Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
think we are not ordinary. Me, for instance, they invite everywhere and
regale me with food and drink like a general at a wedding. My sister is
indignant that people on all sides invite her simply because she is a
writer’s sister. No one wants to love the ordinary people in us. Hence it
follows that if in the eyes of our friends we should appear to-morrow as
ordinary mortals, they will leave off loving us, and will only pity us. And
that is horrid. It is horrid, too, that they like the very things in us
which we often dislike and despise in ourselves. It is horrid that I was
right when I wrote the story “The First-Class Passenger,” in which an
engineer and a professor talk about fame.
I am going away into the country. Hang them all! You have Feodosia. By the
way, about Feodosia and the Tatars. The Tatars have been robbed of their
land, but no one thinks of their welfare. There ought to be Tatar schools.
Write and suggest that the money which is being spent on the sausage Dorpat
University, where useless Germans are studying, should be devoted to
schools for Tatars, who are of use to Russia. I would write about it
myself, but I don’t know how to.
December 23, 1888.
... There are moments when I completely lose heart. For whom and for what
do I write? For the public? But I don’t see it, and believe in it less than
I do in spooks: it is uneducated, badly brought up, and its best elements
are unfair and insincere to us. I cannot make out whether this public wants
me or not. Burenin says that it does not, and that I waste my time on
trifles; the Academy has given me a prize. The devil himself could not make
head or tail of it. Write for the sake of money? But I never have any
money, and not being used to having it I am almost indifferent to it. For
the sake of money I work apathetically. Write for the sake of praise? But
praise merely irritates me. Literary society, students, Pleshtcheyev, young
ladies, etc., were enthusiastic in their praises of my “Nervous Breakdown,”
but Grigorovitch is the only one who has noticed the description of the
first snow. And so on, and so on. If we had critics I should know that I
provide material, whether good or bad does not matter--that to men who
devote themselves to the study of life I am as necessary as a star is to an
astronomer. And then I would take trouble over my work and should know what
I was working for. But as it is you, I, Muravlin, and the rest are like
lunatics who write books and plays to please themselves. To please oneself
is, of course, an excellent thing; one feels the pleasure while one is
writing, but afterwards? But ... I will shut up. In short, I am sorry for
Tatyana Repin, [Translator’s Note: Suvorin’s play.] not because she
poisoned herself, but because she lived her life, died in agony, and was
described absolutely to no purpose, without any good to anyone. A number of
tribes, religions, languages, civilizations, have vanished without a
trace--vanished because there were no historians or biologists. In the same
way a number of lives and works of art disappear before our very eyes owing
to the complete absence of criticism. It may be objected that critics would
have nothing to do because all modern works are poor and insignificant. But
this is a narrow way of looking at things. Life must be studied not from
the pluses alone, but from the minuses too. The conviction that the
“eighties” have not produced a single writer may in itself provide material
for five volumes.
... I settled down last night to write a story for the _Novoye Vremya,_ but
a woman appeared and dragged me to see the poet Palmin who, when he was
drunk, had fallen and cut his forehead to the bone. I was busy over the
drunken fellow for nearly two hours, was tired out, began to smell of
iodoform all over, felt cross, and came home exhausted.... Altogether my
life is a dreary one, and I begin to get fits of hating people which used
never to happen to me before. Long stupid conversations, visitors, people
asking for help, and helping them to the extent of one or two or three
roubles, spending money on cabs for the sake of patients who do not pay me
a penny--altogether it is such a hotch-potch that I feel like running away
from home. People borrow money from me and don’t pay it back, they take my
books, they waste my time.... Blighted love is the one thing that is
missing.
* * * * *
December 26, 1888.
... You say that from compassion women fall in love, from compassion they
get married.... And what about men? I don’t like realistic writers to
slander women, but I don’t like it either when people put women on a
pedestal and attempt to prove that even if they are worse than men, anyway
they are angels and men scoundrels. Neither men nor women are worth a brass
farthing, but men are more just and more intelligent.
December 30, 1888.
... This is how I understand my characters. [Translator’s Note: In the play
“Ivanov.”] Ivanov is a gentleman, a University man, and not remarkable in
any way. He is excitable, hotheaded, easily carried away, honest and
straightforward like most people of his class. He has lived on his estate
and served on the Zemstvo. What he has been doing and how he has behaved,
what he has been interested in and enthusiastic over, can be seen from the
following words of his, addressed to the doctor (Act I., Scene 5): “Don’t
marry Jewesses or neurotic women or blue-stockings ... don’t fight with
thousands single-handed, don’t wage war on windmills, don’t batter your
head against the wall ... God preserve you from scientific farming,
wonderful schools, enthusiastic speeches....” This is what he has in his
past. Sarra, who has seen his scientific farming and other crazes, says
about him to the doctor: “He is a remarkable man, doctor, and I am sorry
you did not meet him two or three years ago. Now he is depressed and
melancholy, he doesn’t talk or do anything, but in old days ... how
charming he was!” (Act I., Scene 7). His past is beautiful, as is generally
the case with educated Russians. There is not, or there hardly is, a single
Russian gentleman or University man who does not boast of his past. The
present is always worse than the past. Why? Because Russian excitability
has one specific characteristic: it is quickly followed by exhaustion. A
man has scarcely left the class-room before he rushes to take up a burden
beyond his strength; he tackles at once the schools, the peasants,
scientific farming, and the _Vyestnik Evropi,_ he makes speeches, writes to
the minister, combats evil, applauds good, falls in love, not in an
ordinary, simple way, but selects either a blue-stocking or a neurotic or a
Jewess, or even a prostitute whom he tries to save, and so on, and so on.
But by the time he is thirty or thirty-five he begins to feel tired and
bored. He has not got decent moustaches yet, but he already says with
authority:
“Don’t marry, my dear fellow.... Trust my experience,” or, “After all,
what does Liberalism come to? Between ourselves Katkov was often
right....” He is ready to reject the Zemstvo and scientific farming, and
science and love. My Ivanov says to the doctor (Act I., Scene 5): “You
took your degree only last year, my dear friend, you are still young and
vigorous, while I am thirty-five. I have a right to advise you....” That
is how these prematurely exhausted people talk. Further down, sighing
authoritatively, he advises: “Don’t you marry in this or that way (see
above), but choose something commonplace, grey, with no vivid colours or
superfluous flourishes. Altogether build your life according to the
conventional pattern. The greyer and more monotonous the background the
better.... The life that I have led--how tiring it is! Ah, how tiring!”
Conscious of physical exhaustion and boredom, he does not understand what
is the matter with him, and what has happened. Horrified, he says to the
doctor (Act I., Scene 3): “Here you tell me she is soon going to die and
I feel neither love nor pity, but a sort of emptiness and weariness....
If one looks at me from outside it must be horrible. I don’t understand
what is happening to my soul.” Finding themselves in such a position,
narrow and unconscientious people generally throw the whole blame on
their environment, or write themselves down as Hamlets and superfluous
people, and are satisfied with that. But Ivanov, a straightforward man,
openly says to the doctor and to the public that he does not understand
his own mind. “I don’t understand! I don’t understand!” That he really
doesn’t understand can be seen from his long monologue in Act III.,
where, _tete-a-tete_ with the public, he opens his heart to it and
even weeps.
The change that has taken place in him offends his sense of what is
fitting. He looks for the causes outside himself and fails to find them; he
begins to look for them inside and finds only an indefinite feeling of
guilt. It is a Russian feeling. Whether there is a death or illness in his
family, whether he owes money or lends it, a Russian always feels guilty.
Ivanov talks all the time about being to blame in some way, and the feeling
of guilt increases in him at every juncture. In Act I. he says: “Suppose I
am terribly to blame, yet my thoughts are in a tangle, my soul is in
bondage to a sort of sloth, and I am incapable of understanding myself....”
In Act II. he says to Sasha: “My conscience aches day and night, I feel
that I am profoundly to blame, but in what exactly I have done wrong I
cannot make out.”
To exhaustion, boredom, and the feeling of guilt add one more enemy:
loneliness. Were Ivanov an official, an actor, a priest, a professor, he
would have grown used to his position. But he lives on his estate. He is in
the country. His neighbours are either drunkards or fond of cards, or are
of the same type as the doctor. None of them care about his feelings or the
change that has taken place in him. He is lonely. Long winters, long
evenings, an empty garden, empty rooms, the grumbling Count, the ailing
wife.... He has nowhere to go. This is why he is every minute tortured by
the question: what is he to do with himself?
Now about his fifth enemy. Ivanov is tired and does not understand himself,
but life has nothing to do with that! It makes its legitimate demands upon
him, and whether he will or no, he must settle problems. His sick wife is a
problem, his numerous debts are a problem, Sasha flinging herself on his
neck is a problem. The way in which he settles all these problems must be
evident from his monologue in Act III., and from the contents of the last
two acts. Men like Ivanov do not solve difficulties but collapse under
their weight. They lose their heads, gesticulate, become nervous, complain,
do silly things, and finally, giving rein to their flabby, undisciplined
nerves, lose the ground under their feet and enter the class of the “broken
down” and “misunderstood.”
Disappointment, apathy, nervous limpness and exhaustion are the inevitable
consequence of extreme excitability, and such excitability is extremely
characteristic of our young people. Take literature. Take the present
time.... Socialism is one of the forms of this excitement. But where is
socialism? You see it in Tihomirov’s letter to the Tsar. The socialists are
married and are criticizing the Zemstvo. Where is Liberalism? Mihailovsky
himself says that all the labels have been mixed up now. And what are all
the Russian enthusiasms worth? The war has wearied us, Bulgaria has wearied
us till we can only be ironical about it. Zucchi has wearied us and so has
the comic opera.
Exhaustion (Dr. Bertensen will confirm this) finds expression not only in
complaining or the sensation of boredom. The life of an over-tired man