My favorite Anton Chekhov short story to teach is "The Letter" (1902). It has been a few years since I’ve had the opportunity, but this term I’ve assigned it to one of my classes. So I was excited this morning to sit down and read it again for the first time in a while. It touched me as it always has. One quality that Chekhov’s devotees love in his writing – how he invites us in on the chuckle he’s having at the poor fools who are his characters, but also nudges us to have a heart for them because aren’t we all kind of this way? – it’s there in abundance in this story.
To my amazement, I found that the “The Letter” also speaks to one of the big contemporary crises in my beleaguered profession: artificial intelligence in student writing.
"The Letter" goes like this. It is late at night in some unnamed Russian town, the day before Easter. We are in the very comfortable home of a high-ranking church authority, Archdeacon Orlov, but he's very uncomfortable, beset with a familiar kind of annoyance: a guest who won’t leave. Father Anastasy, an impoverished, alcoholic, defrocked priest, has come for a visit (and to sponge some vodka and leniency) and he won’t go away, even though he knows very well that he’s being a burdensome irritant. He just can’t generate the wherewithal to depart. This awkward scene is interrupted by the arrival of Lubimov, a financially secure but lummoxy member of the church. Lubimov has terrible news: his son Peter, whom he has provided with a comfortable upbringing and a fine education, has repaid his generosity by shacking up with a married woman in the city. And eating forbidden meat during Lent. Orlov remembers Peter – even as a little kid he was bad news, a snarky unbeliever. While the pathetic Anastasy listens and wheezes and giggles, Orlov lays in to Lubimov about his history of spoiling his rotten kid. It's no wonder that Peter flouts church edicts. Lubimov complains that he did the best he could and now he needs help – he doesn’t know what to do. Orlov suggests a scolding letter. Lubimov protests that with his poor education he wouldn’t know where to start. He begs Orlov to write it for him. At first reluctant, Orlov finally agrees and begins dictating (for Lubimov to copy) a fire and brimstone lecture to the wayward Peter. Lubimov is in ecstasy. What a letter! If this won’t straighten out the kid, nothing will. He wishes he could write like this. The effort of composing and dictating finally exhausts Orlov's patience, and he politely directs his two visitors to get out of his house. Anastasy makes his overdue departure, accompanied by Lubimov. As they walk to Lubimov’s house, the father raves more about the epic takedown of a letter he’s carrying – he can’t wait to send it to Peter. But Anastasy begins appealing to him not to send it. Peter’s feelings will be hurt. The boy needs forgiveness - as he himself does – and where else can he hope to get it but from his father? At Lubimov’s house Anastasy helps himself to a few gulps of booze, makes one more appeal to Lubimov not to send the letter, and passes out. Lubimov meditates on Anastasy’s appeal, pulls out the letter and adds a postscript of tawdry village gossip (entirely undercutting Orlov's stern message), and puts the letter in a place where he’ll remember to put it in the mail.
That’s how it ends. The P.S. gets to me every time. The doofusy tenderness of that moment has a truth in it about the delights of boorish interactions within families. But there's more to it, of course. In light of the Easter timing, and the fact that during their walk Lubimov thinks that Anastasy’s “open cassock looked like wings in the night” (angelic?) leads me to perceive the drunk and disgraced old priest as a holy messenger in the time of resurrection. During Orlov’s audience with Lubimov, Anastasy pointedly asks (with tittering skepticism) whether “excessive reliance on Divine mercy” is really a sin. And without directly referencing either of these well-known episodes from the Gospel of Luke, Anastasy counsels the raging Lubimov to be like the welcoming and forgiving father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and prays a prayer (“Lord forgive me, sinner that I am”) that echoes the prayer of the penitent tax collector, a prayer Jesus commends to his listeners as exemplifying genuine faith.
So Anastasy as unlikely agent of grace? It is not that easy. After all, this is Chekhov, who never gives us any clearcut message other than that human beings are a mess. He won’t allow us to indulge in easy moralizing. Peter, the target of the stern letter, does not sound entirely like a poor misunderstood kid getting hassled by his repressive elders. In fact, he sounds like kind of a skunk If he’s the Prodigal Son, he’s a long, long way from the penitent homecoming stage of his story. And Anastasy? He needs to go straight to an AA meeting and pick up a white chip. His advocacy of forgiveness seems to come more from his immediate personal need to be relieved of his guilt than from a holy impulse to champion mercy. And then there’s that wry acknowledgement at the end of the crassness that sometimes constitutes the ties that bind. If Chekhov had written the reunion of Jacob’s sons, Joseph and Judah would have hugged in reconciliation and immediately started cracking jokes about their father’s hairline. So “The Letter” defies my attempts to make it an emphatic sermon on the glories of mercy. Read another way, it could be a critique of moral lassitude.
And then there's this new contemporary connection. It wasn’t until I was a few pages in to the story when the AI connection came upon me. Here is Lubimov imploring Orlov to write the letter for him:
I am an uneducated man, with a poor mind, but you the Lord has endowed with intelligence and wisdom. You know and understand everything, you have a mind that can fathom anything, while I’m not able to put two words together. Be charitable, instruct me as to how I am to go about writing. Tell me how to phrase it and just what to say.
He sounds like a desperate 10th grader in 2023 making a midnight appeal to his Macbook.
Some of the public discourse about ChatGPT and its ilk has an undertone to it that when it comes to students using AI to do their writing, the people who are most upset about it – notably we English teachers – need to stop all this melodramatic hand-wringing. If we would turn down the professional existential dread for one damn minute we would realize that virtual Orlov is not just unstoppable - he's our friend! Here’s a sentence in that vein from the journal Ars Technica:
AI writing assistance is here to stay, and if used wisely, AI language models can potentially speed up composition in a responsible and ethical way. Teachers may want to encourage responsible use and ask questions like: Does the writing reflect the intentions and knowledge of the writer? And can the human author vouch for every fact included?
"Assistance" is a funny word to use for how many students are using AI. We used to have another word for it. But those questions at the end, the questions teachers may want to ask. May I want to ask questions like that? I may. I may also point to “The Letter” as an illustration of what’s dreadfully wrong with this line of thinking, how in exclusively valuing the product of writing it egregiously discounts the experience of writing and what it can bring about in our confounded hearts and minds. Lubimov thinks Orlov’s letter reflects his intentions. On the walk home with Anastasy he can’t stop talking about how splendidly it reflects his intentions. But it doesn’t, not really, as he comes to find out. The fires of his anger extinguished, Lubimov's mind goes in another direction:
He was thinking of his son . . . remembering the years when [he] would come home for the holidays. His mind dwelt only on what was good, heartwarming, touched with melancholy, on what one could contemplate for a lifetime without getting tired.
These reflections prompt him to write the postscript that "spoils" Orlov's letter. It is not until Lubimov engages in the "desirable difficulty" (as one theorist calls it) of doing his own writing that something like the truth of his intentions emerges (even if he doesn't quite realize it): he'd rather cherish his son than admonish him. That’s the nature of their relationship.
Many have said it: writing gives you a chance to find out what you know.
Of course not every writing task is like a letter to one’s child at a pivotal moment in life. Writing occasions that really break open our consciousness come along rarely. My son’s 200 word response to a documentary he just watched for a college class and my wife’s letter to our health insurer don’t have this kind of juice, nor are they supposed to. But for each of them, even in those commonplace undertakings, the act of composition can do something in their minds – create a clarity or a confusion, or strengthen a resolve, or cause a satisfaction to blossom, or provide a reason to change direction. In Lubimov’s case, ceding to Orlov the job of writing to Peter may alleviate his frustration, but it deprives him of the opportunity for discovery that writing - and the struggles that go with it - can provide.
In this respect, AI doesn’t help. It steals.
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