’Tell me honestly who of my contemporaries—­that is, men between thirty and forty-five—­have given the world one single drop of alcohol?...  Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull time....  The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion.  We lack “something,” that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void.  Let me remind you that the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common 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 apply the standard to himself is of no particular account.