mmon and very important characteristic:
they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it,
too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being,
that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father,
who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.... And we?
We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that--nothing at all.... Flog
us and we can do more! We have neither immediate nor remote aims,
and in our soul there is a great empty space. We have no politics,
we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid
of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and
blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears
nothing cannot be an artist....

'... You think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not
to conceal from myself my disease and not to deceive myself, and not
to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the
ideas of the 'sixties and so on.'

That was written in 1892. When we remember all the strange literary
effort gathered round about that year in the West--Symbolism, the
_Yellow Book_, Art for Art's sake--and the limbo into which it has been
thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own
despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was
plunging with enthusiasm into one _cul de sac_ after another, incapable
of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West,
had achieved a clear vision and a sense of perspective.

To-day we begin to feel how intimately Tchehov belongs to us; to-morrow
we may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. A genius will
always be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned with
the genius of Tchehov we must accept the inevitable. We must analyse and
seek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that since
Tchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, a
vast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable.
Writers who would be modern and ignore Tchehov's achievement are,
however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists,
merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of a
profession like any other; for Tchehov is a standard by which modern
literary effort must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry who
is not sufficiently single-minded to ap