still be honest at whatever cost. We--and I speak of that generation which was hardly man when the war burst upon it, which was ardent and generous and dreamed dreams of devotion to an ideal of art or love or life--are maimed and broken for ever. Let us not deceive ourselves. The dead voices will never be silent in our ears to remind us of that which we once were, and that which we have lost. We shall die as we shall live, lonely and haunted by memories that will grow stranger, more beautiful, more terrible, and more tormenting as the years go on, and at the last we shall not know which was the dream--the years of plenty or the barren years that descended like a storm in the night and swept our youth away.

Yet something remains. Not those lying things that they who cannot feel how icy cold is sudden and senseless death to all-daring youth, din in our ears. We shall not be inspired by the memory of heroism. We shall be shattered by the thought of splendid and wonderful lives that were vilely cast away. What remains is that we should be honest as we shall be pitiful. We shall never again be drunk with hope: let us never be blind with fear. There can be in the lap of destiny now no worse thing which may befall us. We can afford to be honest now.

We can afford to be honest: but we need to learn how, or to increase our knowledge. The Russian writers will help us in this; and not the great Russians only, but the lesser also. For a century of bitter necessity has taught that nation that the spirit is mightier than the flesh, until those eager qualities of soul that a century of social ease has almost killed in us are in them well-nigh an instinct. Let us look among ourselves if we can find a Wordsworth, a Shelley, a Coleridge, or a Byron to lift this struggle to the stars as they did the French Revolution. There is none.--It will be said: 'But that was a great fight for freedom. Humanity itself marched forward with the Revolutionary armies.' But if the future of mankind is not in issue now, if we are fighting for the victory of no precious and passionate idea, why is no voice of true poetry uplifted in protest? There is no third way. Either this is the greatest struggle for right, or the greatest crime, that has ever been. The unmistakable voice of poetry should be certain either in protest or enthusiasm: it is silent or it is trivial. And the cause must be that the keen edge of the soul of those century-old poets which cut through false patriotism so surely is in us dulled and blunted. We must learn honesty again: not the laborious and meagre honesty of those who weigh advantage against advantage in the ledger of their minds, but the honesty that cries aloud in instant and passionate anger against the lie and the half-truth, and by an instinct knows the authentic thrill of contact with the living human soul.

The Russians, and not least the lesser Russians, may teach us this thing once more. Among these lesser, Leon Shestov holds an honourable place. He is hardly what we should call a philosopher, hardly again what we would understand by an essayist. The Russians, great and small alike, are hardly ever what we understand by the terms which we victims of tradition apply to them. In a hundred years they have accomplished an evolution which has with us slowly unrolled in a thousand. The very foundations of their achievement are new and laid within the memory of man. Where we have sharply divided art from art, and from science and philosophy, and given to each a name, the Russians have still the sense of a living connection between all the great activities of the human soul. From us this connection is too often concealed by the tyranny of names. We have come to believe, or at least it costs us great pains not to believe, that the name is a particular reality, which to confuse with another name is a crime. Whereas in truth the energies of the human soul are not divided from each other by any such impassable barriers: they flow into each other indistinguishably, modify, control, support, and decide each other. In their large unity they are real; isolated, they seem to be poised uneasily between the real and the unreal, and become deceptive, barren half-truths. Plato, who first discovered the miraculous hierarchy of names, though he was sometimes drunk with the new wine of his discovery, never forgot that the unity of the human soul was the final outcome of its diversity; and those who read aright his most perfect of all books--The Republic--know that it is a parable which fore-shadows the complete harmony of all the soul's activities.

Not the least of Shestov's merits is that he is alive to this truth in its twofold working. He is aware of himself as a soul seeking an answer to its own question; and he is aware of other souls on the same quest. As in his own case he knows that he has in him something truer than names and divisions and authorities, which will live in spite of them, so towards others he remembers that all that they wrote or thought or said is precious and permanent in so far as it is the manifestation of the undivided soul seeking an answer to its question. To know a man's work for this, to have divined the direct relation between his utterance and his living soul, is criticism: to make that relation between one's own soul and one's speech direct and true is creation. In essence they are the same: creation is a man's lonely attempt to fix an intimacy with his own strange and secret soul, criticism is the satisfaction of the impulse of loneliness to find friends and secret sharers among the souls that are or have been. As creation drives a man to the knowledge of his own intolerable secrets, so it drives him to find others with whom he may whisper of the things which he has found. Other criticism than this is, in the final issue, only the criminal and mad desire to enforce material order in a realm where all is spiritual and vague and true. It is only the jealous protest of the small soul against the great, of the slave against the free.

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