A few months later, however, when the serious-minded Korolenko visited him, Chekhov surprisingly said: "Do you know how I write my little tales? Well, here you are." He looked around the table, took up the first thing his eye fell on — an ashtray — and placed it before him. "Tomorrow, if you wish, there will be a story. The title: The Ashtray. Nevertheless, about a year later, he insisted to his young friend N. D. Teleshov, a beginning author, that one cannot write out of one's head,
4 Chekhov employed this very image of a moonlight night in his story, The Wo If (Petersburg Gazette, March 17, 1886); and in Act IV of The Sea Gull Treplev also comments on it.
that one must not invent. In a cheap tavern where they sat at dawn after attending a wedding, Chekhov pointed to a greasy spot on the wall, made by the heads of numerous cabbies resting against it: "Here you complain that there arc few subjects. Indeed, is this not a subject? . . . There, look at that wall. It would seem that there is nothing interesting about it. But if you look closely at it, you'll find something in it, something all its own which no one else has found or described."
At this point in his career Chekhov was plainly more concerned with the technique of the short story than with the purpose of art. The sheer cleverness of the devices by which he achieved his brilliant effects seemed at times to give him more satisfaction than the moral awakening of a character or the revelation of human evil. In answer to Alexander's failure to discover a theme in Happiness, a highly successful story based on his impressions of the Don steppe which he had gathered on his recent trip, Chekhov rather cockily explains: "My steppe story appeals to me precisely because of its theme which boobies like you don't find in it. It is a product of inspiration. A quasi-symphony. In essence it is a piece of nonsense. It pleases the reader because of an optical illusion. The whole trick rests in the additional ornaments like the sheep and in the finish of the separate lines. I could write about coffee grounds and astonish the reader by means of such tricks." (June 21, 1887.)
With his natural dislike for systems of thought of any kind, Chekhov instinctively resisted the pressure of literary friends to declare himself on the great problems of life and death. In fact, he was not sure that art should have any purpose or that writers should endeavor to offer solutions of the problems that troubled the minds of men. To formulate these problems correctly in the spirit of objective realism was the most the writer should attempt and then let the reader make up his own mind about the solutions. When Mariya Kiseleva questioned the objectivity of his realism, he responded in a remarkable letter which offers a more comprehensive view of his artistic practice in this respect.
She had read Chekhov's Mire, a very frank story of how an alluring Jewish woman had seduced a Russian officer and his cousin, and tricked them out of a sum of money. Chekhov's correspondent had reproachfully questioned his taste and wondered about the reality of this kind of "filth," and why, as an artist, he did not concentrate upon the "pearls" of life in his fiction. Chekhov began his answer by admitting that he had no fondness for this kind of literature but that the question of its right to exist was still a moot one. "Everything in this world," he continued, "is relative and approximate. There are people who can be corrupted even by children's literature, or with particular pleasure skim through the Psalms and the Proverbs of Solomon for piquant passages; there are also some who, the more they acquaint themselves with the sordidness of life, the purer they bccome. Publicists, jurists, and physicians, absorbed in all the secrets of human sin, are not known for their immorality, and very often realistic writers are more moral than archimandrites. And finally, you cannot make a man who has already gone through a whole barrel drunk on one glassful."
Then turning directly to Mariya Kiseleva's charge, Chekhov wrote: "Indeed, to think that literature bears the responsibility of digging up the 'pearl' from the muck heap would amount to rejecting literature itself. Literature is called artistic because it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is truth, unconditional and honest. To narrow its function to such a specialty as digging for 'pearls' would be as fatal for it as if you were to require Levitan to paint a tree and omit the dirty bark and the withered leaves. I agree that the 'pearl' idea is a fine thing, but surely a man of letters is not a confectioner, nor a dealer in cosmetics; not an entertainer; he is a responsible person bound by the realization of his duty and conscience; since he is in it for a penny he has to be in for a pound, and no matter how painful it is, he is compelled to struggle with his fastidiousness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. ... A man of letters must be as objective as a chemist; he has to abandon worldly subjectivity and realize that dung heaps play a very respectable role in a landscape and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones."
Chekhov concludes this section of his letter by asserting that because of "the triviality" of his own tales, he does not commune with his conscience when writing them. But he firmly disagrees with Mariya Kiseleva that editors ought to reject a contribution if it does not suit their own objective ideas about morality: "Sad would be the fate of literature (whether it be important or trivial) if it were left to the mercy of personal views. That's the first thing. In the second place, there is no police force which could consider itself competent in literary matters. I agree that it is impossible to get along without restraints and the big stick, for knaves will find their way even into literature, but no matter how you try, you cannot devise a better police for literature than criticism and the conscience of the authors themselves. People have been trying to discover some such thing since the creation of the world, but nothing better has been found." (January 14, 1887.)
Mire is in no sense typical of the rich variety of talcs that Chekhov wrote during 1886-1887. An objective revelation of "truth, unconditional and honest" would characterize the most successful of them. Many, though not all, appeared in Motley Tales and In the Twilight, which he significantly dedicated to Grigorovich. In 1887 he also published a fourth book. Innocent Speeches, an unimportant collection which he described as "a dozen of my youthful sins," a volume he sold to a shyster publisher when he was desperately short of money. That feeling of beauty in men — he wrote his uncle Mitrofan — which cannot endure what is commonplace and trivial, ennobles the heroes of Volodya and On the Road. Many other tales embody the sentiments which he expressed in the same letter: "One must not humiliate people — that is the chief tiling. It is better to say to man 'My angel' than hurl 'Fool' at his head, although men are more like fools than angels." (January 18, 1887.)
On the whole, there are more fools than angels in the best of the tales written during this period of change, such as Agafya, The Enemies, The Nightmaie, Volodya, Polinka, An Encounter, The Kiss, and On the Road, but Chekhov never loses a sly, wistful affection for them despite their helpless efforts to struggle against the order of things. He had now fully learned that humor and tragedy, like love and hate, are often only the separate sides of the same coin, that life's misfortunes may be intensified by humor or softened by its wise, gentle smile — as in A Letter, when the drunken priest persuades the irate father that to forgive his erring son is more efficacious than to reprimand him. This subtle mingling of pathos and humor, which leaves the reader with the feeling of not knowing whether to laugh or cry, Chekhov deftly introduced into a vein of fiction new at this time —his stories of children, such as Vanka and The Runaway, or his famous story about the performing dog, Kashtanka, written for both children and grownups.