Russia under the Old regime

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holding up a clear mirror to life. To a friend who complained that Chekhov in his stories showed no moral preferences, the writer replied:

Your criticize me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideals, and so on. You desire me, in depicting horse thieves to say: horse-stealing is an evil. But this has been known for a long time without me. Let juries judge horse thieves. My job it is only to show what kind of people they are. I write: you deal with horse thieves then know that these are not poor people but well-fed ones, that they are members of a cult and that for them stealing horses is not theft but a passion. Of course, it would be nice to combine art with preaching, but for me it is extremely difficult to do so and indeed for technical reasons virtually impossible.2' And Tolstoy put the matter succinctly in a letter to a fellow-writer:

The aims of the artist are incommensurable (as mathematicians might say) with social goals. The goal of the artist lies not in solving a question in an indisputable manner, but in making people love life in its infinite, eternally inexhaustible manifestations.28

The quarrel had far greater import than might appear from its literary context. It was not over aesthetics but over the freedom of the creative artist - and, ultimately, that of every human being - to be himself. The radical intelligentsia, in struggling against a regime which had traditionally upheld the principle of compulsory state service, began to develop a service mentality of its own. The belief that literature and art, and to a somewhat lesser extent scholarship and science, had a primary responsibility to society became axiomatic in Russian left-wing circles. Social Democrats of both Bolshevik and Menshevik persuasion held on to it through thick and thin; and hence it was not surprising that when they came to power and got hold of the apparatus of repression which allowed them to put their theories into practice, the Communists soon deprived Russian culture of that freedom of expression which it had managed to win for itself under the imperial regime. Thus the intelligentsia turned on itself, and in the name of justice for society throttled society's voice.