Adrien Sixte

Reading notes

• To A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889. Sumy. §3 Monsieur Sixte, as it may seem, pokes his nose into another's domain

  Adrien Sixte ("г. Сикст,"), the fictional philosopher-scientist and teacher-figure at the center of Bourget's "Le Disciple" -- not a real person. Within the novel's plot, Sixte's materialist doctrine is blamed for corrupting his pupil; Chekhov treats him here as a stand-in example of a "materialist by necessity."

• To A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889. Sumy. §4 the inoculation of children with vices, and the figure of Sixte himself,

  Continues the discussion of Sixte and the novel's staged "psychological experiments" -- the tutor's deliberate inoculation of a pupil with vices, which Chekhov judges wildly exaggerated ("donel'zya utrirovano").

• To A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889. Sumy. §5 just such materialists as Sixte himself.

  Chekhov's argument that spiritualists, too, are "materialists by necessity" like Sixte -- an ironic turn making even the novel's opponents of materialism into materialists by his definition.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 14 May 1889. Sumy. §8 Sixte reading the "Our Father" will touch Evgeny Kochetov,

  Adrien Sixte, the fictional philosopher-scientist at the center of "Le Disciple," already established in the headnote; Chekhov argues that a truly consistent Sixte should, after reading the "Our Father," cry out like Galileo ("Eppur si muove" / "And yet it moves!") rather than simply being moved by the prayer.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 15 May 1889. Sumy. §6 Sixte is an eagle, but Bourget has made a caricature of him.

  Adrien Sixte, the fictional philosopher-scientist at the center of Bourget's "Le Disciple" -- not a real person. Chekhov grants that Bourget may rightly satirize "deviations from the norm" but objects that in caricaturing Sixte's "psychological experiments" he has compromised the scientific type itself, which Chekhov calls "a slander on man and on science."

• To A. S. Suvorin, 15 May 1889. Sumy. §7 it does not follow from this that Sixte is right when he recites the "Our Father,"

  Refers to the scene near the end of "Le Disciple" in which Sixte is shown reciting the Lord's Prayer ("Отче наш"/"Our Father") in an apparent return to religious feeling -- a scene Chekhov treats with irony, arguing that Bourget's novel being popular with Russian readers does not make this moment of Sixte's any more sincere or true.