I don’t know if you are familiar with Anton Chekhov’s letter to his brother where the writer offers a definition of what a cultured person is. Like everything Chekhov wrote, the letter is beautiful and I highly recommend it. (If you prefer to read in Spanish, writer Elvira Lindo translated it and writer Andrés Trapiello posted it on his blog).
Here are just small excerpts but it definitely merits being read in full:
Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions:
1. They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others. They do not make a row because of a hammer or a lost piece of india-rubber; if they live with anyone they do not regard it as a favour and, going away, they do not say “nobody can live with you.” They forgive noise and cold and dried-up meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.
There is nobody I detest more than people who bark at their family members to let off steam. It is absolutely disgusting and incredibly vulgar to make one’s “moods” somebody else’s problem. Note, also, that this is written by a man to another man in a profoundly patriarchal country. This first point on the list is all about co-existing with women without tyrannizing them.
They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood,” or “I have become second-rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false.
See? Chekhov hated whiners as much as I do and considered them vulgar.
They develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove.
I don’t really get the part about the oil stove. I’m guessing it’s the XIXth century equivalent to eating from a can over the sink.
Clarissa's Blog 
Love it, thank you. I’m tempted to show my mom that I am neither snobby nor fussy, but rather cultured. Yet I think using Chekhov to make my point might backfire! (literature is too …cultured for her)
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“There is nobody I detest more than people who bark at their family members to let off steam. It is absolutely disgusting and incredibly vulgar to make one’s “moods” somebody else’s problem.”
People like this, more often male, but sometimes also female, like to try to escape from themselves and the negative sensations they have into the “twosome” of themselves and another. So I’ve learned over the years — over some very long years — to block them. Indeed, you need to wrap them up in themselves. You don’t let them cross that bridge to get away from what they find repulsive in themselves, or otherwise their repulsive thing becomes yours. So you give it back to them and wrap them up in themselves, by making them account for their repulsive thing. “What was the underlying meaning when you said that to me? What was the purpose? Why did you choose those words?”
Also, they are looking for an emotional reaction of any sort. A negative one is as good as a positive one, so you do not give them one. Consequently, they don’t know how their words have been received and this makes them paranoid. Then you keep asking them what their underlying intent was.
I don’t allow emotional transactions that I do not first approve, but many people think they can get away with these. It’s an extremely dangerous game they choose to play.
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