figure
Ham
also: Хам
Noah's son who, in Genesis 9:20-27, sees his father lying drunk and naked and tells his brothers instead of covering him, and is cursed for it; Chekhov uses him as the exemplar of a writer who notices only a subject's degrading flaw while losing sight of their real achievement -- "writers ought not to imitate Ham."
Reading notes
- To Ye. M. Shavrova, 16 September 1891. Moscow. §3 Ham noticed only that his father was a drunk
The crux of Chekhov's parable, and the letter's real thesis about criticism and fairness. Chekhov is not retelling Genesis for its own sake: he is building an argument that a writer who notices only a subject's degrading detail (the professor's bald spot, the gynecologist's supposed cynicism) while missing what makes that subject remarkable (the ark, the saved world) is doing exactly what Ham did to Noah -- and, Chekhov says flatly two sentences later, "writers ought not to imitate Ham." The parable is the letter's rhetorical center, condensing the whole argument of loc. 3 into a single named exemplum.