Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
ALEXIN,
May 7, 1891.
The summer villa is all right. There are woods and the Oka: it is far away
in the wilds, it is warm, nightingales sing, and so on. It is quiet and
peaceful, and in bad weather it will be dull and depressing here. After
travelling abroad, life at a summer villa seems a little mawkish. I feel as
though I had been taken prisoner and put into a fortress. But I am
contented all the same. In Moscow I received from the Society of Dramatic
Authors not two hundred roubles, as I expected, but three hundred. It’s
very kind on the part of fortune.
Well, my dear sir, I owe you, even if we adopt your reckoning, not less
than eight hundred roubles. In June or July, when my money will be at the
shop, I will write to Zandrok to send all that comes to me to you in
Feodosia, and do not try and prevent me. I give you my word of honour that
when I have paid my debts and settled with you, I’ll accept a loan of 2,000
from you. Do not imagine that it is disagreeable to me to be in your debt.
I lend other people money, and so I feel I have the right to borrow money,
but I am afraid of getting into difficulties and the habit of being in
debt. You know I owe your firm a devilish lot.
There is a fine view from my window. Trains are continually passing. There
is a bridge across the Oka.
ALEXIN,
May 10, 1891.
Yes, you are right, my soul needs balsam. I should read now with pleasure,
even with joy, something serious, not merely about myself but things in
general. I pine for serious reading, and recent Russian criticism does not
nourish but simply irritates me. I could read with enthusiasm something new
about Pushkin or Tolstoy. That would be balsam for my idle mind.
I am homesick for Venice and Florence too, and am ready to climb Vesuvius
again; Bologna has been effaced from my memory and grown dim. As for Nice
and Paris, when I recall them “I look on my life with loathing.”
In the last number of _The Messenger of Foreign Literature_ there is a
story by Ouida, translated from the English by our Mihail. Why don’t I know
foreign languages? It seems to me I could translate magnificently. When I
read anyone else’s translation I keep altering and transposing the words in
my brain, and the result is something light, ethereal, like lacework.
On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays I write my Sahalin book, on the other
days, except Sunday, my novel, and on Sundays, short stories. I work with
zest. The weather has been superb every day; the site of our summer villa
is dry and healthy. There is a lot of woodland. There are a lot of fish and
crayfish in the Oka. I see the trains and the steamers. Altogether if it
were not for being somewhat cramped I should be very very much pleased with
it.
* * * * *
I don’t intend to get married. I should like to be a little bald old man
sitting at a big table in a fine study....
ALEXIN,
May 13, 1891.
I am going to write you a Christmas story--that’s certain. Two, indeed, if
you like. I sit and write and write ...; at last I have set to work. I am
only sorry that my cursed teeth are aching and my stomach is out of order.
I am a dilatory but productive author. By the time I am forty I shall have
hundreds of volumes, so that I can open a bookshop with nothing but my own
works. To have a lot of books and to have nothing else is a horrible
disgrace.
My dear friend, haven’t you in your library Tagantsev’s “Criminal Law”?
If you have, couldn’t you send it me? I would buy it, but I am now “a
poor relation”--a beggar and as poor as Sidor’s goat. Would you telephone
to your shop, too, to send me, on account of favours to come, two books:
“The Laws relating to Exiles,” and “The Laws relating to Persons under
Police Control.” Don’t imagine that I want to become a procurator; I
want these works for my Sahalin book. I am going to direct my attack
chiefly against life sentences, in which I see the root of all the
evils; and against the laws dealing with exiles, which are fearfully out
of date and contradictory.
TO L. S. MIZINOV.
ALEXIN,
May 17, 1891.
Golden, mother-of-pearl, and _fil d’Ecosse_ Lika! The mongoose ran away the
day before yesterday, and will never come back again. It is dead. That is
the first thing.
The second thing is, that we are moving our residence to the upper storey
of the house of B.K.--the man who gave you milk to drink and forgot to give
you strawberries. We will let you know the day we move in due time. Come to
smell the flowers, to walk, to fish, and to blubber. Ah, lovely Lika! When
you bedewed my right shoulder with your tears (I have taken out the spots
with benzine), and when slice after slice you ate our bread and meat, we
greedily devoured your face and head with our eyes. Ah, Lika, Lika,
diabolical beauty! ...
When you are at the Alhambra with Trofimov I hope you may accidentally jab
out his eye with your fork.
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
ALEXIN,
May 18, 1891.
... I get up at five o’clock in the morning; evidently when I am old I
shall get up at four. My forefathers all got up very early, before the
cock. And I notice people who get up very early are horribly fussy. So I
suppose I shall be a fussy, restless old man....
BOGIMOVO,
May 20.
... The carp bite capitally. I forgot all my sorrows yesterday; first I sat
by the pond and caught carp, and then by the old mill and caught perch.
... The last two proclamations--about the Siberian railway and the
exiles--pleased me very much. The Siberian railway is called a national
concern, and the tone of the proclamation guarantees its speedy completion;
and convicts who have completed such and such terms as settlers are allowed
to return to Russia without the right to live in the provinces of
Petersburg and Moscow. The newspapers have let this pass unnoticed, and yet
it is something which has never been in Russia before--it is the first step
towards abolishing the life sentence which has so long weighed on the
public conscience as unjust and cruel in the extreme....
BOGIMOVO,
May 27, 4 o’clock in the Morning.
The mongoose has run away into the woods and has not come back. It is cold.
I have no money. But nevertheless, I don’t envy you. One cannot live in
town now, it is both dreary and unwholesome. I should like you to be
sitting from morning till dinner-time in this verandah, drinking tea and
writing something artistic, a play or something; and after dinner till
evening, fishing and thinking peaceful thoughts. You have long ago earned
the right which is denied you now by all sorts of chance circumstances, and
it seems to me shameful and unjust that I should live more peacefully than
you. Is it possible that you will stay all June in town? It’s really
terrible....
... By the way, read Grigorovitch’s letter to my enemy Anna Ivanovna. Let
her soul rejoice. “Chekhov belongs to the generation which has perceptibly
begun to turn away from the West and concentrate more closely on their own
world....” “Venice and Florence are nothing else than dull towns for a man
of any intelligence....” _Merci_, but I don’t understand persons of such
intelligence. One would have to be a bull to “turn away from the West” on
arriving for the first time in Venice or Florence. There is very little
intelligence in doing so. But I should like to know who is taking the
trouble to announce to the whole universe that I did not like foreign
parts. Good Lord! I never let drop one word about it. I liked even Bologna.
Whatever ought I to have done? Howled with rapture? Broken the windows?
Embraced Frenchmen? Do they say I gained no ideas? But I fancy I did....
We must see each other--or more correctly, I must see you. I am missing you
already, although to-day I caught two hundred and fifty-two carp and one
crayfish.
BOGIMOVO,
June 4, 1891.
Why did you go away so soon? I was very dull, and could not get back into
my usual petty routine very quickly afterwards. As luck would have it,
after you went away the weather became warm and magnificent, and the fish
began to bite.
... The mongoose has been found. A sportsman with dogs found him on this
side of the Oka in a quarry; if there had not been a crevice in the quarry
the dogs would have torn the mongoose to pieces. It had been astray in the
woods for eighteen days. In spite of the climatic conditions, which are
awful for it, it had grown fat--such is the effect of freedom. Yes, my dear
sir, freedom is a grand thing.
I advise you again to go to Feodosia by the Volga. Anna Ivanovna and you
will enjoy it, and it will be new and interesting for the children. If I
were free I would come with you. It’s snug now on those Volga steamers,
they feed you well and the passengers are interesting.
Forgive me for your having been so uncomfortable with us. When I am grown
up and order furniture from Venice, as I certainly shall do, you won’t have
such a cold and rough time with me.
TO L. S. MIZINOV.
BOGIMOVO,
June 12, 1891.
Enchanting, amazing Lika!
Captivated by the Circassian Levitan, you have completely forgotten that
you promised my brother Ivan you would come on the 1st of June, and you do
not answer my sister’s letter at all. I wrote to you from Moscow to invite
you, but my letter, too, remained a voice crying in the wilderness. Though
you are received in aristocratic society, you have been badly brought up
all the same, and I don’t regret having once chastised you with a switch.
You must understand that expecting your arrival from day to day not only
wearies us, but puts us to expense. In an ordinary way we only have for
dinner what is left of yesterday’s soup, but when we expect visitors we
have also a dish of boiled beef, which we buy from the neighbouring cooks.
We have a magnificent garden, dark avenues, snug corners, a river, a mill,
a boat, moonlight, nightingales, turkeys. In the pond and river there are
very intelligent frogs. We often go for walks, during which I usually close
my eyes and crook my right arm in the shape of a bread-ring, imagining that
you are walking by my side.
... Give my greetings to Levitan. Please ask him not to write about you in
every letter. In the first place it is not magnanimous on his part, and in
the second, I have no interest whatever in his happiness.
Be well and happy and don’t forget us. I have just received your letter, it
is filled from top to bottom with such charming expressions as: “The devil
choke you!” “The devil flay you!” “Anathema!” “A good smack,” “rabble,”
“overeaten myself.” Your friends--such as Trophim--with their cabmen’s
talk certainly have an improving influence on you.
You may bathe and go for evening walks. That’s all nonsense. All my inside
is full of coughs, wet and dry, but I bathe and walk about, and yet I am
alive....
TO L. S. MIZINOV.
(Enclosing a photograph of a young man inscribed “To Lida from Petya.”)
PRECIOUS LIDA!
Why these reproaches! I send you my portrait. To-morrow we shall meet.
Do not forget your Petya. A thousand kisses!!!
I have bought Chekhov’s stories. How delightful! Mind you buy them.
Remember me to Masha Chekhov. What a darling you are!
TO THE SAME.
I love you passionately like a tiger, and I offer you my hand.
Marshal of Nobility,
GOLOVIN RTISHTCHEV.
P.S.--Answer me by signs. You do squint.
TO HIS SISTER.
BOGIMOVO,
June, 1891.
Masha! Make haste and come home, as without you our intensive culture is
going to complete ruin. There is nothing to eat, the flies are sickening.
The mongoose has broken a jar of jam, and so on, and so on.
All the summer visitors sigh and lament over your absence. There is no
news.... The spiderman is busy from morning to night with his spiders. He