654
PARTISAN REVIEW
ter of 1888, "I always insist that it is not the artist's business to answer
narrowly specialized issues .... For specialized issues we have the
specialist; it's their business to pass judgment about the peasant
communes, the fate of capitalism, the damage of heavy drinking,
boots, or women's ailments. As for the artist, he must pass judgment
only about matters he can grasp.... Anyone who insists the artist's
domain covers all the answers . . . has never written or has had no
experience with images.... You are right in requiring from the art–
ist a conscious attitude towards his work, but you confuse two as–
pects:
the answer to a problem and the correct presentation ofa problem.
Only
the second is an obligation for the artist."
Chekhov was said by his contemporaries to have had an am–
biguous attitude towards what one of them called "the
burning ques–
tions
of the day," and he was proud that his characters were not
created out of preconceived ideas or intellectual assumptions. This
does not mean that he excluded social/political questions from his
plays. The debates over the future that permeate
Three Sisters
were
undoubtedly overheard by Chekhov in Moscow drawing rooms, and
the original speeches of the revolutionary student Trofimov in
The
Cherry Orchard
were said to be so inflammatory that the play was
threatened with suppression until he agreed to modify them . On the
other hand, these opinions are never the property of the playwright;
they belong to the people who express them and exist, in Aristote–
lean fashion, to reveal character. In short, Chekhov introduced
political, social, and philosophical discussions into his work, because
this was the reality he was eager to present. But he was careful never
to take sides or hint at solutions. As he put it in his favorite court–
room metaphor, "It is the duty of the judge to put the questions to
the jury accurately, and it is for members of the jury to make up
their minds, each according to his own taste."
Just as he tried to protect his characters from conventional
moralistic interpretations of their behavior, so he tried to preserve
their integrity as complicated human beings against narrow ideo–
logical interpretations of them as figures in a political chess game.
Chekhov provided his characters with class roles, political convic–
tions, and philosophic attitudes, but he never entirely defined them
by these elements, even when they wished thus to define themselves.
For G_hekhov, the political animal and the suffering human often
seem mutually incompatible.
It was because of their desire to protect the privacy of the in–
dividual from public impositions that both Ibsen and Chekhov
