The Logos Scripture · The Book of Chekhov
The Book of Chekhov 5 · Written by himself, from the letters and Sakhalin Island
Anton Chekhov, born at Taganrog in 1860, died at Badenweiler in Germany in 1904, aged forty-four, of tuberculosis. His grandfather was a serf who saved and bought himself and his family out. His father kept a grocer’s shop, was intensely devout, and beat his sons; the shop failed, the father fled to Moscow, and Chekhov was left alone in the town at sixteen, selling things and tutoring to finish the gymnasium before going to Moscow himself. He qualified in medicine in 1884 and practised all his life, often without payment; he served as an unpaid district doctor during the cholera, organised famine relief in 1892, and built schools. In 1890, at thirty and already ill, he travelled some thousands of versts to the penal island of Sakhalin, had census cards printed at his own expense, questioned nearly ten thousand people one at a time, and made from it the book Sakhalin Island. He wrote several hundred stories and four plays. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: the letters and Sakhalin Island. Squeezing the slave out drop by drop, at the end of chapter one, is from the letter to Suvorin of January 1889. You confuse solving the problem with correctly posing the question; only the second is obligatory for the artist, in chapter two, is from the letter to Suvorin of 27 October 1888. The holy of holies passage in chapter three is from the letter to Pleshcheyev of 4 October 1888, and the words are his; in that same letter he writes that the people he fears are those who look for his tendency between the lines and are determined to make him out a liberal or a conservative. Not his judge but an impartial witness, at the end of chapter five, is also from the Suvorin letters. This is the second book in the scripture from a person who did not make his case in argument, but for a different reason than Brahms (cf. The Book of Brahms): Brahms left very few words and Chekhov left an enormous correspondence, all of it reasoning. He was a physician, trained in evidence, and half of what makes this volume stand is that. It brings three things. First, the axiom of questioning as it lands on a human life. The second article says that how you ask is how you take, and what you ask determines what you see (cf. The Covenant 2.1). Chekhov made that a rule of composition and put it harder than the covenant does: the writer owes a correctly posed question and does not owe an answer. Verses 2.10 to 2.12 give the reason: if you have the answer first you were already selecting when you selected your material, and what you produce is not men but your answer wearing clothes. Second, chapter four. He went to count. Sakhalin was not a tour, it was a census. So long as a man has not gone and counted, what he says about the matter is himself (cf. The Covenant 1.3). The drawing rooms of Moscow debated penal labour for decades and not one debater had been to the island — the Order holds that verse to be more practical than any exhortation to examine anywhere in this scripture. Third, chapter five. No book here had yet refused, to its face, the sentence that suffering has a meaning. The only Russian in the canon was Sakharov (cf. The Book of Sakharov), and Chekhov is the Russian least willing to make a doctrine of suffering: twenty years of medicine and he did not find that it made anyone clean, so he would not speak well of it. Verse 5.10 is the weight of the whole book — that sentence is not a consolation, it is a receipt made out to the man who did nothing. The Order records two things. First, he never made not answering into a teaching of its own; 2.15 is his measure — no answer owed, but a question owed untrimmed. Second, he said openly that he did not know what should be done, and was not ashamed of it. That agrees with the ninth chapter of the Rule: what you choose to hold, you carry with its label on (cf. The Rule of the Order 9.14).