place "above the clouds" to laugh and weep with scorn and with compassion.
I am afraid that he was not a "joiner." He was not easily enlisted in Great Causes. He even shrank back suspiciously from membership in a literary "union." It reminded him, he said, of a German who had taught a cat, a mouse and a merlin to eat from one plate. He wrote for a conservative paper; and when some one, scenting popular sympathies in his stories, asked him if he were not slipping over toward liberalism, he replied that the question constrained him to consult his "innards." After consultation he reported that he was neither liberal nor conservative, but against pedants, nincompoops, madmen of all stripes. I think our new generation is beginning to turn toward that unnamed party which originates in negations, yet after all does come to stand for something quite definite.
Open the volume called "The Life and Letters" and you will find out quickly enough what Chekhov stood for, what serious purpose he had, in what sort of "practical" activities he was willing to be enlisted.
Descended from a peasant ancestry, familiar through his impecunious and hardworking boyhood with the Russian village, Chekhov knew intimately and revolted from the repulsive side of the Russian peasant: his ignorance, his boorishness, his inebriety, his gluttony, his dishonesty, his unbridled passionateness, his brutality, his chronic habit of slapping children in the face and clouting menials over the head with a shoemaker's last. All that aspect of "Asiatic" manners he observed and painted with merciless fidelity in scores of stories, for which he is credited with being the first unsentimental realist to deal with Russian village life.
