person
Diogenes of Sinope
Diogenes
also: Диоген
The Cynic philosopher famous for flouting social convention through deliberate acts of public impropriety, most famously living in a barrel and confronting Alexander the Great.
Reading notes
- Ward No. 6 §144 Diogenes lived in a tub
Andrei Yefimych's stock philosophical example -- that the Cynic Diogenes achieved happiness inside a barrel, without possessions -- opens the story's central philosophical debate; Ivan Dmitrich's immediate, furious rejection of the example ("Your Diogenes was a blockhead") sets the terms of the whole exchange that follows through section 206.
- To A. S. Lazarev, 1 November 1889. Moscow. §10 Diogenes
The Cynic philosopher famous for his radical poverty and asceticism, invoked here as a byword for being poor.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 8 September 1891. Moscow. §6 Diogenes spat in men's beards
Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher famous for flouting convention through deliberate public impropriety. Chekhov's analogy is precise and unflattering to Tolstoy: Diogenes could spit in men's beards and insult them because his fame and social position placed him beyond ordinary consequence, and Chekhov argues Tolstoy occupies the identical position relative to doctors and "great questions" -- untouchable, and therefore, in Chekhov's view, licensed toward a rudeness an ordinary person could never get away with. The comparison recurs elsewhere in Chekhov's letters of these years as a settled complaint about the moral privileges of genius.