Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.) ANTON TCHEKHOV AND OTHER ESSAIS BY LEON SHESTOV TRANSLATED BY S. KOTELIANSKY AND J. M. MURRY MAUNSEL AND CO. LTD. DUBLIN AND LONDON 1916 CONTENTS ANTON TCHEKHOV (CREATION FROM THE VOID) THE GIFT OF PROPHECY PENULTIMATE WORDS THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE INTRODUCTION It is not to be denied that Russian thought is chiefly manifested in the great Russian novelists. Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekhov made explicit in their works conceptions of the world which yield nothing in definiteness to the philosophic schemes of the great dogmatists of old, and perhaps may be regarded as even superior to them in that by their nature they emphasise a relation of which the professional philosopher is too often careless--the intimate connection between philosophy and life. They attacked fearlessly and with a high devotion of which we English readers are slowly becoming sensible the fundamental problem of all philosophy worthy the name. They were preoccupied with the answer to the question: Is life worth living? And the great assumption which they made, at least in the beginning of the quest, was that to live life must mean to live it wholly. To live was not to pass by life on the other side, not suppress the deep or even the dark passions of body or soul, not to lull by some lying and narcotic phrase the urgent questions of the mind, not to deny life. To them life was the sum of all human potentialities. They accepted them all, loved them all, and strove to find a place for them all in a pattern in which none should be distorted. They failed, but not one of them fainted by the way, and there was not one of them but with his latest breath bravely held to his belief that there was a way and that the way might be found. Tolstoi went out alone to die, yet more manifestly than he had lived, a seeker after the secret; death overtook Dostoevsky in his supreme attempt to wrest a hope for mankind out of the abyss of the imagined future; and Tchekhov died when his most delicate fingers had been finally eager in lighting _The Cherry Orchard_ with the tremulous glint of laughing tears, which may perhaps be the ultimate secret of the process which leaves us all bewildered and full of pity and wonder.