[Below, The Times Literary Supplement offers a thematic analysis of the critical essays collected in Anton Tchekov and Other Essays.]

Mr. Shestov is evidently a remarkable critic, and these essays of his were well worth translating. He is, Mr. Murry tells us in his introduction, fifty years old and has written little. Criticism with him is not a hand-to-mouth business. He does not choose a subject and then to begin to wonder what he can find to say about it. His criticism is philosophy expounded by means of a particular example, and rather hinted at than expounded. One feels that he has strong convictions but is shy of proclaiming them. Mr. Murry says that he is afraid of being dogmatic. If so it is not a cowardly fear, but a desire to leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. He will lead him to the water and trust in his thirst. Mr. Murry tells us also that, when Shestov began to write nearly twenty years ago, "Karl Marx was enthroned and infallible" in Russia, and that he has always been in reaction against dogmatic materialism. His business is to hint a doubt and hesitate dislike of it. Perhaps he hints and hesitates too much; but he seems to us to make his points clearly enough, just because he leaves them to make themselves.

The first essay on Tchekov may reassure those who wonder whether all Russians are like the people in Tchekov. He was, Mr. Shestov says, a specialist in hopelessness. Something must have happened to him which killed hope in him; and after it he wrote about a world from which hope had been removed. "He refused in advance every possible consolation, material or metaphysical. Not even in Tolstoi, who set no great store by philosophical systems, will you find such keenly expressed disgust for every kind of conceptions and ideas as in Tchekov.… Finally, he frees himself from ideas of every kind, and loses even the notion of connexion between the happenings of life." One can see that Mr. Shestov has a sympathy for this utterly destructive criticism, which is hardly criticism but rather a mode of experience. It was something that happened to Tchekov, not a pose that he assumed for artistic purposes; and therefore the fact that he was able to make real works of art out of this mode of experience is itself valuable. He did, in his negative way, prove something—namely, the supremacy of the spirit of man over its own hopelessness. And he proved it all the more surely because he was not trying to do so. He really was hopeless, and wished that he wasn't. There is no luxury of woe in him. He doesn't want to rub the gilt off the gingerbread, but for him there is no gilt on the gingerbread to begin with. And yet he is interesting and must have interested himself, or he would not have continued to write. He had, by no effort of thought, but by mere calamity, attained to the last scepticism, the disbelief in, and, more, the lack of any sense of, any kind of universal whatever. "In all the thoughts, feelings, and ideas," he says himself, "which I form about anything there is wanting the something universal which could bind all these together in one whole." To him every man is merely himself and has nothing in common with other men; and he remains the artist of men seen so.

That is the point; he does remain an artist, just as Schopenhauer remained a philosopher, although he denied all value to the contents of space and the subject matter of thought. But Tchekov is more sincere than Schopenhauer, for he takes no pleasure in his denial; it is something that has happened to him, and he does not even hail it as truth. But still he writes. It is a kind of undramatic tragedy. The worst that can happen to a man has happened to him; and yet the tragic beauty is wrung out of it. Mr. Shestov refuses to judge Tchekov by the moral conclusions that might be drawn from his works, because he knows that in fact they are not drawn. They ought to be devitalizing, but they are not, for there never is any poison in sincerity; and at last he tells us what is Tchekov's secret. "The only philosophy which Tchekov took seriously, and therefore seriously fought, was positivist materialism—just the positivist materialism; the limited materialism, which does not pretend to theoretical completeness." Above all things he hated the conviction that in the face of nature man must "always adapt himself and give way, give way, give way." He seems to submit to it in his stories, but "the submission is but an outward show; under it lies concealed a hard, malignant hatred of the unknown enemy." And with this hatred, Mr. Shestov hints, he proves more than the idealists and metaphysicians ever prove. He proves the irreconcilability of man to this tyranny of things. If there is nothing but adaptation, then the fact remains that man has not adapted himself. Hope and faith may be merely adaptation; but these characters of Tchekov, and Tchekov himself, have neither. They rebel utterly against all illusions that nature may try to impose on them; they will not be adapted; and by their rebellion they prove that adaptation is not everything, that in their case at least "great, unerring Nature once goes wrong." And so with their despair the whole theory of adaptation falls to the ground. They are, in fact, the real martyrs of a faith which they seem not to possess and yet possess more deeply than those who profess it.

That is the conclusion to which Mr. Shestov leads us, but with his peculiar method he leaves us to draw it. Mr. Murry says that he is hardly a philosopher, and yet we think he is nothing else; only with his method he makes the reader philosophize for him. He seems the most complete sceptic; but he is not the cause of scepticism in others. His scepticism is all really an attack on materialism, which itself began by pretending to be scepticism, as tyrants begin by pretending to be demagogues. Materialism pretended to be the free choice of man's mind; but then it told him that he had no choice—that nature itself forced him to believe it. Mr. Shestov tells us that nature forces us to believe nothing. His scepticism, all the more because it seems impartial, is directed against the reigning tyrant. Let us get rid of him at least, and then we can think about a constitution. Above all, he wants to destroy man's sense of status, upon which all his tyrant delusions are based. "Christ knew that men could renounce all things save the right to superiority alone, to superiority over one's neighbours, to that which Nietzsche calls the patent of nobility." He seems to believe that Christ himself did not think it possible to take from men their hope of distinction. But there is inherent in Christianity the doctrine that men must utterly strip themselves of this hope; and this doctrine is what Mr. Shestov preaches. Because of it he is angry with the famous speech of Dostoevsky on Pushkin, which is included in the pages from the journal of an author.