Chekhov is often disliked because he seems indifferent. I think his comic sense is hard to understand because we live in a period so much like his. We more or less feel that everything is wrong, that society has ossified, and that major change is just around the corner. We divide society into a calcimined majority and a vigorous, youthful vanguard. And no one is particularly delighted by art which says that his most serious hopes and fears are in some way comical. So we recreate Chekhov in our image, make him either a prophet of apocalyptic change, a critic of a dead society, an eloquent voice of hopelessness and stoicism, or all of these.

WHAT DOES Chekhov give us that is positive? Of course, he hardly owes us anything positive. But I think that, like Johnson, he places great value on getting the mind off the mind through work. Johnson used to quote Burton, "Be not idle, be not solitary," and write to himself, "Despair is a sin." But once religious comfort, however rational, gives place to "the work ethic," the solution takes on the appearance of romantic oversimplification. Work, like everything else-socialism, democracy, love-was to Chekhov only a preconceived notion which could not renew life by itself, and which, if clung to stupidly as a panacea (no matter how elaborated), would seize the spirit, plunge it into a useless, deadening cycle of paroxysm and exhaustion, ending in the destruction of the person rather than the renovation of society. Bernard Shaw took Ania from The Cherry Orchard, renamed her Ellic Dunn, placed her in a crazy house of supine elegance and overheated, strangling dreams, and showed that Heartbreak House, or cultured, leisured Europe before the War, would split up on the rocks of apocalyptic change. That bitter play, Shaw's greatest, ends with the romantics and neurotic socialites and realists wishing for the return of raiding bombers-the romantics for the fun of it, the realists for the irrevocable annihilation of it Chekhov does not take refuge in the modern romanticisms of self-despising, indifferent contempt of social evils, or renovatory violence. Even as the axes fall on the cherry trees in his last play, he cannot point with any assurance to juvenescence.

I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist. Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in merchants' houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation. . . . There is no civilization, no happiness, if the woods fall under the axe, if the climate is harsh and flat, if the people are harsh and flat-the future is terrible!

There is no evidence to suggest he possessed either unbearable horror or uncontaminated love for life. He saw that much had stagnated, but not everything; that much needed replacing, but not everything; that even as much good was created, much good would be lost. Perhaps he would have agreed with Nietzsche (in this only) that the voice of beauty was a quiet one. Chekhov was a poet who made beauty without violence; poets today must make beauty out of violence. His plays are comedies because their people suffer not from external evil or forces, and not from a mixture of nobility and tragic error leading through suffering to transcendental knowledge and sympathy, but only from their own romantic fancies. The plays are comedies because like all comedies they yearn for new energy and finally see glimpses of it. But Chekhov does not offer hope surreptitiously. He merely says that despite all of this, happiness may be possible. Comedy does not have to end happily, only be true to itself.

Above all, be cheerful: don't look at life so much as a problem-it is, most likely, far simpler. And whether it-life, of which we know nothing-is worth the agonizing reflections which wear out our Russian wits, is a question.

Everyone is like Ivanov-"a gentleman, a University man, and not remarkable in any way." And everyone can only say with Ivanov, "I do not understand." That is the Prologue and Epilogue of each of the comedies of the man who once confided to a close friend, "My ambition is to be idle and love a fat girl."