But why these torments? Throw up the oars and begin a new life. _Impossible._ While no answer comes down from heaven, Tregovin will not throw up the oars, will not begin a new life. In Tchekhov's work, only young, very young and inexperienced people speak of a new life. They are always dreaming of happiness, regeneration, light, joy. They fly head-long into the flame, and are burned like silly butterflies. In _The Sea-Gull,_ Nina Zaryechnaya and Trepliev, in other works other heroes, men and women alike--all are seeking for something, yearning for something, but not one of them does that which he desires. Each one lives in isolation; each is wholly absorbed in his life, and is indifferent to the lives of others. And the strange fate of Tchekhov's heroes is that they strain to the last limit of their inward powers, but there are no visible results at all. They are all pitiable. The woman takes snuff, dresses slovenly, wears her hair loose, is uninteresting. The man is irritable, grumbling, takes to drink, bores every one about him. They act, they speak--always out of season. They cannot, I would even say they do not want to, adapt the outer world to themselves. Matter and energy unite according to their own laws;--people live according to their own, as though matter and energy had no existence at all. In this Tchekhov's intellectuals do not differ from illiterate peasants and the half-educated bourgeois. Life in the manor is the same as in the valley farm, the same as in the village. Not one believes that by changing his outward conditions he would change his fate as well. Everywhere reigns an unconscious but deep and ineradicable conviction that our will must be directed towards ends which have nothing in common with the organised life of mankind. Worse still, the organisation appears to be the enemy of the will and of man. One must spoil, devour, destroy, ruin. To think out things quietly, to anticipate the future--that is impossible. One must beat one's head, beat one's head eternally against the wall. And to what purpose? Is there any purpose at all? Is it a beginning or an end? Is it possible to see in it the warrant of a new and inhuman creation, a creation out of the void? 'I do not know' was the old professor's answer to Katy. 'I do not know' was Tchekhov's answer to the sobs of those tormented unto death. With these words, and only these, can an essay upon Tchekhov end. _Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute._ THE GIFT OF PROPHECY (For the twenty-fifth anniversary of F. M. Dostoevsky's death.) I