Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays #266774

It is not to be denied that Russian thought is chiefly manifested in the great Russian novelists. Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekhov made explicit in their works conceptions of the world which yield nothing in definiteness to the philosophic schemes of the great dogmatists of old, and perhaps may be regarded as even superior to them in that by their nature they emphasise a relation of which the professional philosopher is too often careless - the intimate connection between philosophy and life. They attacked fearlessly and with a high devotion of which we English readers are slowly becoming sensible the fundamental problem of all philosophy worthy the name. They were preoccupied with the answer to the question: Is life worth living? And the great assumption which they made, at least in the beginning of the quest, was that to live life must mean to live it wholly.