work
Le Disciple
"The Disciple"
also: "Ученик", The Disciple
Paul Bourget's 1889 novel about the philosopher-scientist Adrien Sixte, whose materialist teaching is blamed for corrupting his pupil; Chekhov read it both in Suvorin's account and in the Russian serialization in "Severny Vestnik," and uses this letter to argue at length against the novel's central campaign against the "materialist direction."
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 7 May 1889. Sumy. §3 I have read Bourget's "The Disciple,"
Paul Bourget's 1889 novel "Le Disciple", which Chekhov read both in Suvorin's own account of it and in the Russian serialization in "Severny Vestnik"; the letter is a sustained critical argument about the novel's central polemic against the "materialist direction" in thought.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 14 May 1889. Sumy. §8 I don't like the ending of Bourget's new novel.
Paul Bourget's 1889 novel "Le Disciple", which Chekhov engages at length in the immediately preceding letter in this corpus (same Sumy/Luka cluster); here he turns specifically to a critique of its ending.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 15 May 1889. Sumy. §6 Surely, if I were to write a novel in which, for the sake of
science, an anatomist dissects his living wife and nursing infants,
or a learned lady doctor travels to the Nile and, for scientific
purposes, copulates with a crocodile and a rattlesnake -- surely
that novel would not fail to be a slander?
CONTENT FLAG: two deliberately grotesque rhetorical hypotheticals -- a vivisectionist anatomist dissecting his own living wife and nursing infants "for the sake of science," and a woman scientist traveling to the Nile to copulate with a crocodile and a rattlesnake "for scientific purposes" -- which Chekhov invents himself, on the spot, as counterexamples to Bourget's Sixte. These are not gratuitous: they are Chekhov's own rhetorical overstatement, constructed to demonstrate by exaggeration what a genuinely slanderous, caricatured treatment of "scientific" motive would look like, in contrast to what he considers Bourget's milder but still unfair treatment of Sixte's "psychological experiments." The shock of the images is the argument's point -- Chekhov is showing that absurdity of this degree is what it would actually take to slander science, implying Bourget's caricature, while less extreme, commits the same category of offense. Translated literally and without softening, per the translator's report and corpus policy on invented rhetorical material of this kind.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 15 May 1889. Sumy. §8 As for your talent
for rendering in compact form novels such as "Disciple," I read it
and rejoiced on your account.
Refers to Suvorin's own compact rendering/review of Bourget's "Le Disciple", evidently published in "Novoye Vremya"; not further named or dated in this letter and left unlinked to a specific piece beyond this reference.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 17 October 1889. Moscow. §9 Значит, и "Disciple" Бурже публицистика?
Chekhov invokes Paul Bourget's 1889 novel "Le Disciple" -- which he had discussed at length with Suvorin a few months earlier -- as a comparison case for the charge of "publicism" (публицистика, i.e. writing that argues a thesis rather than presenting neutral observation) that Suvorin has apparently leveled at "A Boring Story." Chekhov's rhetorical question implies the charge is as misplaced against his own novella as it would be against Bourget's overtly polemical novel.