"You often complained to me that "no one understands me!!". Even Goethe and Newton didn't complain about that... Only Christ complained but he was talking not about his ego but his teaching" (page 60)
-- letter from Anton Chekhov to his brother, translated by Ivan from The Lifeboat on Substack
O Anton Pavlovich!
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov cracks me up, when he’s not putting me in tears. Now I understand why he called The Cherry Orchard a comedy. To him it was. Here he calculates the number of artists on earth: “there is only one artist per two million people on earth...”
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The Gnomen live underground easy as we do above it. We don’t feel the air, just as the fish don’t feel the water, just as the Gnomen don’t feel the earth. We all simply breath and move through our respective elements. Doktor Doktor Bombastus Paracelsus knew this, and noted it extra careful to Huohu the firefox.
The Gnomen are distantly related to Elven folk of Noldor whom Tolkien called gnomes, meaning those who have knowledge. The Noldorin High Elves, or gnomes, haven’t so much truck with the literally down to earth Gnomen of our story, but they knew of each other, and an occasional great aunt could recall visiting a distant cousin once upon a time immemorial.
The Gnomen are small, about two handspans tall, so we are not likely to come across one except by fortuitous happenstance.
Dwarfs on the other hand, are a good bit bigger and truck more with man-folk, as the sisters Schneeweisschen and Rosenrot found out, and as the brothers Grimm wrote down.
There are other small, tricksy folk, like kobolds near houses and klabautermann on ships, but that’s for another day my friends.