Chekhov - Bourgeois Writers

to A.S. Suvorin

August, 1894


It sometimes happens that one passes a third-class refreshment room on the train and sees a cold fish, cooked long before, and wonders carelessly who wants that unappetizing fish.  And yet undoubtedly that fish is wanted and will be eaten and there are people who will think it nice.  One may say the same of the works of N.  He is a bourgeois writer, writing for the unsophisticated public who travel third class.  For that public Tolstoy and Turgenev are too luxurious, too aristocratic, somewhat alien and not easily digested.  There is a public which enjoys salt beef and horse-radish sauce and does not care for artichokes or asparagus.  Put yourself at this point of view, imagine the grey, dreary courtyard, the educated ladies who look like cooks, the smell of paraffin, the slack interests and tasks -- and you will understand N. and his readers.  He has no color.  He is false because bourgeois writers cannot help but being false.  They are vulgar writers perfected.  The vulgarians sin together with their public, while the bourgeois are hypocritical with them and flatter their narrow virtue.




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