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Mankind marches on, going from strength to strength. All that now eludes us will one day be well within our grasp, but, as I say, we must work and we must do all we can for those who are trying to find the truth. Here in Russia very few people do work at present. The kind of Russian intellectuals I know, far and away the greater part of them anyway, aren鈥檛 looking for anything. They don鈥檛 do anything. They still don鈥檛 know the meaning of hard work. They call themselves an intelligensia, but they speak to their servants as inferiors and treat the peasants like animals. They don鈥檛 study properly, they never read anything serious, in fact they don鈥檛 do anything at all. Science is something they just talk about and they know precious little about art. Oh, they鈥檙e all very earnest. They all go round looking extremely solemn. They talk of nothing but weighty issues and they discuss abstract problems, while all the time everyone knows the workers are abominably fed and sleep without proper bedding, thirty or forty to a room--with bed-bugs everywhere, to say nothing of the stench, the damp, the moral degradation. And clearly all our fine talk is just meant to pull wool over our own eyes and other people鈥檚 too. Tell me, where are those children鈥檚 creches that there鈥檚 all this talk about? Where are the libraries? They鈥檙e just things people write novels about, we haven鈥檛 actually got any of them. What we have got it dirt, vulgarity and squalor. I loathe all those earnest faces. They scare me, and so do earnest conversations. Why can鈥檛 we keep quiet for a change?

Anton Chekhov. 鈥淭he Cherry Orchard鈥�. Five Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 266.