ANTON TCHEKHOV

IN April, 1890, a young doctor, neither well off nor in good health, left Moscow entirely on his own account to visit

Saghalien, the Russian penal settlement off the East Siberian coast. Friends protested : they probably thought that as this young man, Anton Tchekhov, had not long been awarded the Poushkin literary prize it was unwise of him to abandon even temporarily a promising career as a writer of humorous

short stories -to' go off on a wild-goose chase. One of them said that Saghalien was of no use . or interest to anyone.

TchekhciV replied :— •

" Can this be true ? Saghalien can be useless and uninteresting only to a society which does not exile thousands to it. . . . Sag- halien is a place of the most unbearable sufferings of which man, free or captive, is capable. . . . It is evident that we have sent millions of men to rot in prison, have destroyed them—casually, without thinking, barbarously—we have driven men in fetters through the cold 10,000 versts . . . have depraved them, have Multiplied criminals, and the blame for all this we have thrown upon the gaolers. . . . Now all educated Europe knows that it is not the superintendents that are to blame, but all of us."

He arrived in July after crossing Russia and Siberia by steamer, postchaise and steamer again, a sufficiently difficult and agitated journey, which he described in his letters home in that lively tone of gaiety mingled with shrewdness which had already made his contributions to newspapers remarkable.

Although he arrived utterly unknown, he set to work at once, rising early and going to bed late, speaking to every one of the convicts and settlers and making a complete census of the population. Three months later he sailed for home, via Singa- pore and the Red Sea.

" I have brought away a horrid feeling . . . as I remember it Saghalien seems to be a perfect hell. . . . God's world is a good

place. The one thing not good in it is we."

. . .

After the Saghalien trip Tchekhov, thanks to his increasing success as a writer, was able to buy a rather ramshackle estate in the country, to which the family moved. There he wrote sonic of his best and most famous stories, no longer the " news- paper rubbish " of the earlier days. Up to that time he had written " as reporters write their notes under fire," holding back his best material for fear of spoiling it in his necessary haste to make money : now he was able to take a little longer (though never very long) over his work, in the intervals of cultivating the estate; and giving medical attention to the neighbouring peasants, surrounded with relatives, visitors and pet animals, always forced to borrow money from editors and always paying it back later. This humanitarian dcietor with a talent for writing devoted all his short, busy life to other people in the most natural, least goody-goody way imaginable indeed, his literary work was only begun as means of earning, money for his parents while he studied for a medical degree. One moment he was getting a blind man provided for`; the next, with a sincerity which must have been stimulating% criticizing the- work of his contemporaries. Another time Tchekhov used every endeavour to establish a bankrupt Chronicle of Surgery on a firm basis, simply because he thought it useful. He provided books for the Saghalien schools: started a library in his native town, built a school for the ' peasant children near his new country house, and, in spite of increasing bad henith, gave his services vigorously . during- faminen and outbreaks of cholera. As a result of many articles and a handbook he wrote about the Saghalien settle- ment, which interested not only the general readers but people in Government circles, various reforms in the penal system followed:

If he was good to people, it was because he believed it the sensible, the necessary thing to be. He was " practical," de- tested theorizing about art or morality, and seems to have believed that salvation, both for Russia and for humanity, lies neither in religion nor philosophy, but in an ,alert and truthful scientific attitude to life.

The short stories which he wrote have had as world-wide an influence as they have had success : although he has been dead twenty years he remains one of the most modern of writers. In his imitators he has been less than well served perhaps, for they have all been gloomy and a little bitter, while Tchekhov himself, however sordid or cynical his subjects, by the very objectivity and passionate truthfulness of his treatment, makes his tales ring with an inspiring: note. An intense but sometimes sorrowful love of humanity is implicit in everything he wrote : although one sees again and again from his letters how utterly he believed in the objective and the non-moral attitude to art. While he tried his best to avoid cynicism, he also insisted :—

" An artist must not be the judge of his characters or of what they say, but only an impartial witness. . . ."

" You are right in demanding that an artist should take a conscious attitude to his work, but you confuse two conceptions : the solution of a question and the correct setting of a question. The latter alone is Obligatory for an artist."

To this man good writing was a matter of wise and honest seeing. lie was angry when his friend Souvorin took the hero of his play, -loamy, for a " scoundrel " ; indeed, he had no patience ever with those who looked either for saints or scoundrels in his work. And when he heard that Merezhkov- sky called his famous Monk a " failure," he wrote :— " To divide people into successes and failures is to look at human nature- from' a narrow, preconceived point of view. . . . Are you a success or not ? Am I ? And Napoleon ? . . . . What is the criterion ? One. needs to be a god to be able to distinguish success from failure without being mistaken."

In translating and editing Tchekhov's letters Mr. Kote- liansky and Mr. Tomlinson will certainly have earned the gratitude not only of the devoted admirers of the writer, but of all amateurs of psychology and literature. True, many of the letters have appeared before in the charming collection which Mrs. Constance Garnett gave us in 1920, and we really regret that from this selection all the letters written on the journey across Siberia have been omitted, and also those which Tchekhov wrote from his country place, which are amongst the most enchantingly gay and descriptive he ever penned. On the other hand, there is much that is new in the present volume. As Tchekhov's health became worse, while his prestige was increasing, the letters become less happy, more business-like. Money affairs obviously worried him very much. Even so, the old spirit was there, as is perfectly clear in the letters from the Riviera about the Dreyfus case : even his last note to his sister a few days before his death is from the same affectionate, vivid creature who dashed off the first charming letter of the series.

A short biography prefaces the letters themselves, together with papers from Tchekhov's brother on the raw material from which some of the stories and plays were drawn, and on the author's attitude to the theatre. And, happily for those numerous readers who will wish to pick up this book again and again; whether to reconsider its revelations of the artistic temperament, or merely to savour again the charm of Tchekhov as a man, there is appended a short but useful index.

Jigs BARRY.