Chekhov paid more serious attention to a long and rather favorable article on his writing in Northern Herald, by the young Dmitri Mere- zhkovsky, who later became quite celebrated as a poet, novelist and leader of one wing of the Symbolist Movement. The article lacked simplicity and definition, Chekhov thought, but he particularly objected to Merezhkovsky's attempt to apply an essentially scientific approach in an analysis of creative art.
The absence of a vigorous, effective professional criticism disturbed Chekhov. Because of this lack, he complained, a mass of lives and works of art were vanishing before the eyes of his generation. Though all praised to the skies An Attack of Nerves, he pointed out, only the old novelist Grigorovich had singled out for comment the description of the virgin snow falling on the street lined with brothels. Chekhov wrote to Suvorin: "If we had any criticism, I would know that I provide material — good or bad, it doesn't matter — and that to people who devote themselves to the study of life, I am as necessary as a star to an astronomer. Then I would work hard and would know for what I worked." (December 23, 1888.)
However severe he was on his rivals, Chekhov was more severe with himself. On the whole, he had lived up to his resolution to shun hasty writing; he published only nine stories in 1888, although four of these, and by far the most notable artistically (The Steppe, The Lights, The Name-Day Party, An Attack of Nerves), are long short stories —he sometimes referred to them as "little novels." Yet he did not abide by his decision to abandon the cheap press; lack of funds, perhaps force of habit, and a desire not to forsake entirely Suvorin's newspaper, led him to publish three short stories in New Times and also two in the Petersburg Gazette. As he confessed, he did not yet know his own strengths and weaknesses in the longer type of tale and he struggled mightily with these works, cutting, polishing, juggling the parts, sometimes abandoning what he had written and starting anew. Again and again in his letters he stigmatized the results as "boring," "dull," "monotonous"; he had intended The Lights to be philosophical, but it ended in a "vinegary taste." In his infinite concern to avoid the superfluous in his lengthier stores, he achieved by artistic measure and economy of means a refinement of expression that was truly classical, and an illusion of reality — based on his favorite touchstones of objectivity, truthfulness, originality, boldness, brevity, and simplicity — that seemed quite complete.
"my holy of holies . . . is absolute freedom" / 167
Concentration on the longer talc complicated the debate that had been going on in Chekhov's mind concerning the relation between art and life. г1Ъе moral suasion of Tolstoyism, with its strong element of reformed Christianity, had already begun to lose some of its charm for Chekhov, who, if not an atheist at this stage of his development, could properly be dcscribcd as a confirmed agnostic. In fact, a brief skctch in 1888, A Story without a Title, conccrning a group of monks who desert their monastery for a town after hearing their abbot's scductivc description of its sinning population, may well be regarded as a satire on the unreality of Tolstoy's moral preachments. However, such stories as The Lights and An Attack of Nerves have a distinct Tolstoyan flavor. They arc powerful problem pieccs in which the conncction between ethical and social values is implicit if not actively argued. With a couragc that he had formerly lackcd, Chekhov now declared bluntly that "Russian life beats down the Russian man." In greeting Grigorovich at Christmas he sadly observed: "It is a poctic holiday. I'm only sorry that people arc poor and hungry in Russia. . . ." And he asked Suvorin why he did not publish an article about the way Tatars were left uncducatcd and were pushed around by their Russian overlords. Or why not do an articlc on the slavery of prostitution in Moscow, a shocking revelation which he himself had provided in his An Attack of Nerves, which is a profound study of a typical Garshin theme: society's personal guilt in relation to the victims of its social order.
Chekhov appears to have entered the lists himself in a planned series of articles for New Times. One of them, Moscow Hypocrites, defended shop clcrks whose employers had prevailed upon the City Council to alter the Sunday closing law. Another, On Pauperism, takes as its text the current drive against street beggars. Everybody in Russia, Chekhov demonstrates, is trying to get something for nothing, and he concludcs his article: "When all layers of society, from the highest to the lowest, learn to esteem the labor and the kopecks of others, street beggary, domestic, and every other kind, will vanish."
The debate, however, foundered at the edge of politics, although Chekhov lived in a country where social problems were defined in terms of one's political allegiance. Pleshchcev professed to see nothing of the "direction" which Chekhov had mentioned, nothing against cither liberalism or conservatism, in The Name-Day Party, whose central character, a rank conservative, rails against the evils of liberalism. And generalizing on this point, Plcshcheev repeated a type of criticism which now positively angered Chekhov — namely, that readers found in his tales neither sympathy nor convictions, a lack which they attributed to Chekhov's indifference or to his desire to be entirely objective. "But indeed," he ambiguously answered, "do I not protest against lying in the story from beginning to end? And in truth, is this not direction?" ('October 7-8, 1888.) In a subsequent letter he returned to Pleshchecv's charge: "It seems to me that I could sooner be accused of gluttony, drunkenness, light-mindedness, coldness, anything you wish, rather than a desire to put myself in a certain attitude. I have never concealed my position. ... It is true that the suspicious thing in my story is the attempt to balance the pluses and the minuses. But I do not balance conservatism against liberalism, which for me are not the chief things at all, but the lying against the truthfulness of characters. . . . When I present such types or speak about them, I do not think of conservatism or liberalism, but of their stupidity and pretensions." (October 9, 1888.) In the same vein he commented upon Elena Lintvareva's warning to him not to associate with such a reactionary as Suvorin. These young ladies and their politically-minded cavalicrs are pure souls, he wrote Suvorin, but nine tenths of their political purity is not worth a straw. It was all based on misty and na'ive antipathies and sympathies for people and labels but not for facts. "It is easy to be pure when you are able to hate a devil you do not know and love a God whom it never occurs to you to doubt." (September 11, 1888.) Freedom, he thought, could be menaced just as much by the Left as by the Right.
This was Chekhov's dilemma: his firm conviction that the artist must remain a free individual beyond the restraining bonds of political parties, creeds, prejudices, and labels. With passionate sincerity, he summarized this conviction in a letter to Pleshcheev: "I fear those who look for tendencies between the lines and want to regard me precisely as a liberal or a conservative. I am not a liberal, a conservative, an evolutionist, a monk, or indifferent to the world. I should like to be a free artist — and that is all — and I regret that God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all their aspects. . . . Pharisaism, stupidity, and idle whims reign not only in the homes of merchants and in prison; I see them in science, in literature, and among young people. Therefore I cannot nurture any special feeling for policemen, butchers, learned men, writers, or youth. I regard tradesmarks or labels as prejudices. My holy of holies are the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom — freedom from