“There is always a certain element of insolence in being well-fed, as in every aspect of power,” Anton Chekhov wrote to a friend in 1892 while living in Melikhovo, a provincial town smaller than Aiken but with a distinct resemblance: farms, horses, landlords, classy people, overworked peasants. “And that element expresses itself chiefly in the well-fed preaching to the hungry.”
