I am an American living in Russia. When I was studying Russian I read a number of Chekhov's short stories and got a feel for who he was.
I later came across one of his quotes: "В человеке должно быть все прекрасно: и лицо, и одежда, и душа, и мысли" (Everything in a person should be excellent: his face, his clothes, his soul and his ideas). I sometimes discussed this phrase with Russians, eventually coming to be believe that "face" in this context meant that you should do all you can to appear clean and groomed, not necessarily that you need to be beautiful. I liked this quote and it can be a starting point of interesting discussion when I talk to Russians about Chekhov.
There's a funny story about when Chekhov went to Tomsk (now a town of about 500,000 people in Siberia.) In a letter, he wrote "Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull, too." In recent history, the inhabitants of Tomsk erected a bronze caricature statute [1] of Chekhov which makes him look funny. The local residents consider that touching his nose is good luck, so the statue has a really shiny bronze nose. I personally saw it and even touched his nose.
The statue's proportions are somewhat like what you would see if you look at a person from below. As actual drunkard lying on the floor could see Chechov.
Source: indigenous Tomsker. We like to joke about Checkov's words about Tomsk.
That's a beautiful idea—like you must view Chekhov from the perspective of a drunk person (a near substitution for 'you are a drunk person') even when you're sober and standing up rather than lying down, because of his strange proportioning, therefore he is the 'cause of seeing his peers as like drunkards.
No man is perfect, even Checkhov. From the article: "These eight conditions are not a checklist, but a guideline—a “true north” of sorts that reveals to us the direction we must go…"
I read a bunch of them (in English) when I was a university student: that's where my first exposure came from.
When I started to study Russian, I read one or two of his stories in this book [1], which was great because it has English and Russian versions on opposite pages. I got to enjoy reading in Russian because I didn't constantly have to look up every tenth word in a dictionary.
Russian is a hard language but there are some still harder. To understand magazine articles and carry on simple conversations on arbitrary topics is a time investment of about 600 hours. To read Chekhov and speak really well on advanced topics is about double that, or 1200 hours. Chekhov's style is close to modern Russian and his style of writing is more straightforward than earlier writers. To read Dostoyevsky... well, hell if I know, I can barely make it through the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary even after all this time investment and living in Russia for a few years! It's like a different language.
"Прекрасно" is "good in every way", "perfect", it is something that cause wonder and delight or feeling of exaltation. So it's not about beauty. It's about what beauty of something do to you.
At least in Soviet times this quote was taught and discussed in schools and I'd dare to argue that for some it is the only quote by Chekhov's they remember.
Modern Russian [street] variation of "Everything in a person ..." sounds as : "В человеке всё должно быть прекрасно - и душа и джинсы" - "Everything in a human should be perfect, as his soul as his jeans".
That's why Russians are paying so much attention to their education/reading and what they wear :) This stuff is taught in school.
Well, there's no possiblity of doing A/B testing. I can't go back and live an alternate life where I didn't touch his nose. So there's no way to know. But I'm enjoying my life, and I'm happy with the life in which I did touch his nose.
What's the thing about russians and noses? The naval academy also has a statute with a lucky nose. In other cultures people want to touch the hands or feet of statues, but in russia it seems to be the nose.
I don't think it's a uniquely Russian thing. I think it has more to do with the scale of bronze statuary. Busts have accessible noses, but feet are easier to reach on full figures. My university in the United States had a bust of Abraham Lincoln with a lucky nose.
We took the Gutenberg transcriptions, compiled them into one ebook, ordered by publication date, lightly modernized, edited, corrected, and completely proofread them. Check out the Github repo to see the changes (which are a lot, since it's a huge amount of writing): https://github.com/standardebooks/anton-chekhov_short-fictio...
While I don't speak Russian, I've found Garnett's translations to be extremely readable. A lot of her contemporaries seem to have agreed.
Standard Ebooks looks to be a very interesting project. Is there a story behind the project that details how you got started and who are the main contributors?
A 'Show HN' [0] or a write-up on indiehackers.com [1] would be awesome and could you more contributors.
I subscribed to your RSS feed [2] that announces your new publications but it lacks a URL for me to download the Ebook right away.
Also, is there a way for omnivoracious readers like me to download all your Ebooks in a mega .zip file at one go?
Great project! I grabbed the book; look forward to reading it.
A small tip - I note the files don't automatically trigger a file download in my browser (Chrome), instead trying to display inline in the browser. Look into the following headers you need to send to force a download:
I notice this theme again and again in every "change yourself" book, show, class, lecture. Be it weight loss, improving mental health, curing addiction, becoming a better writer/photographer/programmer, the theme all comes down to a battle against yourself. Fighting the desire to snack, fighting the desire to lay on the couch instead of going to the gym, fighting the desire to veg and watch netflix instead of watching another lecture in the MOOC you're taking.
You'd think it'd be easier to control ourselves. I have trouble understanding how we can want something, but some other part of us can seem to not want that thing, or just be extremely short sighted to the point of being an obstacle to our "long-sighted self."
> the theme all comes down to a battle against yourself
Perhaps "control" and "battle" are the wrong model. Some broad, general suggestions based on what experts have said:
Respect yourself: If you are doing something over and over again despite not wanting to, there probably is a good reason for it, a legitimate healthy need, even if the expression of that need is unhealthy. Respect that need and its priority as legitimate and serious. Find a healthy, productive way to address it. It should be no surprise that the response is unhealthy: Imagine if someone else had a real need and your response was to ignore it and abuse them constantly for acting on it; how would that person behave?
Know yourself: Know your strengths and limits; don't put yourself in position to fail and then abuse yourself for failing. Again, imagine you were someone else's manager, you knew their limitations, and yet you kept putting them in position to fail and then abused them over the results. That would be a horrible failure of management, not of the employee.
Have compassion for yourself. Like every human ever to live, you also will live your whole life with serious flaws.
Nurture yourself: Work together (so to speak) for change. That's how real change happens; that's how good parents, good teachers and mentors, and good managers accomplish things. Fighting with people just entrenches the problem.
....
That feels a little too ... bullsh*tty to post - loose, imprecise ideas with little serious foundation included; my apologies. But I'm not sure how to tighten it up, don't have links at my fingertips, and posting it seems better than not.
However, I can't seem to be able to make a connection with the examples your parent comment mentioned. For example, if you want to lose weight but keep eating fast food despite that---what is the healthy need manifesting through that, and how do you address it in some other, good way? Same with being addicted to e.g. alcohol or smoking.
The more I think about it and learn about the functioning of the brain, the less I believe in the unitary 'self'. I once read the suggestion that what we think of as the 'self' is really just the brain's public relations department.
You might enjoy a book called Quantum Psychology (Robert Anton Wilson).
He lays out some interesting concepts about the way we think and one thought experiment in particular, observing all the 'thinkers' within and how they can multiply at will i.e consider the following innocuous statement:
I agree. I find it amazing how unfocused the human mind can be, but at the same time am not really surprised given how we evolved.
I also have somewhat of a pragmatic view of solving this problem.
Anecdotal, but since I started taking the antidepressant Valdoxan (aka Agolmelatine, sadly illegal in the US) I've found that I feel it's easier to win that battle. When I say I'm going to do or not do something, I'm more likely to stick to that.
I've finally, for example, gone to my parent's house and not binge eaten on my mum's generous cooking. I went to the bar and actually had two drinks instead of six.
I haven't taken them, but I also understand that there may be some other medications such as AHDH or concentration drugs that have a similar effect, possibly with different time scales and mechanisms.
I'm still a total coffee addict - haven't kicked that one yet - and I'm by no means perfect. But my self control was pretty much non existent before, and in the last two months I've made alot of progress.
I hope that we continue to find better ways of managing the brain's chemistry (and the side effects of doing so), but just as much that the methods we have now become more widely available, and less illegal and stigmatized.
"The Master said, 'The prosecution of learning may be compared to what may happen in raising a mound. If there want but one basket of earth to complete the work and I stop, the stopping is my own work. It may be compared to throwing down the earth on the level ground. Though but one basketful is thrown at a time, the advancing with it is my own going forward.'" (The Analects, translated by Legge)
>Be it weight loss, improving mental health, curing addiction, becoming a better writer/photographer/programmer, the theme all comes down to a battle against yourself.
Most of them say that, but a few say the wiser thing: Prevention is king. If you don't get addicted to something, it causes fewer problems. This applies to both physical and mental addictions. Don't let your body get used to fatty foods, and there will be nothing to fight. Same goes for alcohol. Or tobacco. Or TV binging: I've been relatively cable-free for well over a decade.
>fighting the desire to veg and watch netflix instead of watching another lecture in the MOOC you're taking.
Amusingly, I have to fight the desire to take yet another MOOC. I'm addicted to information/knowledge. I absorb it easily. Retaining the information, and actually utilizing it takes a lot of work. For me, taking another MOOC is just a way of slacking off to avoid putting in the effort to apply those skills I keep "learning".
I think of it like this: I want to lay on the couch, not go to the gym, but I want to want to go to the gym, or I want to have gone to the gym. I want to have gone to the gym because I hate to be at the gym. Realizing that, I have a choice: is going to the gym a chore, like flossing my teeth to avoid tooth pain or taking out the garbage so I'm not living in garbage? that is, is going to the gym something I do even though I don't want to, and which I needn't pretend to like? or should I just admit that i hate the gym and find something else to do?
But you don't need the gym, for losing weight or getting healthier. The only thing you need the gym for is getting big muscles, now you can reframe the question.
Is my goal to be more healthy or getting ripped?
If the goal is health then you can stop going to the gym. Start running, start swimming, try bicycle, outdoor gyms, join a hike group, join a martial art club. Start doing excersices at home with your body weight. If you are so weak or big that you can't do many bodyweight drills, then you don't need a gym anyway. Better served with a small 10$ dumbar package at home.
The only thing that can be good with a gym is a Personal Trainer that can give you a good plan. It will be hard to replace that service to the same level.
If your goal truly is to be more muscular, then and only then does it really become a question of motivation. Do i want this enough do go to the gym, even on the days that i don't feel for it?
That's the nice thing about chaotic wild life. Your life depends on every day gymnastic and it's often quite a pleasure to feel alive and full. We distorded the game too much it seems. Unless the VR trend provides a healthy dose of entertaining physical activity.
Speaking about battling ourselves: I recently started questioning whether we're truly free – as in, do we have complete control over the decisions we're making.
There are certain things about ourselves we simply can't control, such as our parents, where we were born/raised, our genetic makeup, the structure of our brains, etc, and these things highly influence our decision making.
So it looks like there is constant battle between who we want to be and who we truly are.
There's a whole eastern philosophy around this sort of sentiment. The idea being that things aren't inherently 'anything' but we do attach emotions or ideas to those things. You can take a 'meta' step back and notice this.
Vipassana meditation has helped me to increase discipline and self-control. Since taking a 10-day course, I finally got control of my snacking urges and my emotional health has drastically improved.
takes will + effort to fight entropy.
"your self" in this case is just a manifestation of a physical entropy-prone world that you are dealing with.
some of that is pre-programmed or instilled by the circumstance, anything above and beyond that requires additional effort that might seem like it's applied at "fighting yourself".
I suspect a subtle mistranslation here. Chekhov seems to be talking about decent people, or maybe good people, not cultured ones.
In English, it is quite possible to be cultured but bad. You know all kinds of stuff about literature, music, art, history and science (and therefore you are cultured) but you cheat on your wife and your taxes (and are therefore bad).
I think it depends on your definition of cultured as well. Depending on the dictionary it also means enlightened and good mannered. I consider cheating pretty bad mannered.
Agreed with treve, what does culture really mean? If you read ALL the literature, listen to ALL the music, view ALL the art, can recite ALL the history and do ALL the science... and still conclude it's OK to cheat on your wife and taxes, the argument can be made that none of this culture was internalized, and hence you are not cultured.
Of course things are rarely so black-and-white, but that's the gist of it.
IMHO well-bred has a meaning of specific ancestry, of aristocracy of one sort or another, of which the Russian "воспитанный" has none - it's rather well brought-up, well-behaved, conforming to the norms and customs of the polite society.
I'm struck by how much this echoes Confucius and the Analects and how they define the so-called gentleman or noble man (not to be confused with nobleman, and translation is hard). Given how unlikely it is that Chekhov had exposure to either, it's incredible to observe the universality of these qualities considered admirable.
If people haven't, do recommend checking out The Analects! Caveat: there are quite a few excerpts that need to be taken in historical perspective, or can be easily misinterpreted (e.g. advice to be slow to embrace new that was in context of centuries of chaos and warring, or statements on women that interpreted naïvely clearly contradict other statements on mothers).
Can you give some examples of those "statements on women that interpreted naïvely clearly contradict other statements on mothers?"
I've read bits and pieces of Analects, thought it was ok, but felt that is was very much reflective of the perspectives of the time. Most of it felt like stuff that was obvious and other stuff felt not applicable to the world today. IIRC there was some stuff about traveling abroad / being a good guest in a foreign country, and I did think that part was useful.
I don't really recall reading stuff about women though. I wouldn't expect an enlightened perspective from a man in that time period though, no matter how kind the interpretation. It wouldn't invalidate the whole work, it would just show that the author was wrong about at least one thing, which is not an issue (unless we're talking about holy books where it's not acceptable to acknowledge mistakes).
"The Master said: 'Girls and inferior men are hard to get along with. If you get familiar with them, they lose their humility; if you are distant, they resent it.'" (Chapter 17)
This sounds pretty bad. My reading of it is that he meant that relationships between men and women are particularly tricky (bearing in mind heteronormative standards at the time, etc. etc.), so one has to be careful not to misrepresent them or else everyone suffers. This can be generously reinterpreted to general use ("don't toy around with people and treat them straightforwardly"). Realistically... I'm happy to take it as a mistake on his part and just extract something worthwhile from it even if it's not what he meant.
With regard to enlightened perspective or lack thereof, there's an interesting question. I'm no expert on Confucius himself and how he regarded women, but his filial piety towards his mother is widely lauded (as was Mencius').
Russia and China were bumping into each other before Chekhov's time, and a bit of Googling is turning up cases of Russian missionaries translating Chinese works to Russian in the early 1800s.
If you have specific evidence of Chekhov referencing Confucius (the similarities are so striking that either he came up with them independently, which was my original point, or he was inspired by Confucius, which should then leave traces) please do tell! That would be really cool.
At a certain point, sure. There is, I suspect, an execution difference (which does not at all create mutual exclusivity) though. Have you read The Analects, out of curiosity? If so, you know what I mean. If not, by all means please check it out! It's a short read, unlike any of the Bible, Torah, or Quran ;)
On the timeline of humanity, our pocket computers are brand-new. It will likely be a couple of decades before we sort out the social norms of using them. However, I think that we will fall towards using these devices constantly in all social settings because the young people growing up won't have the nostalgia of time before smartphones-- there was never a time where you and your friends sat at a table and talked completely free of digital interruption. Go to a coffee shop or restaurant near a high school around the lunch hour...
But it could also swing the other way: after the novelty wears off people might find it more respectful to pay attention to whoever you're sharing the table with in that coffee shop. There have always been ways to momentarily withdraw from your company and preoccupy yourself with something personal, but still you don't see people suddenly pulling out a book or a newspaper and read a couple of paragraphs (to give a flawed analogy).
It's also possible the current physical manifestations of these devices will change quite a bit in the near future. I imagine in 20 years of less we'll mostly be using some eye based (glasses, lenses, whatever) display with AR and gesture control.(likely with a gesture "shorthand" for AR control with limited movement for when you don't want to wave your hand in front of you).
At that point, it will be both much more and much less invasive, as it will likely be fully integrated. You can use it to enhance your conversation by adding context, distract from your conversation by utilizing it for something unrelated, or ignore it entirely. Sort of like your memory and imagination now (because that's what it will be at that point, a slower but much fuller extension to your current mind).
Readit News
I later came across one of his quotes: "В человеке должно быть все прекрасно: и лицо, и одежда, и душа, и мысли" (Everything in a person should be excellent: his face, his clothes, his soul and his ideas). I sometimes discussed this phrase with Russians, eventually coming to be believe that "face" in this context meant that you should do all you can to appear clean and groomed, not necessarily that you need to be beautiful. I liked this quote and it can be a starting point of interesting discussion when I talk to Russians about Chekhov.
There's a funny story about when Chekhov went to Tomsk (now a town of about 500,000 people in Siberia.) In a letter, he wrote "Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull, too." In recent history, the inhabitants of Tomsk erected a bronze caricature statute [1] of Chekhov which makes him look funny. The local residents consider that touching his nose is good luck, so the statue has a really shiny bronze nose. I personally saw it and even touched his nose.
[1] https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g665310-d35959...
When I started to study Russian, I read one or two of his stories in this book [1], which was great because it has English and Russian versions on opposite pages. I got to enjoy reading in Russian because I didn't constantly have to look up every tenth word in a dictionary.
Russian is a hard language but there are some still harder. To understand magazine articles and carry on simple conversations on arbitrary topics is a time investment of about 600 hours. To read Chekhov and speak really well on advanced topics is about double that, or 1200 hours. Chekhov's style is close to modern Russian and his style of writing is more straightforward than earlier writers. To read Dostoyevsky... well, hell if I know, I can barely make it through the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary even after all this time investment and living in Russia for a few years! It's like a different language.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Stories-Dual-Language-Book-En...
Probably nitpicking, but I'd translate "прекрасно" as "beautiful" here.
"Прекрасно" is "good in every way", "perfect", it is something that cause wonder and delight or feeling of exaltation. So it's not about beauty. It's about what beauty of something do to you.
Deleted Comment
That's why Russians are paying so much attention to their education/reading and what they wear :) This stuff is taught in school.
Did it work?
Well. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/g/gogol/nikolai/g61n/
Ah yes, unlike that Einstein. That disheveled example of a someone who could have been so much more, had he just reached for a comb. /s
And? Any luck?
We took the Gutenberg transcriptions, compiled them into one ebook, ordered by publication date, lightly modernized, edited, corrected, and completely proofread them. Check out the Github repo to see the changes (which are a lot, since it's a huge amount of writing): https://github.com/standardebooks/anton-chekhov_short-fictio...
While I don't speak Russian, I've found Garnett's translations to be extremely readable. A lot of her contemporaries seem to have agreed.
A 'Show HN' [0] or a write-up on indiehackers.com [1] would be awesome and could you more contributors.
I subscribed to your RSS feed [2] that announces your new publications but it lacks a URL for me to download the Ebook right away.
Also, is there a way for omnivoracious readers like me to download all your Ebooks in a mega .zip file at one go?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/show
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/
[2] https://standardebooks.org/opds/all
A small tip - I note the files don't automatically trigger a file download in my browser (Chrome), instead trying to display inline in the browser. Look into the following headers you need to send to force a download:
You'd think it'd be easier to control ourselves. I have trouble understanding how we can want something, but some other part of us can seem to not want that thing, or just be extremely short sighted to the point of being an obstacle to our "long-sighted self."
Perhaps "control" and "battle" are the wrong model. Some broad, general suggestions based on what experts have said:
Respect yourself: If you are doing something over and over again despite not wanting to, there probably is a good reason for it, a legitimate healthy need, even if the expression of that need is unhealthy. Respect that need and its priority as legitimate and serious. Find a healthy, productive way to address it. It should be no surprise that the response is unhealthy: Imagine if someone else had a real need and your response was to ignore it and abuse them constantly for acting on it; how would that person behave?
Know yourself: Know your strengths and limits; don't put yourself in position to fail and then abuse yourself for failing. Again, imagine you were someone else's manager, you knew their limitations, and yet you kept putting them in position to fail and then abused them over the results. That would be a horrible failure of management, not of the employee.
Have compassion for yourself. Like every human ever to live, you also will live your whole life with serious flaws.
Nurture yourself: Work together (so to speak) for change. That's how real change happens; that's how good parents, good teachers and mentors, and good managers accomplish things. Fighting with people just entrenches the problem.
....
That feels a little too ... bullsh*tty to post - loose, imprecise ideas with little serious foundation included; my apologies. But I'm not sure how to tighten it up, don't have links at my fingertips, and posting it seems better than not.
However, I can't seem to be able to make a connection with the examples your parent comment mentioned. For example, if you want to lose weight but keep eating fast food despite that---what is the healthy need manifesting through that, and how do you address it in some other, good way? Same with being addicted to e.g. alcohol or smoking.
He lays out some interesting concepts about the way we think and one thought experiment in particular, observing all the 'thinkers' within and how they can multiply at will i.e consider the following innocuous statement:
"I observe that I am happy"
Who is happy and who is the observer?
http://greg-egan.wikia.com/wiki/Mister_Volition
I also have somewhat of a pragmatic view of solving this problem.
Anecdotal, but since I started taking the antidepressant Valdoxan (aka Agolmelatine, sadly illegal in the US) I've found that I feel it's easier to win that battle. When I say I'm going to do or not do something, I'm more likely to stick to that.
I've finally, for example, gone to my parent's house and not binge eaten on my mum's generous cooking. I went to the bar and actually had two drinks instead of six.
I haven't taken them, but I also understand that there may be some other medications such as AHDH or concentration drugs that have a similar effect, possibly with different time scales and mechanisms.
I'm still a total coffee addict - haven't kicked that one yet - and I'm by no means perfect. But my self control was pretty much non existent before, and in the last two months I've made alot of progress.
I hope that we continue to find better ways of managing the brain's chemistry (and the side effects of doing so), but just as much that the methods we have now become more widely available, and less illegal and stigmatized.
Most of them say that, but a few say the wiser thing: Prevention is king. If you don't get addicted to something, it causes fewer problems. This applies to both physical and mental addictions. Don't let your body get used to fatty foods, and there will be nothing to fight. Same goes for alcohol. Or tobacco. Or TV binging: I've been relatively cable-free for well over a decade.
>fighting the desire to veg and watch netflix instead of watching another lecture in the MOOC you're taking.
Amusingly, I have to fight the desire to take yet another MOOC. I'm addicted to information/knowledge. I absorb it easily. Retaining the information, and actually utilizing it takes a lot of work. For me, taking another MOOC is just a way of slacking off to avoid putting in the effort to apply those skills I keep "learning".
The animal side is happy with eating, shitting, sleeping, fucking, pointing and laughing at funny stuff, punching other people and things.
You, on the other hand, are trapped inside this animal and want quite different things.
It's a constant struggle.
If the goal is health then you can stop going to the gym. Start running, start swimming, try bicycle, outdoor gyms, join a hike group, join a martial art club. Start doing excersices at home with your body weight. If you are so weak or big that you can't do many bodyweight drills, then you don't need a gym anyway. Better served with a small 10$ dumbar package at home.
The only thing that can be good with a gym is a Personal Trainer that can give you a good plan. It will be hard to replace that service to the same level.
If your goal truly is to be more muscular, then and only then does it really become a question of motivation. Do i want this enough do go to the gym, even on the days that i don't feel for it?
There are certain things about ourselves we simply can't control, such as our parents, where we were born/raised, our genetic makeup, the structure of our brains, etc, and these things highly influence our decision making.
So it looks like there is constant battle between who we want to be and who we truly are.
http://dhamma.org/
Learning though, by it's very nature, means fixing what's wrong or implanting knowledge in place where one is "not even wrong".
If it were easier it would be of less value. The supply is more limited than the demand.
Humans typically associate themselves (ie 'you'), as a distinct thing in reality, rather than a group of competing agents.
some of that is pre-programmed or instilled by the circumstance, anything above and beyond that requires additional effort that might seem like it's applied at "fighting yourself".
In English, it is quite possible to be cultured but bad. You know all kinds of stuff about literature, music, art, history and science (and therefore you are cultured) but you cheat on your wife and your taxes (and are therefore bad).
Of course things are rarely so black-and-white, but that's the gist of it.
http://www.anton-chehov.info/754-n-p-chexovu.html
>you are drawn away from it, and you vacillate between cultured people and the lodgers vis-a-vis
>тебя тянет от нее, и тебе приходится балансировать между культурной публикой и жильцами vis-а-vis.
Here "cultured people" are originally "культурная публика", literally "cultured public".
>Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions:
>Воспитанные люди, по моему мнению, должны удовлетворять след<ующим> условиям:
Here "Cultured people" are originally "Воспитанные люди". More like well-brought-up.
http://lithub.com/anton-chekhov-a-post-modernist-way-ahead-o...
If people haven't, do recommend checking out The Analects! Caveat: there are quite a few excerpts that need to be taken in historical perspective, or can be easily misinterpreted (e.g. advice to be slow to embrace new that was in context of centuries of chaos and warring, or statements on women that interpreted naïvely clearly contradict other statements on mothers).
I've read bits and pieces of Analects, thought it was ok, but felt that is was very much reflective of the perspectives of the time. Most of it felt like stuff that was obvious and other stuff felt not applicable to the world today. IIRC there was some stuff about traveling abroad / being a good guest in a foreign country, and I did think that part was useful.
I don't really recall reading stuff about women though. I wouldn't expect an enlightened perspective from a man in that time period though, no matter how kind the interpretation. It wouldn't invalidate the whole work, it would just show that the author was wrong about at least one thing, which is not an issue (unless we're talking about holy books where it's not acceptable to acknowledge mistakes).
"The Master said: 'Girls and inferior men are hard to get along with. If you get familiar with them, they lose their humility; if you are distant, they resent it.'" (Chapter 17)
This sounds pretty bad. My reading of it is that he meant that relationships between men and women are particularly tricky (bearing in mind heteronormative standards at the time, etc. etc.), so one has to be careful not to misrepresent them or else everyone suffers. This can be generously reinterpreted to general use ("don't toy around with people and treat them straightforwardly"). Realistically... I'm happy to take it as a mistake on his part and just extract something worthwhile from it even if it's not what he meant.
With regard to enlightened perspective or lack thereof, there's an interesting question. I'm no expert on Confucius himself and how he regarded women, but his filial piety towards his mother is widely lauded (as was Mencius').
Hope that helps!
Russia and China were bumping into each other before Chekhov's time, and a bit of Googling is turning up cases of Russian missionaries translating Chinese works to Russian in the early 1800s.
If you have specific evidence of Chekhov referencing Confucius (the similarities are so striking that either he came up with them independently, which was my original point, or he was inspired by Confucius, which should then leave traces) please do tell! That would be really cool.
At that point, it will be both much more and much less invasive, as it will likely be fully integrated. You can use it to enhance your conversation by adding context, distract from your conversation by utilizing it for something unrelated, or ignore it entirely. Sort of like your memory and imagination now (because that's what it will be at that point, a slower but much fuller extension to your current mind).