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 inthe great Russian novelists. Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekhov madeexplicit in their works conceptions of the world which yield nothing indefiniteness to the philosophic schemes of the great dogmatists of old,and perhaps may be regarded as even superior to them in that by theirnature they emphasise a relation of which the professional philosopheris too often careless—the intimate connection between philosophy andlife. They attacked fearlessly and with a high devotion of which weEnglish readers are slowly becoming sensible the fundamental problem ofall philosophy worthy the name. They were preoccupied with the answerto the question: Is life worth living? And the great assumption whichthey made, at least in the beginning of the quest, was that to livelife must mean to live it wholly. To live was not to pass by life onthe other side, not suppress the deep or even the dark passions of bodyor soul, not to lull by some lying and narcotic phrase the urgentquestions of the mind, not to deny life. To them life was the sum ofall human potentialities. They accepted them all, loved them all, andstrove to find a place for them all in a pattern in which none shouldbe 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 heldto 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 supremeattempt to wrest a hope for mankind out of the abyss of the imaginedfuture; and Tchekhov died when his most delicate fingers had beenfinally eager in lighting The Cherry Orchard with the tremulous glintof laughing tears, which may perhaps be the ultimate secret of theprocess which leaves us all bewildered and full of pity and wonder.
There were great men and great philosophers. It may be that thiscruelly conscious world will henceforward recognise no man as greatunless he has greatly sought: for to seek and not to think is theessence of philosophy. To have greatly sought, I say, should be themeasure of man's greatness in the strange world of which there will beonly a tense, sorrowful, disillusioned remnant when this grim ordealis over. It should be so: and we, who are, according to our strength,faithful to humanity, must also strive according to our strength tomake it so. We are not, and we shall not be, great men: but we havethe elements of greatness. We have an impulse to honesty, to thinkhonestly, to see honestly, and to speak the truth to ourselves in thelonely hours. It is only an impulse, which, in these barren, bitter,years, so quickly withers and dies. It is