Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
stopped in Kulikov’s hotel, where I took a room for seventy-five kopecks.
After sleeping on wooden sofas and washtubs it was a voluptuous sight to
see a bed with a mattress, a washstand.... Fragrant breezes came in at the
wide-open window and green branches thrust themselves in. It was a glorious
morning. It was a holiday (May 6th) and the bells were ringing in the
cathedral. People were coming out from mass. I saw police officers,
justices of the peace, military superintendents, and other principalities
and powers come out of the church. I bought two kopecks’ worth of sunflower
seeds, and hired for six roubles a carriage on springs to take me to the
Holy Mountains and back (in two days’ time). I drove out of the town
through little streets literally drowned in the green of cherry, apricot,
and apple trees. The birds sang unceasingly. Little Russians whom I met
took off their caps, taking me probably for Turgenev; my driver jumped
every minute off the box to put the harness to rights, or to crack his whip
at the boys who ran after the carriage.... There were strings of pilgrims
along the road. On all sides there were white hills, big and small. The
horizon was bluish-white, the rye was tall, oak copses were met with here
and there--the only things lacking were crocodiles and rattlesnakes.
I came to the Holy Mountains at twelve o’clock. It is a remarkably
beautiful and unique place. The monastery stands on the bank of the river
Donets at the foot of a huge white rock covered with gardens, oaks, and
ancient pines crowded together and over-hanging, one above another. It
seems as if the trees had not enough room on the rock, and as if some force
were driving them upwards.... The pines literally hang in the air and look
as though they might fall any minute. Cuckoos and nightingales sing night
and day.
The monks, very pleasant people, gave me a very unpleasant room with a
pancake-like mattress. I spent two nights at the monastery and gathered a
mass of impressions. While I was there some fifteen thousand pilgrims
assembled because of St. Nicolas’ Day; eight-ninths of them were old women.
I did not know before that there were so many old women in the world; had I
known, I would have shot myself long ago. About the monks, my acquaintance
with them and how I gave medical advice to the monks and the old women, I
will write to the _Novoye Vremya_ and tell you when we meet. The services
are endless: at midnight they ring for matins, at five for early mass, at
nine for late mass, at three for the song of praise, at five for vespers,
at six for the special prayers. Before every service one hears in the
corridors the weeping sound of a bell, and a monk runs along crying in the
voice of a creditor who implores his debtor to pay him at least five
kopecks for a rouble:
“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us! Please come to matins!”
It is awkward to stay in one’s room, and so one gets up and goes out. I
have chosen a spot on the bank of the Donets, where I sit during all the
services.
I have bought an ikon for Auntie. [Translator’s Note: His mother’s sister.]
The food is provided gratis by the monastery for all the fifteen thousand:
cabbage soup with dried fresh-water fish and porridge. Both are good, and
so is the rye bread.
The church bells are wonderful. The choir is not up to much. I took part in
a religious procession on boats.
TO V. G. KOROLENKO.
MOSCOW,
October 17, 1887.
... I am extremely glad to have met you. I say it sincerely and with all my
heart. In the first place, I deeply value and love your talent; it is dear
to me for many reasons. In the second, it seems to me that if you and I
live in this world another ten or twenty years we shall be bound to find
points of contact. Of all the Russians now successfully writing I am the
lightest and most frivolous; I am looked upon doubtfully; to speak the
language of the poets, I have loved my pure Muse but I have not respected
her; I have been unfaithful to her and often took her to places that were
not fit for her to go to. But you are serious, strong, and faithful. The
difference between us is great, as you see, but nevertheless when I read
you, and now when I have met you, I think that we have something in common.
I don’t know if I am right, but I like to think it.
TO HIS BROTHER ALEXANDR.
MOSCOW,
November 20, 1887.
Well, the first performance [Translator’s Note: “Ivanov.”] is over. I
will tell you all about it in detail. To begin with, Korsh promised me
ten rehearsals, but gave me only four, of which only two could be called
rehearsals, for the other two were tournaments in which _messieurs les
artistes_ exercised themselves in altercation and abuse. Davydov and Glama
were the only two who knew their parts; the others trusted to the prompter
and their own inner conviction.
Act One.--I am behind the stage in a small box that looks like a prison
cell. My family is in a box of the benoire and is trembling. Contrary to my
expectations, I am cool and am conscious of no agitation. The actors are
nervous and excited, and cross themselves. The curtain goes up ... the
actor whose benefit night it is comes on. His uncertainty, the way that he
forgets his part, and the wreath that is presented to him make the play
unrecognizable to me from the first sentences. Kiselevsky, of whom I had
great hopes, did not deliver a single phrase correctly--literally _not a
single one_. He said things of his own composition. In spite of this and of
the stage manager’s blunders, the first act was a great success. There were
many calls.
Act Two.--A lot of people on the stage. Visitors. They don’t know
their parts, make mistakes, talk nonsense. Every word cuts me like a knife
in my back. But--o Muse!--this act, too, was a success. There were calls
for all the actors, and I was called before the curtain twice.
Congratulations and success.
Act Three.--The acting is not bad. Enormous success. I had to come
before the curtain three times, and as I did so Davydov was shaking my
hand, and Glama, like Manilov, was pressing my other hand to her heart. The
triumph of talent and virtue.
Act Four, Scene One.--It does not go badly. Calls before the curtain
again. Then a long, wearisome interval. The audience, not used to leaving
their seats and going to the refreshment bar between two scenes, murmur.
The curtain goes up. Fine: through the arch one can see the supper table
(the wedding). The band plays flourishes. The groomsmen come out: they are
drunk, and so you see they think they must behave like clowns and cut
capers. The horseplay and pot-house atmosphere reduce me to despair. Then
Kiselevsky comes out: it is a poetical, moving passage, but my Kiselevsky
does not know his part, is drunk as a cobbler, and a short poetical
dialogue is transformed into something tedious and disgusting: the public
is perplexed. At the end of the play the hero dies because he cannot get
over the insult he has received. The audience, grown cold and tired, does
not understand this death (the actors insisted on it; I have another
version). There are calls for the actors and for me. During one of the
calls I hear sounds of open hissing, drowned by the clapping and stamping.
On the whole I feel tired and annoyed. It was sickening though the play had
considerable success....
Theatre-goers say that they had never seen such a ferment in a theatre,
such universal clapping and hissing, nor heard such discussions among the
audience as they saw and heard at my play. And it has never happened before
at Korsh’s that the author has been called after the second act.
November 24.
... It has all subsided at last, and I sit as before at my writing-table
and compose stories with untroubled spirit. You can’t think what it was
like! ... I have already told you that at the first performance there was
such excitement in the audience and on the stage as the prompter, who has
served at the theatre for thirty-two years, had never seen. They made an
uproar, shouted, clapped and hissed; at the refreshment bar it almost came
to fighting, and in the gallery the students wanted to throw someone out
and two persons were removed by the police. The excitement was general....
... The actors were in a state of nervous tension. All that I wrote to you
and Maslov about their acting and attitude to their work must not, of
course, go any further. There is much one has to excuse and understand....
It turned out that the actress who was doing the chief part in my play had
a daughter lying dangerously ill--how could she feel like acting? Kurepin
did well to praise the actors.
The next day after the performance there was a review by Pyotr Kitcheyev in
the _Moskovsky Listok_. He calls my play impudently cynical and immoral
rubbish. The _Moskovskiya Vyedomosti_ praised it.
... If you read the play you will not understand the excitement I have
described to you; you will find nothing special in it. Nikolay, Shehtel,
and Levitan--all of them painters--assure me that on the stage it is so
original that it is quite strange to look at. In reading one does not
notice it.
TO D. V. GRIGOROVITCH.
MOSCOW,
1887.
I have just read “Karelin’s Dream,” and I am very much interested to know
how far the dream you describe really is a dream. I think your description
of the workings of the brain and of the general feeling of a person who is
asleep is physiologically correct and remarkably artistic. I remember I
read two or three years ago a French story, in which the author described
the daughter of a minister., and probably without himself suspecting it,
gave a correct medical description of hysteria. I thought at the time that
an artist’s instinct may sometimes be worth the brains of a scientist, that
both have the same purpose, the same nature, and that perhaps in time, as
their methods become perfect, they are destined to become one vast
prodigious force which now it is difficult even to imagine.... “Karelin’s
Dream” has suggested to me similar thoughts, and to-day I willingly believe
Buckle, who saw in Hamlet’s musings on the dust of Alexander the Great,
Shakespeare’s knowledge of the law of the transmutation of
substance--i.e., the power of the artist to run ahead of the men of
science.... Sleep is a subjective phenomenon, and the inner aspect of it
one can only observe in oneself. But since the process of dreaming is
the same in all men, every reader can, I think, judge Karelin by his own
standards, and every critic is bound to be subjective. From my own
personal experience this is how I can formulate my impression.
In the first place the sensation of cold is given by you with remarkable
subtlety. When at night the quilt falls off I begin to dream of huge
slippery stones, of cold autumnal water, naked banks--and all this dim,
misty, without a patch of blue sky; sad and dejected like one who has lost
his way, I look at the stones and feel that for some reason I cannot avoid
crossing a deep river; I see then small tugs that drag huge barges,
floating beams.... All this is infinitely grey, damp, and dismal. When I
run from the river I come across the fallen cemetery gates, funerals, my
school-teachers.... And all the time I am cold through and through with
that oppressive nightmare-like cold which is impossible in waking life, and
which is only felt by those who are asleep. The first pages of “Karelin’s
Dream” vividly brought it to my memory--especially the first half of page
five, where you speak of the cold and loneliness of the grave.
I think that had I been born in Petersburg and constantly lived there, I
should always dream of the banks of the Neva, the Senate Square, the
massive monuments.
When I feel cold in my sleep I dream of people.... I happened to have read