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ANTON TCHEKHOV

AND OTHER ESSAIS

BY

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