Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
truth and the immutable laws? If it knew, believe me, it would long ago
have shown us the true path and we should have known what to do, and
Fofanov would not have been in a madhouse, Garshin would have been alive
to-day, Barantsevitch would not have been so depressed and we should not be
so dull and ill at ease as we are, and you would not feel drawn to the
theatre and I to Sahalin. But criticism maintains a dignified silence or
gets out of it with idle trashy babble. If it seems to you authoritative it
is because it is stupid, conceited, impudent, and clamorous; because it is
an empty barrel one cannot help hearing.
But let us have done with that and sing something out of a different opera.
Please don’t build any literary hopes on my Sahalin trip. I am not going
for the sake of impressions or observations, but simply for the sake of
living for six months differently from how I have lived hitherto. Don’t
rely on me, old man; if I am successful and clever enough to do something,
so much the better; if not, don’t blame me. I am going after Easter. I will
send you in due time my Sahalin address and minute instructions....
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MOSCOW,
March 22, 1890.
... Yesterday a young lady told me that Professor Storozhenko had related
to her the following anecdote. The Sovereign liked the _Kreutzer
Sonata_. Pobyedonostsev, Lubimov, and the other cherubim and seraphim,
hastened to justify their attitude to Tolstoy by showing his Majesty
“Nikolay Palkin.” After reading it, his Majesty was so furious that he
ordered measures to be taken. Prince Dolgorukov was informed. And so one
fine day an adjutant from Dolgorukov comes to Tolstoy and invites him to go
at once to the prince. The latter replies: “Tell the prince that I only
visit the houses of my acquaintances.” The adjutant, overcome with
confusion, rides away, and next day brings Tolstoy the official notice
demanding from him an explanation in regard to his “Nikolay Palkin.”
Tolstoy reads the document and says:
“Tell his excellency that I have not for a long time past written anything
for publication; I write only for my friends, and if my friends spread my
writings abroad, they are responsible and not I. Tell him that!”
“But I can’t tell him that,” cried the adjutant in horror, “the prince will
not believe me!”
“The prince will not believe his subordinates? That’s bad.”
Two days later the adjutant comes again with a fresh document, and learns
that Tolstoy has gone away to Yasnaya Polyana. That is the end of the
anecdote.
Now about the new movements. They flog in our police stations; a rate has
been fixed; from a peasant they take ten kopecks for a beating, from a
workman twenty--that’s for the rods and the trouble. Peasant women are
flogged too. Not long ago, in their enthusiasm for beating in a police
station, they thrashed a couple of budding lawyers, an incident upon which
_Russkiya Vyedomosti_ has a vague paragraph to-day; an investigation
has begun.
Another sign of the times: the cabmen approve of the students’
disturbances.
“They are making a riot for the poor to be taken in to study,” they
explain, “learning is not only for the rich.” It is said that when a crowd
of students were being taken by night to the prison the populace fell upon
the gendarmes to rescue the students from them. The populace is said to
have shouted: “You have set up flogging for us, but they stand up for us.”
March 29.
... Fatigue is a relative matter. You say you used to work twenty hours out
of the twenty-four and were not exhausted. But you know one may be
exhausted lying all day long on the sofa. You used to write for twenty
hours, but you know you were in perfect health all that time, you were
stimulated by success, defiance, a sense of your talent; you liked your
work, or you wouldn’t have written. Your heir-apparent sits up late, not
because he has a talent for journalism or a love for his work, but simply
because his father is an editor of a newspaper. The difference is vast. He
ought to have been a doctor or a lawyer, to have had an income of two
thousand roubles a year, and published his articles not in _Novoye Vremya_
and not in the spirit of _Novoye Vremya_. Only those young people can be
accepted as healthy who refuse to be reconciled with the old order and
foolishly or wisely struggle against it--such is the will of nature and it
is the foundation of progress, while your son began by absorbing the old
order. In our most intimate talks he has never once abused Tatistchev or
Burenin, and that’s a bad sign. You are a hundred times as liberal as he
is, and it ought to be the other way. He utters a listless and indolent
protest, he soon drops his voice and soon agrees, and altogether one has
the impression that he has no interest whatever in the contest; that is, he
looks on at the cock-fight like a spectator and has no cock of his own. And
one ought to have one’s own cock, else life is without interest. The
unfortunate thing, too, is that he is intelligent, and great intelligence
with little interest in life is like a great machine which produces
nothing, yet requires a great deal of fuel and exhausts the owner....
April 1.
You abuse me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil,
lack of ideals and ideas, and so on. You would have me, when I describe
horse-stealers, say: “Stealing horses is an evil.” But that has been known
for ages without my saying so. Let the jury judge them, it’s my job simply
to show what sort of people they are. I write: you are dealing with
horse-stealers, so let me tell you that they are not beggars but well-fed
people, that they are people of a special cult, and that horse-stealing is
not simply theft but a passion. Of course it would be pleasant to combine
art with a sermon, but for me personally it is extremely difficult and
almost impossible, owing to the conditions of technique. You see, to depict
horse-stealers in seven hundred lines I must all the time speak and think
in their tone and feel in their spirit, otherwise, if I introduce
subjectivity, the image becomes blurred and the story will not be as
compact as all short stories ought to be. When I write I reckon entirely
upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking
in the story.
April 11.
Madame N. who used at one time to live in your family is here now. She
married the artist N., a nice but tedious man who wants at all costs to
travel with me to Sahalin to sketch. To refuse him my company I haven’t the
courage, but to travel with him would be simple misery. He is going to
Petersburg in a day or two to sell his pictures, and at his wife’s request
will call on you to _ask your advice_. With a view to this his wife
came to ask me for a letter of introduction to you. Be my benefactor, tell
N. that I am a drunkard, a swindler, a nihilist, a rowdy character, and
that it is out of the question to travel with me, and that a journey in my
company will do nothing but upset him. Tell him he will be wasting his
time. Of course it would be very nice to have my book illustrated, but when
I learned that N. was hoping to get not less than a thousand roubles for
it, I lost all appetite for illustrations. My dear fellow, advise him
against it!!! Why it is your advice he wants, the devil only knows.
April 15.
And so, my dear friend, I am setting off on Wednesday or Thursday at
latest. Good-bye till December. Good luck in my absence. I received the
money, thank you very much, though fifteen hundred roubles is a great deal;
I don’t know where to put it.... I feel as though I were preparing for the
battlefield, though I see no dangers before me but toothache, which I am
sure to have on the journey. As I am provided with nothing in the way of
papers but a passport, I may have unpleasant encounters with the
authorities, but that is a passing trouble. If they refuse to show me
something, I shall simply write in my book that they wouldn’t show it me,
and that’s all, and I won’t worry. In case I am drowned or anything of that
sort, you might keep it in mind that all I have or may have in the future
belongs to my sister; she will pay my debts.
I am taking my mother with me and putting her down at the Troitsky
Monastery; I am taking my sister too, and leaving her at Kostroma. I am
telling them I shall be back in September.
I shall go over the university in Tomsk. As the only faculty there is
medicine I shall not show myself an ignoramus.
I have bought myself a fur coat, an officer’s waterproof leather coat, big
boots, and a big knife for cutting sausage and hunting tigers. I am
equipped from head to foot.
TO HIS SISTER.
STEAMER “ALEXANDR NEVSKY 23,”
April, 1890, early in the morning.
My dear Tunguses!
Did you have rain when Ivan was coming back from the monastery? In
Yaroslavl there was such a downpour that I had to swathe myself in my
leather chiton. My first impression of the Volga was poisoned by the rain,
by the tear-stained windows of the cabin, and the wet nose of G., who came
to meet me at the station. In the rain Yaroslavl looks like Zvenigorod, and
its churches remind me of Perervinsky Monastery; there are lots of
illiterate signboards, it’s muddy, jackdaws with big heads strut about the
pavement.
In the steamer I made it my first duty to indulge my talent--that is, to
sleep. When I woke I beheld the sun. The Volga is not bad; water meadows,
monasteries bathed in sunshine, white churches; the wide expanse is
marvellous, wherever one looks it would be a nice place to sit down and
begin fishing. Class ladies [Translator’s Note: I.e., School chaperons,
whose duty it is to sit in the classroom while the girls are receiving
instruction from a master.] wander about on the banks, nipping at the green
grass. The shepherd’s horn can be heard now and then. White gulls, looking
like the younger Drishka, hover over the water.
The steamer is not up to much....
* * * * *
Kundasova is travelling with me. Where she is going and with what object I
don’t know. When I question her about it, she launches off into extremely
misty allusions about someone who has appointed a tryst with her in a
ravine near Kineshma, then goes off into a wild giggle and begins stamping
her feet or prodding with her elbow whatever comes first. We have passed
both Kineshma and the ravine, but she still goes on in the steamer, at
which of course I am very much pleased; by the way, yesterday for the first
time in my life I saw her eating. She eats no less than other people, but
she eats mechanically, as though she were munching oats.
Kostroma is a nice town. I saw the stretch of river on which the languid
Levitan used to live. I saw Kineshma, where I walked along the boulevard
and watched the local _beaus_. Here I went into the chemist’s shop to
buy some Bertholet salts for my tongue, which was like leather after the
medicine I had taken. The chemist, on seeing Olga Petrovna, was overcome
with delight and confusion; she was the same. They were evidently old
acquaintances, and judging from the conversation between them they had
walked more than once about the ravines near Kineshma.
... It’s rather cold and rather dull, but interesting on the whole. The
steamer whistles every minute; its whistle is midway between the bray of an
ass and an Aeolian harp. In five or six hours we shall be in Nizhni. The
sun is rising. I slept last night artistically. My money is safe; that is
because I am constantly pressing my hands on my stomach.
Very beautiful are the steam-tugs, dragging after them four or five barges
each; they look like some fine young intellectual trying to run away while
a plebeian wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and wife’s grandmother hold