Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
doubt, I could spit on it. It would be a good thing, by God! to devote
three years to it. I shall write a great deal of rubbish, because I am not
a specialist, but really I shall write something sensible too. It is such a
good subject, because it would live for a hundred years after me, as it
would be the literary source and aid for all who are studying prison
organization, or are interested in it.
You are right, your Excellency, I have done a great deal this summer.
Another such summer and I may perhaps have written a novel and bought an
estate. I have not only paid my way, but even paid off a thousand roubles
of debt.
... Tell your son that I envy him. And I envy you too, and not because your
wives have gone away, but because you are bathing in the sea and living in
a warm house. I am cold in my barn. I should like new carpets, an open
fireplace, bronzes, and learned conversations. Alas! I shall never be a
Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above all things; and in the history of
mankind, culture, expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and
keenness of wit. Ach! To make haste and become an old man and sit at a big
table! ...
P.S.--If we were to cut the zoological conversations out of “The Duel”
wouldn’t it make it more living? ...
MOSCOW,
September 8.
I have returned to Moscow and am keeping indoors. My family is busy trying
to find a new flat but I say nothing because I am too lazy to turn round.
They want to move to Devitchye Polye for the sake of cheapness.
The title you recommend for my novel--“Deception”--will not do: it would
only be appropriate if it were a question of conscious lying. Unconscious
lying is not deception but a mistake. Tolstoy calls our having money and
eating meat lying--that’s too much....
Death gathers men little by little, he knows what he is about. One might
write a play: an old chemist invents the elixir of life--take fifteen drops
and you live for ever; but he breaks the phial from terror, lest such
carrion as himself and his wife might live for ever. Tolstoy denies mankind
immortality, but my God! how much that is personal there is in it! The day
before yesterday I read his “Afterword.” Strike me dead! but it is stupider
and stuffier than “Letters to a Governor’s Wife,” which I despise. The
devil take the philosophy of the great ones of this world! All the great
sages are as despotic as generals, and as ignorant and as indelicate as
generals, because they feel secure of impunity. Diogenes spat in people’s
faces, knowing that he would not suffer for it. Tolstoy abuses doctors as
scoundrels, and displays his ignorance in great questions because he’s just
such a Diogenes who won’t be locked up or abused in the newspapers. And so
to the devil with the philosophy of all the great ones of this world! The
whole of it with its fanatical “Afterwords” and “Letters to a Governor’s
Wife” is not worth one little mare in his “Story of a Horse....”
TO E. M. S.
MOSCOW,
September 16.
So we old bachelors smell of dogs? So be it. But as for specialists in
feminine diseases being at heart rakes and cynics, allow me to differ.
Gynaecologists have to do with deadly prose such as you have never dreamed
of, and to which perhaps, if you knew it, you would, with the ferocity
characteristic of your imagination, attribute a worse smell than that of
dogs. One who is always swimming in the sea loves dry land; one who for
ever is plunged in prose passionately longs for poetry. All gynaecologists
are idealists. Your doctor reads poems, your instinct prompted you right; I
would add that he is a great liberal, a bit of a mystic, and that he dreams
of a wife in the style of the Nekrassov Russian woman. The famous Snyegirev
cannot speak of the “Russian woman” without a quiver in his voice. Another
gynaecologist whom I know is in love with a mysterious lady in a veil whom
he has only seen from a distance. Another one goes to all the first
performances at the theatre and then is loud in his abuse, declaring that
authors ought to represent only ideal women, and so on. You have omitted to
consider also that a good gynaecologist cannot be a stupid man or a
mediocrity. Intellect has a brighter lustre than baldness, but you have
noticed the baldness and emphasized it--and have flung the intellect
overboard. You have noticed, too, and emphasized that a fat
man--brrr!--exudes a sort of greasiness, but you completely lose sight
of the fact that he is a professor--that is, that he has spent several
years in thinking and doing something which sets him high above millions
of men, high above all the Verotchkas and Taganrog Greek girls, high
above dinners and wines of all sorts. Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham,
and Japheth. Ham only noticed that his father was a drunkard, and
completely lost sight of the fact that he was a genius, that he had
built an ark and saved the world.
Writers must not imitate Ham, bear that in mind.
I do not venture to ask you to love the gynaecologist and the professor,
but I venture to remind you of the justice which for an objective writer is
more precious than the air he breathes.
The girl of the merchant class is admirably drawn. That is a good passage
in the doctor’s speech in which he speaks of his lack of faith in medicine,
but there is no need to make him drink after every sentence....
Then from the particular to the general! Let me warn you. This is not a
story and not a novel and not a work of art, but a long row of heavy,
gloomy barrack buildings. Where is your construction which at first so
enchanted your humble servant? Where is the lightness, the freshness, the
grace? Read your story through: a description of a dinner, then a
description of passing ladies and girls, then a description of a company,
then a description of a dinner, ... and so on endlessly. Descriptions and
descriptions and no action at all. You ought to begin straight away with
the merchant’s daughter, and keep to her, and chuck out Verotchka and the
Greek girls and all the rest, except the doctor and the merchant family.
Excuse this long letter.
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MOSCOW,
October 16, 1891.
I congratulate you on your new cook, and wish you an excellent appetite.
Wish me the same, for I am coming to see you soon--sooner than I had
intended--and shall eat for three. I simply must get away from home, if
only for a fortnight. From morning till night I am unpleasantly irritable,
I feel as though someone were drawing a blunt knife over my soul, and this
irritability finds external expression in my hurrying off to bed early and
avoiding conversation. Nothing I do succeeds. I began a story for the
_Sbornik_; I wrote half and threw it up, and then began another; I have
been struggling for more than a week with this story, and the time when I
shall finish it and when I shall set to work and finish the first story,
for which I am to be paid, seems to me far away. I have not been to the
province of Nizhni Novgorod yet, for reasons not under my control, and I
don’t know when I shall go. In fact it’s a hopeless mess--a silly muddle
and not life. And I desire nothing now so much as to win two hundred
thousand....
Ah, I have such a subject for a novel! If I were in a tolerable humour I
could begin it on the first of November and finish it on the first of
December. I would make five signatures of print. And I long to write as I
did at Bogimovo--i.e., from morning till night and in my sleep.
Don’t tell anyone I am coming to Petersburg. I shall live incognito. In my
letters I write vaguely that I am coming in November....
Shall I remind you of Kashtanka, or forget about her? Won’t she lose her
childhood and youth if we don’t print her? However, you know best....
P. S.--If you see my brother Alexandr, tell him that our aunt is dying of
consumption. Her days are numbered. She was a splendid woman, a saint.
If you want to visit the famine-stricken provinces, let us go together in
January, it will be more conspicuous then....
MOSCOW,
October 19, 1891.
What a splendid little letter has come from you! It is warmly and
eloquently written, and every thought in it is true. To talk now of
laziness and drunkenness, and so on, is as strange and tactless as to
lecture a man on the conduct of life at a moment when he is being sick or
lying ill of typhus. There is always a certain element of insolence in
being well-fed, as in every kind of force, and that element finds
expression chiefly in the well-fed man preaching to the hungry. If
consolation is revolting at a time of real sorrow, what must be the effect
of preaching morality; and how stupid and insulting that preaching must
seem. These moral people imagine that if a man is fifteen roubles in
arrears with his taxes he must be a wastrel, and ought not to drink; but
they ought to reckon up how much states are in debt, and prime ministers,
and what the debts of all the marshals of nobility and all the bishops
taken together come to. What do the Guards owe! Only their tailors could
tell us that....
You have told them to send me four hundred? Vivat dominus Suvorin! So I
have already received from your firm 400 + 100 + 400. Altogether I shall
get for “The Duel” as I calculated, about fourteen hundred, so five hundred
will go towards my debt. Well, and for that thank God! By the spring I must
pay off all my debt or I shall go into a decline, for in the spring I want
another advance from all my editors. I shall take it and escape to Java....
Ah, my friends, how bored I am! If I am a doctor I ought to have patients
and a hospital; if I am a literary man I ought to live among people instead
of in a flat with a mongoose, I ought to have at least a scrap of social
and political life--but this life between four walls, without nature,
without people, without a country, without health and appetite, is not
life, but some sort of ... and nothing more.
For the sake of all the perch and pike you are going to catch on your
Zaraish estate, I entreat you to publish the English humorist Bernard.
[Translator’s Note: ? Bernard Shaw.] ...
TO MADAME LINTVARYOV.
MOSCOW,
October 25, 1891.
HONOURED NATALYA MIHAILOVNA,
I have not gone to Nizhni as I meant to, but am sitting at home, writing
and sneezing. Madame Morozov has seen the Minister, he has absolutely
prohibited private initiative in the work of famine relief, and actually
waved her out of his presence. This has reduced me to apathy at once. Add
to that, complete lack of money, sneezing, a mass of work, the illness of
my aunt who died to-day, the indefiniteness, the uncertainty in
fact--everything has come together to hinder a lazy person like me. I have
put off my going away till the first of December.
We felt dull without you for a long time, and when the Shah of Persia
[Footnote: A. I. Smagin.] went away it was duller still. I have given
orders that no one is to be admitted, and sit in my room like a heron in
the reeds; I see no one, and no one sees me. And it is better so, or the
public would pull the bell off, and my study would be turned into a smoking
and talking room. It’s dull to live like this, but what am I to do? I shall
wait till the summer and then let myself go.
I shall sell the mongoose by auction. I should be glad to sell N. and his
poems too, but no one would buy him. He dashes in to see me almost every
evening as he used to do, and bores me with his doubts, his struggles, his
volcanoes, slit nostrils, atamans, the life of the free, and such tosh, for
which God forgive him.
Russkiya Vyedomosti is printing a _Sbornik_ for the famine fund. With your
permission, I shall send you a copy.
Well, good health and happiness to you; respects and greetings to all yours
from
the Geographer,
A. CHEKHOV.