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But I wish we had had a Tchekoff to answer it. As for this author, he leads his characters to a conveniently deserted house, lights a fire on the hearth, sets water boiling for tea, and in a few pages of charming romance would persuade us that with a few economies in this rural residence, true love may have its course and a successful marriage crown the morning's adventure.
And so he makes life interesting in many varieties, even when his Russian prepossessions lead him far away from our Western moods. Freedom. That is the word here, and also in his method of telling these stories. No one seems to have said to Tchekoff, "Your stories must move, move, move."
Andreyev is considered, to-day, as one of the most brilliant representatives of the new constellation of Russian writers, in which he takes a place immediately next to Tchekoff, whom he resembles in the melancholy tone of his work.
It came so suddenly that it troubled him and was almost a blow to his modesty, which is one of the sympathetic traits of his personality. In fact, there came a time when the attention of the literary world, especially among the younger generation, became so wrapped up in his works that Gorky and Tchekoff sank to a second level.
This idea of the nothingness of life, with its extremes, monstrous and profitless, is often found in the work of Tchekoff. His story "The Kiss" is but a variation of this theme, the absurdity of life.
Unlike Gorky, Andreyev, and Tchekoff, Merezhkovsky was brought up in the midst of comfort and elegance; he received a correct and careful education; fate was solicitous for him, in that it allowed him to develop that spirit of objective observation and calm meditation which permits a man to look down on the spectacle of life, and indulge in philosophical speculations very often divorced from reality.
He sees them especially in a mysterious force: "The Invisible," already studied by Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Tchekoff, and especially by de Maupassant; and he sees them in the unhappy conditions of Russian history, which created a social and political organization favorable only to those who crawl along and not to those who plan.
Under a different set of circumstances those of the war, for instance, so far as concerns a section of the group of which we are speaking there has been a pitiful relapse into mere boredom, cynicism, and inactivity; remote from the passions of the crowd, and unable to give service to a cause in which they disbelieve, some of our cleverest men have provided an English parallel with the vodka-drinking, bridge-playing, and unutterably tired community of highly-developed intellects which Tchekoff describes so brilliantly.
In spite of all, when you look at him closely, you feel that he possesses the essential thing, the sentiment of justice." This love of justice Tchekoff has had occasion to observe even among convicts.
In many European papers there is always to be found a part called the "feuilleton," which usually consists of a serial story, continued from day to day. "Ward No. 6" is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful story that Tchekoff has written.
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