374
PARTISAN REVIEW
Self-made intellectuals buy at the price of their youth what
gently born and bred writers have been endowed with by nature. Go
ahead and write a story about a young man, the son of a serf, an
ex-small shopkeeper, a choir boy, high school and university student,
brought up on respect for rank, kissing priests' hands, and the wor–
ship of others' ideas, offering thanks for every mouthful of bread,
often whipped, going to school without shoes, fighting, torturing ani–
mals, fond of dining with rich relatives, playing the hypocrite before
God and people without any cause, except out of a consciousness of
his own insignificance-then tell how this young man presses the
slave out of himself one drop at a time and how he wakes up one
fine morning to feel that in his veins flows not the blood of a slave,
but real human blood.
. . . Keep well then, and forgive the long letter.
Yours,
A. CHEKHOV
To
ALEXEI PLESHCHEYEV
February
15,
1890, Moscow
... You really didn't like the
Kreutzer Sonata?
I won't say it
is a work of genius, or a work for all eternity, for I am no judge of
these matters, but in my opinion, amongst the mass of things being
written here and abroad, you will hardly find anything its equal in
seriousness of conception and beauty of execution, not to mention
its artistic merits, which
in
spots are astounding. You must thank the
story for just the one point that it is extremely thought-provoking.
As
I read it I could hardly keep myself from exclaiming, "That's
true!" or "That's ridiculous!" Of course it does have some very an–
noying defects. Besides those you enumerated, there is still another
point that one won't readily forgive its author, to wit, Tolstoy's
stubborn brashness in treating of things he doesn't know and doesn't
understand. Thus, his pronouncements on syphilis, foundling homes,
women's repugnance to cohabitation and so on are not only debatable
but also show him to be an ignoramus who has never taken the
trouble during the course of
his
long life to read two or three books
written by specialists. Still, these defects fly like feathers before the
wind; considering the story's great qualities you just do not notice
them, or
if
you do, it is only to be peeved that the story did not
