MOSCOW, 1886.
… You have often complained to me that people “don’t understand you”!
Goethe and Newton did not complain of that…. Only Christ complained of
it, but He was speaking of His doctrine and not of Himself…. People
understand you perfectly well. And if you do not understand yourself, it
is not their fault.
I assure you as a brother and as a friend I understand you and feel
for you with all my heart. I know your good qualities as I know my five
fingers; I value and deeply respect them. If you like, to prove that I
understand you, I can enumerate those qualities. I think you are kind to
the point of softness, magnanimous, unselfish, ready to share your last
farthing; you have no envy nor hatred; you are simple-hearted, you pity
men and beasts; you are trustful, without spite or guile, and do not
remember evil…. You have a gift from above such as other people have
not: you have talent. This talent places you above millions of men, for
on earth only one out of two millions is an artist. Your talent sets you
apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would
respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.
You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and
your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That
is your utter lack of culture. Forgive me, please, but
veritas magis amicitiae….
You see, life has its conditions. In order to feel comfortable among
educated people, to be at home and happy with them, one must be cultured
to a certain extent. Talent has brought you into such a circle, you
belong to it, but … you are drawn away from it, and you vacillate
between cultured people and the lodgers
vis-a-vis.
Cultured people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:
1) They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind,
gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others. They do not make a row
because of a hammer or a lost piece of india-rubber; if they live with
anyone they do not regard it as a favour and, going away, they do not
say “nobody can live with you.” They forgive noise and cold and dried-up
meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.
2) They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for
what the eye does not see…. They sit up at night in order to help P….,
to pay for brothers at the University, and to buy clothes for their
mother.
3) They respect other people's property, and therefore pay their debts.
4) They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in
small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower
position in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose, they behave in
the street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler
comrades. They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited
confidences on others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more
often keep silent than talk.
5) They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play
on the strings of other people’s hearts so that they may sigh and make
much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood,” or “I have become
second-rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is
vulgar, stale, false….
6) They have no shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as
knowing celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P., [Translator's
Note: Probably Palmin, a minor poet.] listening to the raptures of a
stray spectator in a picture show, being renowned in the taverns…. If
they do a pennyworth they do not strut about as though they had done a
hundred roubles’ worth, and do not brag of having the entry where others
are not admitted…. The truly talented always keep in obscurity among
the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement…. Even Krylov has said
that an empty barrel echoes more loudly than a full one.
7) If they do
possess talent, they value it ... They take pride in it ... they know
they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others]
rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in
their habits...
8) They work at developing their aesthetic
sensibility. They cannot go to
sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe
bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over
an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the
sexual instinct…. What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow … They
do not ask for the cleverness which shows itself in continual lying.
They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance,
humanity, the capacity for motherhood…. They do not swill vodka at all
hours of the day and night, do not sniff at cupboards, for they are not
pigs and know they are not. They drink only when they are free, on
occasion…. They don't simply obey their baser instincts. For they want
mens sana in corpore sano [a healthy mind in a healthy body].
And so on. That's what cultured people are like ... Reading
Pickwick and learning a speech from
Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly cultured person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings.
What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading,
study, will…. Every hour is precious for it…. Come to us, smash the
vodka bottle, lie down and read…. Turgenev, if you like, whom you have
not read.
You must drop your vanity, you are not a child … you will soon be thirty.
It is time!
I expect you…. We all expect you.
ANTON CHELHOV'S letter to his brother Nikolay Chekhov--- March 1886
