he belonged to no political party, could be
nothing but a liberal in the noblest and greatest sense of the word.
One also realized that he was not the pessimist that he was once
believed to be, but a writer who suffered for his ideal and who
awakened by his works a desire to emerge from the twilight of life
that he depicted.

To some he even appeared as an enchanted admirer of the future
progress of humanity. Did he not often say, while admiring his own
little garden: "Do you know that in three or four hundred years the
entire earth will be a flourishing garden? How wonderful it will be
to live then!" And did he not pronounce these proud words: "Man must
be conscious of being superior to the lions, tigers, stars, in
short, to all nature. We are already superior and great people, and,
when we come to know all the strength of human genius, we shall be
comparable to the gods."

These great hopes did not prevent him from painting with a vigorous
brush the nothingness of mankind, not only at a certain given moment
and under certain circumstances, but always and everywhere. Is this
a paradox? No. If he did not doubt progress, he would be most
pessimistic, if I may so express myself. He would suffer from that
earthly pessimism, in face of which reason is weak; the pessimism
which manifests itself by a hopeless sadness in face of the
stupidity of life and the idea of death.

"I, my friend, am afraid of life, and do not understand it," says
one of Tchekoff's heroes. "When, lying on the grass, I examine a
lady-bird, it seems to me that its life is nothing but a texture of
horrors, and I see myself in it.... Everything frightens me because
I understand neither the motive nor the end of things. I understand
neither persons nor things. If you understand I congratulate you.

"When one looks at the blue sky for a long time, one's thoughts and
one's soul unite mysteriously in a feeling of solitude.... For a
moment one feels the loneliness of the dead, and the enigma of
hopeless and terrible life."

This universal hopelessness; this sadness, provoked by the
platitudes of existence compared with the unrelenting lessons of
death, of which Tchekoff speaks with such a nervous terror, can be
found in almost all the works of the best known Russian writers. We
find it in Byronian Lermontov, who sees nothing in life but "une
plaisanterie;" in Dostoyevsky, who has written so many striking
pages of realism on the bitterness of a life with