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.
Postscript.—Leon Shestov is fifty years old. He was born at Kiev, and studied at the university there. His first book was written in 1898. As a writer of small production, he has made his way to recognition slowly: but now he occupies a sure position as one of the most delicate and individual of modern Russian critics. The essays contained in this volume are taken from the fourth and fifth works in the following list:—
1898. Shakespeare and his Critic, Brandes.
1900. Good in the teaching of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching.
1903. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy.
1905. The Apotheosis of Groundlessness: An Essay on Dogmatism.
1908. Beginnings and Ends.
1912. Great Vigils.
ANTON TCHEKHOV
(CREATION FROM THE VOID)
Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute.
(CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.)
I
Tchekhov is dead; therefore we may now speak freely of him. For to speak of an artist means to disentangle and reveal the 'tendency' hidden in his works, an operation not always permissible when the subject is still living. Certainly he had a reason for hiding himself, and of course the reason was serious and important. I believe many felt it, and that it was partly on this account that we have as yet had no proper appreciation of Tchekhov. Hitherto in analysing his works the critics have confined themselves to common-place and cliché. Of course they knew they were wrong; but anything is better than to extort the truth from a living person. Mihailovsky alone attempted to approach closer to the source of Tchekhov's creation, and as everybody knows, turned away from it with aversion and even with disgust. Here, by the way, the deceased critic might have convinced himself once again of the extravagance of the so-called theory of 'art for art's sake.' Every artist has his definite task, his life's work, to which he devotes all his forces. A tendency is absurd when it endeavours to take the place of talent, and to cover impotence and lack of content, or when it is borrowed from the stock of ideas which happen to be in demand at the moment. 'I defend ideals, therefore every one must give me his sympathies.' Such pretences we often see made in literature, and the notorious controversy concerning 'art for art's sake' was evidently maintained upon the double meaning given to the word 'tendency' by its opponents. Some wished to believe that a writer can be saved by the nobility of his tendency; others feared that a tendency would bind them to the performance of alien tasks. Much ado about nothing: ready-made ideas will never endow mediocrity with talent; on the contrary, an original writer will at all costs set himself his own task. And Tchekhov had his own business, though there were critics who said that he was the servant of art for its own sake, and even compared him to a bird, carelessly flying. To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Tchekhov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Tchekhov was doing one thing alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes. Herein, I hold, lies the essence of his creation. Hitherto it has been little spoken of. The reasons are quite intelligible. In ordinary language what Tchekhov was doing is called crime, and is visited by condign punishment. But how can a man of talent be punished? Even Mihailovsky, who more than once in his lifetime gave an example of merciless severity, did not raise his hand against Tchekhov. He warned his readers and pointed out the 'evil fire' which he had noticed in Tchekhov's eyes. But he went no further. Tchekhov's immense talent overcame the strict and rigorous critic. It may be, however, that Mihailovsky's own position in literature had more than a little to do with the comparative mildness of his sentence. The younger generation had listened to him uninterruptedly for thirty years, and his word had been law. But afterwards every one was bored with eternally repeating: 'Aristides is just, Aristides is right.' The younger generation