His self-devotion was boundless.
Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when
he wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent.' Tchehov was indifferent;
but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies
will show, was of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, an
axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. Since life is what it is and
men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon
the individual. The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is
within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. In one of
his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his
brother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he said, respect
human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only;
they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they
are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves
to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent
they respect it; they develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves .
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