Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
reads Schopenhauer and goes to church to hear the Song of Praise; she
conscientiously studies every number of the _Vyestnik Evropi_ and
_Syeverny Vyestnik_, and knows writers I have not dreamed of; attaches
much importance to the fact that once the painter Makovsky stayed in her
lodge and now a young writer is staying there; talking to Pleshtcheyev she
feels a holy thrill all over and rejoices every minute that it has been
“vouchsafed” to her to see the great poet.
Her eldest daughter, a woman doctor--the pride of the whole family and “a
saint” as the peasants call her--really is remarkable. She has a tumour on
the brain, and in consequence of it she is totally blind, has epileptic
fits and constant headaches. She knows what awaits her, and stoically with
amazing coolness speaks of her approaching death. In the course of my
medical practice I have grown used to seeing people who were soon going to
die, and I have always felt strange when people whose death was at hand
talked, smiled, or wept in my presence; but here, when I see on the
verandah this blind woman who laughs, jokes, or hears my stories read to
her, what begins to seem strange to me is not that she is dying, but that
we do not feel our own death, and write stories as though we were never
going to die.
The second daughter, also a woman doctor, is a gentle, shy, infinitely kind
creature, loving to everyone. Patients are a regular torture to her, and
she is scrupulous to morbidity with them. At consultations we always
disagree: I bring good tidings where she sees death, and I double the doses
which she prescribes. But where death is obvious and inevitable my lady
doctor feels quite in an unprofessional way. I was receiving patients with
her one day at a medical centre; a young Little Russian woman came with a
malignant tumour of the glands in her neck and at the back of her head. The
tumour had spread so far that no treatment could be thought of. And because
the woman was at present feeling no pain, but would in another six months
die in terrible agony, the doctor looked at her in such a guilty way as
though she were asking forgiveness for being well, and ashamed that medical
science was helpless. She takes a zealous part in managing the house and
estate, and understands every detail of it. She knows all about horses
even. When the side horse does not pull or gets restless, she knows how to
help matters and instructs the coachman. I believe she has never hurt
anyone, and it seems to me that she has not been happy for a single instant
and never will be.
The third daughter, who has finished her studies at Bezstuzhevka, is a
vigorous, sunburnt young girl with a loud voice. Her laugh can be heard a
mile away. She is a passionate Little Russian patriot. She has built a
school on the estate at her own expense, and teaches the children Krylov’s
fables translated into Little Russian. She goes to Shevtchenko’s grave as a
Turk goes to Mecca. She does not cut her hair, wears stays and a bustle,
looks after the housekeeping, is fond of laughing and singing.
The eldest son is a quiet, modest, intelligent, hardworking young man with
no talents; he has no pretensions, and is apparently content with what life
has given him. He has been dismissed from the University [Translator’s
Note: On political grounds, of course, is understood.] just before taking
his degree, but he does not boast of it. He speaks little. He loves farming
and the land and lives in harmony with the peasants.
The second son is a young man mad over Tchaikovsky’s being a genius. He
dreams of living according to Tolstoy.
* * * * *
Pleshtcheyev is staying with us. They all look upon him as a demi-god,
consider themselves happy if he bestows attention on somebody’s junket,
bring him flowers, invite him everywhere, and so on.... And he “listens and
eats,” and smokes his cigars which give his admirers a headache. He is slow
to move, with the indolence of old age, but this does not prevent the fair
sex from taking him about in boats, driving with him to the neighbouring
estates, and singing songs to him. Here he is by way of being the same
thing as in Petersburg--i.e., an ikon which is prayed to for being
old and for having once hung by the side of the miracle-working ikons. So
far as I am concerned I regard him--not to speak of his being a very good,
warm-hearted and sincere man--as a vessel full of traditions, interesting
memories, and good platitudes.
... What you say about “The Lights” is quite just. You say that neither
the conversation about pessimism nor Kisotcha’s story in any way help to
solve the question of pessimism. It seems to me it is not for writers of
fiction to solve such questions as that of God, of pessimism, etc. The
writer’s business is simply to describe who has been speaking about God
or about pessimism, how, and in what circumstances. The artist must be
not the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely
an impartial witness. I have heard a desultory conversation of two
Russians about pessimism--a conversation which settles nothing--and I
must report that conversation as I heard it; it is for the jury, that
is, for the readers, to decide on the value of it. My business is merely
to be talented--i.e., to know how to distinguish important statements
from unimportant, how to throw light on the characters, and to speak
their language. Shtcheglov-Leontyev blames me for finishing the story
with the words, “There’s no making out anything in this world.” He
thinks a writer who is a good psychologist ought to be able to make it
out--that is what he is a psychologist for. But I don’t agree with him.
It is time that writers, especially those who are artists, recognized
that there is no making out anything in this world, as once Socrates
recognized it, and Voltaire, too. The mob thinks it knows and understands
everything; and the more stupid it is the wider it imagines its outlook
to be. And if a writer whom the mob believes in has the courage to say
that he does not understand anything of what he sees, that alone will be
something gained in the realm of thought and a great step in advance.
TO A. N. PLESHTCHEYEV.
SUMY,
June 28, 1888.
... We have been to the province of Poltava. We went to the Smagins’,
and to Sorotchintsi. We drove with a four-in-hand, in an ancestral,
very comfortable carriage. We had no end of laughter, adventures,
misunderstandings, halts, and meetings on the way.... If you had only
seen the places where we stayed the night and the villages stretching
eight or ten versts through which we drove! ... What weddings we met on
the road, what lovely music we heard in the evening stillness, and what
a heavy smell of fresh hay there was! Really one might sell one’s soul
to the devil for the pleasure of looking at the warm evening sky, the
pools and the rivulets reflecting the sad, languid sunset....
... The Smagins’ estate is “great and fertile,” but old, neglected, and
dead as last year’s cobwebs. The house has sunk, the doors won’t shut, the
tiles in the stove squeeze one another out and form angles, young suckers
of cherries and plums peep up between the cracks of the floors. In the room
where I slept a nightingale had made herself a nest between the window and
the shutter, and while I was there little naked nightingales, looking like
undressed Jew babies, hatched out from the eggs. Sedate storks live on the
barn. At the beehouse there is an old grandsire who remembers the King
Goroh [Translator’s Note: The equivalent of Old King Cole.] and Cleopatra
of Egypt.
Everything is crumbling and decrepit, but poetical, sad, and beautiful in
the extreme.
* * * * *
TO HIS SISTER.
FEODOSIA,
July, 1888.
... The journey from Sumy to Harkov is frightfully dull. Going from Harkov
to Simferopol one might well die of boredom. The Crimean steppe is
depressing, monotonous, with no horizon, colourless like Ivanenko’s
stories, and on the whole rather like the tundra.... From Simferopol
mountains begin and, with them, beauty. Ravines, mountains, ravines,
mountains, poplars stick out from the ravines, vineyards loom dark on the
mountains--all this is bathed in moonlight, is new and wild, and sets one’s
imagination working in harmony with Gogol’s “Terrible Vengeance.”
Particularly fantastic are the alternating precipices and tunnels when you
see now depths full of moonlight and now complete sinister darkness. It is
rather uncanny and delightful. One feels it is something not Russian,
something alien. I reached Sevastopol at night. The town is beautiful in
itself and beautiful because it stands by a marvellous sea. The best in the
sea is its colour, and that one cannot describe. It is like blue copperas.
As to steamers and sailing vessels, piers and harbours, what strikes one
most of all is the poverty of the Russians. Except the “_popovkas_,” which
look like Moscow merchants’ wives, and two or three decent steamers, there
is nothing to speak of in the bay.
... In the morning it was deadly dull. Heat, dust, thirst.... In the
harbour there was a stench of ropes, and one caught glimpses of faces burnt
brick-red, sounds of a pulley, of the splashing of dirty water, knocking,
Tatar words, and all sorts of uninteresting nonsense. You go up to a
steamer: men in rags, bathed in sweat and almost baked by the sun, dizzy,
with tatters on their backs and shoulders, unload Portland cement; you
stand and look at them and the whole scene becomes so remote, so alien,
that one feels insufferably dull and uninterested. It is entertaining to
get on board and set off, but it is rather a bore to sail and talk to a
crowd of passengers consisting of elements all of which one knows by heart
and is weary of already.... Yalta is a mixture of something European that
reminds one of the views of Nice, with something cheap and shoddy. The
box-like hotels in which unhappy consumptives are pining, the impudent
Tatar faces, the ladies’ bustles with their very undisguised expression of
something very abominable, the faces of the idle rich, longing for cheap
adventures, the smell of perfumery instead of the scent of the cedars and
the sea, the miserable dirty pier, the melancholy lights far out at sea,
the prattle of young ladies and gentlemen who have crowded here in order to
admire nature of which they have no idea--all this taken together produces
such a depressing effect and is so overwhelming that one begins to blame
oneself for being biassed and unfair.... At five o’clock in the morning I
arrived at Feodosia--a greyish-brown, dismal, and dull-looking little
town. There is no grass, the trees are wretched, the soil is coarse and
hopelessly poor. Everything is burnt up by the sun, and only the sea
smiles--the sea which has nothing to do with wretched little towns or
tourists. Sea bathing is so nice that when I got into the water I began to
laugh for no reason at all....
* * * * *
July 22.
... Yesterday we went to Shah-Mamai Aivazovsky’s estate, twenty-five versts
from Feodosia. It is a magnificent estate, rather like fairyland; such
estates may probably be seen in Persia. Aivazovsky [Translator’s Note: The
famous marine painter.] himself, a vigorous old man of seventy-five, is a
mixture of a good-natured Armenian and an overfed bishop; he is full of
dignity, has soft hands, and offers them like a general. He is not very
intelligent, but is a complex nature worthy of attention. He combines in
himself a general, a bishop, an artist, an Armenian, a naive old peasant,
and an Othello. He is married to a young and very beautiful woman whom he
rules with a rod of iron. He is friendly with Sultans, Shahs, and Amirs. He