A historical moment such as ours, when the most visible cohort of the well-educated and well-shod seems to long for its own destruction, was one that Anton Chekhov well understood. In Three Sisters (1901), the baron and lieutenant Tuzenbach feels guilty about his life of ease but cheerfully envisions an age when languid men such as he will be given a proper seeing-to. He exclaims,
A new age is dawning, the people are marching on us all, a powerful, health-giving storm is gathering, it is drawing near, soon it will be upon us, and it will drive away laziness, indifference, the prejudice against labor, and rotten dullness from our society. I shall work, and in twenty-five or thirty years, every man will have to work. Every one!
The baron’s view that, in lieu of changing one’s own unlovely habits, one should hope for a bit of revolutionary change to force it along is, like much else taking place in the minds of Chekhov’s cast of the depressed, the dissipated, and the deceived, symptomatic of a trait we see all around us today. In America’s poshest zip codes, which in most cases are among our most resolutely progressive ones, there is a palpable attraction to Tuzenbach’s claim that “rotten dullness” afflicts our society and that some destruction would therefore be salutary. Because of the alleged corruption of society, today’s elites play-act being “allies” of the supposedly oppressed classes on social media, repeating nihilistic slogans, offering to bail out
