Gary Morson: Chekhov's enlightenment
Chekhov was no aristocrat, as were Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. He cultivated neither their refined manners nor the equally meticulous “anti-manners” of the radicals. Unlike Chernyshevsky and Stalin, he was neither a priest’s son nor a seminarian, the most typical origin for a radical. The son of a failed shopkeeper from a remote town, he was always unapologetically concerned with money, down to earth in his manners, and practical.. Chekhov never forgot that his grandfather had been a serf who had saved enough to buy his family’s freedom, but he refused to carry a chip on his shoulder. He spoke of self-pity and the consciousness of victimhood in a tone verging on disgust. Those emotions belonged to the servile consciousness he wanted to rise above.
What sort of Russian writer was he? He had no solution to the ultimate questions. With no “general idea” to teach, wasn’t he more like a talented Frenchman or Englishman born in the wrong place? No country ever has valued literature more highly than Russia. When Tolstoy published Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky enthused that at last the existence of the Russian people had been justified! Can anyone imagine an English critic thinking England’s right to exist was in question or discovering it in Bleak House?
Nations, it seemed, live in order to produce great literature, and literature exists to reveal great truths. Science, philosophy, and the other arts are all very well, but nothing rivals poetry and fiction. For Russians, literature played the same role as Scripture did for the ancient Hebrews when it was still possible to add books to the Bible.
Boris Pasternak proclaimed: “a book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience—and nothing else!” The radical writer Nicholas Chernyshevsky explained that, whereas European countries have developed an intellectual “division of labor,” Russia concentrates its energies on literature:
For that reason . . . literature plays a greater role in our intellectual life than French, German, and English literature play in the intellectual life of their respective countries, and it bears greater responsibilities. . . . Russian literature has the direct duty of taking an interest in the subject matter that has elsewhere passed into the special competence of other fields of intellectual activity.
How many people can name a Russian philosopher, economist, or sociologist? The reason it is hard is that talented Russians with something to say wrote novels or, at least, literary criticism. If you had an idea about psychology, you would write a book on Dostoevsky. Philosophers of sex commented on Tolstoy.
Even today, Russians treat great writers as soothsayers... Read more:
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Chekhov-s-enlightenment-7471
