person
Paul Bourget
Bourget
also: Бурже, Paul Charles Joseph Bourget
French novelist and critic (1852-1935), author of the 1889 novel "Le Disciple" ("The Disciple"), which Chekhov read and discusses at length in this letter -- praising Bourget's command of scientific method while dismissing his polemic against the "materialist direction" in thought as incoherent.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889. Sumy. §3 Bourget is a talented, very intelligent and educated
man.
Paul Bourget, the French novelist and critic (1852-1935), author of "Le Disciple"; Chekhov praises his unusual command of the natural-sciences method while dismissing academic "psychology" as a pseudo-science akin to alchemy.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889. Sumy. §7 In a word, Bourget's campaign is incomprehensible to me.
Restates Chekhov's core objection to Bourget's "campaign" (поход) against the materialist direction -- that it never identifies a coherent target -- with a closing suggestion that Bourget should instead have pointed materialists toward a visible, demonstrable god.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 15 May 1889. Sumy. §3 I am answering your letter about
Bourget.
Continues the ongoing argument with Suvorin over Paul Bourget and his 1889 novel "Le Disciple", begun in and carried forward through; here Chekhov replies point by point to a letter of Suvorin's that is not itself preserved in this run, arguing that no real war exists between "the science of matter" and "the life of the spirit."
- To A. S. Suvorin, 15 May 1889. Sumy. §5 Bourget too makes war.
Chekhov turns the argument back onto Bourget specifically: whatever his intentions, the novel "Le Disciple" provokes rather than reconciles whichever kind of reader encounters it -- a scientist's family member, a churchman, an anatomist -- because it stages the conflict as real rather than illusory.