: Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays by Shestov Lev Koteliansky S S Samuel Solomonovitch Translator Murry John Middleton Translator - Philosophy; Russian literature History and criticism; Chekhov Anton Pavlovich 1860-1904; Dostoyevsky Fyodor 1821-1881

@FreeBooks

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

ANTON TCHEKHOV THE GIFT OF PROPHECY PENULTIMATE WORDS THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

INTRODUCTION

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.

Not the least of Shestov's merits is that he is alive to this truth in its twofold working. He is aware of himself as a soul seeking an answer to its own question; and he is aware of other souls on the same quest. As in his own case he knows that he has in him something truer than names and divisions and authorities, which will live in spite of them, so towards others he remembers that all that they wrote or thought or said is precious and permanent in so far as it is the manifestation of the undivided soul seeking an answer to its question. To know a man's work for this, to have divined the direct relation between his utterance and his living soul, is criticism: to make that relation between one's own soul and one's speech direct and true is creation. In essence they are the same: creation is a man's lonely attempt to fix an intimacy with his own strange and secret soul, criticism is the satisfaction of the impulse of loneliness to find friends and secret sharers among the souls that are or have been. As creation drives a man to the knowledge of his own intolerable secrets, so it drives him to find others with whom he may whisper of the things which he has found. Other criticism than this is, in the final issue, only the criminal and mad desire to enforce material order in a realm where all is spiritual and vague and true. It is only the jealous protest of the small soul against the great, of the slave against the free.

Against this smallness and jealousy Shestov has set his face. To have done so does not make him a great writer; but it does make him a real one. He is honest and he is not deceived. But honesty, unless a man is big enough to bear it, and often even when he is big enough to bear it, may make him afraid. Where angels fear to tread, fools rush in: but though the folly of the fool is condemned, some one must enter, lest a rich kingdom be lost to the human spirit. Perhaps Shestov will seem at times too fearful. Then we must remember that Shestov is Russian in another sense than that I have tried to make explicit above. He is a citizen of a country where the human spirit has at all times been so highly prized that the name of thinker has been a key to unlock not merely the mind but the heart also. The Russians not only respect, but they love a man who has thought and sought for humanity, and, I think, their love but seldom stops 'this side idolatry.' They will exalt a philosopher to a god; they are even able to make of materialism a religion. Because they are so loyal to the human spirit they will load it with chains, believing that they are garlands. And that is why dogmatism has never come so fully into its own as in Russia.

When Shestov began to write nearly twenty years ago, Karl Marx was enthroned and infallible. The fear of such tyrannies has never departed from Shestov. He has fought against them so long and so persistently--even in this book one must always remember that he is face to face with an enemy of which we English have no real conception--that he is at times almost unnerved by the fear that he too may be made an authority and a rule. I do not think that this ultimate hesitation, if understood rightly, diminishes in any way from the interest of his writings: but it does suggest that there may be awaiting him a certain paralysis of endeavour. There is indeed no absolute truth of which we need take account other than the living personality, and absolute truths are valuable only in so far as they are seen to be necessary manifestations of this mysterious reality. Nevertheless it is in the nature of man, if not to live by absolute truths, at least to live by enunciating them; and to hesitate to satisfy this imperious need is to have resigned a certain measure of one's own creative strength. We may trust to the men of insight who will follow us to read our dogmatisms, our momentary angers, and our unshakable convictions, in terms of our personalities, if these shall be found worthy of their curiosity or their love. And it seems to me that Shestov would have gained in strength if he could have more firmly believed that there would surely be other Shestovs who would read him according to his own intention. But this, I also know, is a counsel of perfection: the courage which he has not would not have been acquired by any intellectual process, and its possession would have deprived him of the courage which he has. As dogmatism in Russia enjoys a supremacy of which we can hardly form an idea, so a continual challenge to its claims demands in the challenger a courage which it is hard for us rightly to appreciate.

I have not written this foreword in order to prejudice the issue. Shestov will, no doubt, be judged by English readers according to English standards, and I wish no more than to suggest that his greatest quality is one which has become rare among us, and that his peculiarities are due to Russian conditions which have long since ceased to obtain in England. The Russians have much to teach us, and the only way we shall learn, or even know, what we should accept and what reject, is to take count as much as we can of the Russian realities. And the first of these and the last is that in Russia the things of the spirit are held in honour above all others. Because of this the Russian soul is tormented by problems to which we have long been dead, and to which we need to be alive again. J. M. M.

ANTON TCHEKHOV

R?signe-toi, mon coeur, dors ton sommeil de brute.

Yet the just Aristides was right this time too, as he was right when he gave his warning against Dostoevsky. Now that Tchekhov is no more, we may speak openly. Take Tchekhov's stories, each one separately, or better still, all together; look at him at work. He is constantly, as it were, in ambush, to watch and waylay human hopes. He will not miss a single one of them, not one of them will escape its fate. Art, science, love, inspiration, ideals--choose out all the words with which humanity is wont, or has been in the past, to be consoled or to be amused--Tchekhov has only to touch them and they instantly wither and die. And Tchekhov himself faded, withered and died before our eyes. Only his wonderful art did not die--his art to kill by a mere touch, a breath, a glance, everything whereby men live and wherein they take their pride. And in this art he was constantly perfecting himself, and he attained to a virtuosity beyond the reach of any of his rivals in European literature. Maupassant often had to strain every effort to overcome his victim. The victim often escaped from Maupassant, though crushed and broken, yet with his life. In Tchekhov's hands, nothing escaped death.

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Login to post a comment!