violence and falsehood in whatever form these may be expressed. This is the program I would hold to if I were a great artist." (October 1S88.)
At this time Chekhov did not seem to realize that his "holy of holies" was uncompatible with his belief that as an artist he must objectively depict society in a spirit of noninvolvement in its great moral problems. If art has any definitive answers to the eternal disharmony of life, they must be the purely subjective responses of the artist himself.
Suvorin had protested that Chekhov failed to solve the problem of pessimism in The Lights, a story that insists upon the decisive relationship between man's philosophy and his actions. And Leontiev-Shcheglov had criticized him for ending the story with the sentence: "You cannot make head or tail of anything in this world." The artist-psychologist must analyze especially the soul of his hero, the critic maintained.
The writer's task, Chekhov answered Suvorin, is not to solve such questions as God or pessimism, "but to depict only who, how, and in what circumstances people have spoken or thought about God or pessimism. The artist must not be a judge of his characters or of what they say, but only an objective observer." The reader must make his own evaluation of what is said, Chekhov insisted; the author's task was to throw some light on his characters and to speak their language. (May 30, 1888.) And to Leontiev-Shchcglov, he replied: "It is not the psychologist's business to pretend that he understands what no one understands. Then we will not be charlatans and will frankly declare that you can't make head or tail of anything in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything." (June 9, 1888.)
Chekhov's emphasis on objectivity in the process of literary creation may well have been influenced by his scientific training. He believed that outside matter there was no experience, no knowledge, no absolute truths. And he appears to have looked upon social phenomena very much as the natural scientist rather than as the artist-sociologist, for he was an enemy of everything romantic, metaphysical, and sentimental. In his tales he diagnosed life as a physician diagnosed disease, but as an artist he refused to offer prescriptions for the moral and social ills of mankind.
Chekhov seemed to believe at this time that all the artist could do was to draw life as it is, for there was nothing he could decide about it. To be sure, creation was a premeditated act in which the artist consciously posed definite questions, but he was not obliged to resolve these questions. Even in the selection of his themes, Chekhov maintained, the artist must remain objective and he must handle them truthfully, that is, in relation to life as it is. Any tendentiousncss or emphasis on particulars must be eschewed.
Toward the end of 1888, however, Chekhov obviously began to have serious doubts about objectivity in art. "I sometimes preach heresies," he wrote Suvorin on October 27, "but I have never once gone so far as an absolute negation of problems in art. . . . The artist, however, must pass judgment only on what he understands; his circle is as limited as that of any other specialist. ... If one denies problems and purpose in creative work, then one must recognize that the artist creatcs without design, without purpose, under the influence of some aberration. . . ." It was important in art, he pointed out, not to confuse the solution of a problem with its correct presentation.
The debate which Chekhov carried on within himself and with his correspondents about art and its purpose reflected in reality an acute dissatisfaction with his own writing. In this same letter he informed Suvorin "... I haven't yet begun my literary career" — Plots for five big stories and two novels swarmed in his head, while what he had already published was trash. There were subjects that sat in his mind like discarded books in a storehouse. He loved them. "If my love is mistaken, then I am not right, but it is possible that it is not mistaken! I'm cither a fool and a presumptuous person, or I'm actually an organism capable of being a fine writer; all that I now write displeases and bores me, all that sits in my head interests me, touches and agitates me." In moments of frustration he preferred the doers, the activists, to the bookish scholars or to literary artists who only wrote about life. In an obituary notice at this time on the famous traveler N. M. Przhevalsky, whose exciting career as an explorer he enthusiastically admired, Chekhov significantly asserted: "Such personalities are living documents demonstrating to society that in addition to the men and women who spend their lives discussing optimism and pessimism, writing mediocre stories to kill time, and drawing up unnecessary schemes and cheap dissertations . . . there are people of another sort, capable of heroic feats, possessing faith, and thoroughly conscious of their aim. If the positive types created by literature provide valuable educational material, those created by life itself are beyond price."
"my holy of holies ... is absolute freedom" / 171 « 7 »
Not until the beginning of October did Chekhov return to the task which, at the end of the previous year, he had promised himself to complete — a revision of his play Ivanov for a performance in Petersburg. He radically altered the second and fourth acts, wrote a new monologue for the hero, and retouched the characterization of Sasha. "If they don't understand my Ivanov now," he told Suvorin, "I'll throw it into the stove and write a novel — 'Enough'!"5 This effort and perhaps the huge success of The Bear, which was being performed in several cities at this time, intensified his interest once again in everything connected with the theater. He busied himself in getting his one-act play Swan Song through the censor for production in Petersburg, and wrote another one-act farce, The Proposal, which concerns the hilarious unreasonableness and stupidity of two people who wish to marry. These one- act plays, where his spirit of fun had full scope, came easily to him. When he had written himself out on fiction, he jokingly declared, he would make his living by composing one-acters. "I believe I could write a hundred a year," he boasted to Suvorin. "Subjects for one-act plays sprout out of me like oil from the soil of Baku." (December 23, 1888.) Chekhov also occupied himself now with The Wood Demon, the play that he had sketched the past summer at Feodosiya and in which Suvorin, who had written a number of dramas, agreed to collaborate. When Suvorin sent his draft of the first act, however, Chekhov, obviously dissatisfied with it, drew up a series of brilliant descriptions of the characters of the proposed play as guides for Suvorin, and in some of them are discernible the clear lineaments of characters in the later Uncle Vanya, which was based on The Wood Demon. Suvorin quickly begged off and the project was dropped for the time being, although Chekhov continued to urge him to collaborate on some other subject — a tragedy, he suggested, on Holofernes and Judith, or Napoleon at Elba — he was aware by now of his friend's preferences and limitations as a dramatist.