Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
P. S.--All my family send their regards.
We are all well but sorrowful. Our aunt was a general favourite, and was
considered among us the incarnation of goodness, kindness, and justice, if
only all that can be incarnated. Of course we shall all die, but still it
is sad.
In April I shall be in your parts. By the spring I hope I shall have heaps
of money. I judge by the omen: no money is a sign of money coming.
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MOSCOW,
October 25, 1891.
Print “The Duel” not twice a week but only once. To print it twice is
breaking a long-established custom of the paper, and it would seem as
though I were robbing the other contributors of one day a week; and
meanwhile it makes no difference to me or my novel whether it is printed
once a week or twice. The literary brotherhood in Petersburg seems to talk
of nothing but the uncleanness of my motives. I have just received the good
news that I am to be married to the rich Madame Sibiryakov. I get a lot of
agreeable news altogether.
I wake up every night and read “War and Peace.” One reads it with the same
interest and naive wonder as though one had never read it before. It’s
amazingly good. Only I don’t like the passages in which Napoleon appears.
As soon as Napoleon comes on the scene there are forced explanations and
tricks of all sorts to prove that he was stupider than he really was.
Everything that is said and done by Pierre, Prince Andrey, or the
absolutely insignificant Nikolay Rostov--all that is good, clever, natural,
and touching; everything that is thought and done by Napoleon is not
natural, not clever, inflated and worthless.
When I live in the provinces (of which I dream now day and night), I shall
practice as a doctor and read novels.
I am not coming to Petersburg.
If I had been by Prince Andrey I should have saved him. It is strange to
read that the wound of a prince, a rich man spending his days and nights
with a doctor and being nursed by Natasha and Sonya, should have smelt like
a corpse. What a scurvy affair medicine was in those days! Tolstoy could
not help getting soaked through with hatred for medicine while he was
writing his thick novel....
MOSCOW,
November 18, 1891.
... I have read your letter about the influenza and Solovyov. I was
unexpectedly aware of a dash of cruelty in it. The phrase “I hate” does not
suit you at all; and a public confession “I am a sinner, a sinner, a
sinner,” is such pride that it made me feel uncomfortable. When the pope
took the title “holiness,” the head of the Eastern church, in pique, called
himself “The servant of God’s servants.” So you publicly expatiate on your
sinfulness from pique of Solovyov, who has the impudence to call himself
orthodox. But does a word like orthodoxy, Judaism, or Catholicism contain
any implication of exceptional personal merit or virtue? To my thinking
everybody is bound to call himself orthodox if he has that word inscribed
on his passport. Whether you believe or not, whether you are a prince of
this world or an exile in penal servitude, you are, for practical purposes,
orthodox. And Solovyov made no sort of pretension when he said he was no
Jew or Chaldean but orthodox....
I still feel dull, blighted, foolish, and indifferent, and I am still
sneezing and coughing, and I am beginning to think I shall not get back to
my former health. But that’s all in God’s hands. Medical treatment and
anxiety about one’s physical existence arouse in me a feeling not far from
loathing. I am not going to be doctored. I will take water and quinine, but
I am not going to let myself be sounded....
I had only just finished this letter when I received yours. You say that if
I go into the wilds I shall be quite cut off from you. But I am going to
live in the country in order to be nearer Petersburg. If I have no flat in
Moscow you must understand, my dear sir, I shall spend November, December,
and January in Petersburg: that will be possible then. I shall be able to
be idle all the summer too; I shall look out for a house in the country for
you, but you are wrong in disliking Little Russians, they are not children
or actors in the province of Poltava, but genuine people, and cheerful and
well-fed into the bargain.
Do you know what relieves my cough? When I am working I sprinkle the edge
of the table with turpentine with a sprayer and inhale its vapour. When I
go to bed I spray my little table and other objects near me. The fine drops
evaporate sooner than the liquid itself. And the smell of turpentine is
pleasant. I drink Obersalzbrunnen, avoid hot things, talk little, and blame
myself for smoking so much. I repeat, dress as warmly as possible, even at
home. Avoid draughts at the theatre. Treat yourself like a hothouse plant
or you will not soon be rid of your cough. If you want to try turpentine,
buy the French kind. Take quinine once a day, and be careful to avoid
constipation. Influenza has completely taken away from me any desire to
drink spirituous liquors. They are disgusting to my taste. I don’t drink my
two glasses at night, and so it is a long time before I can get to sleep. I
want to take ether.
I await your story. In the summer let us each write a play. Yes, by God!
why the devil should we waste our time....
TO E. M. S.
MOSCOW,
November 19, 1891.
HONOURED ELENA MIHAILOVNA,
I am at home to all commencing, continuing, and concluding authors--that is
my rule, and apart from your authorship and mine, I regard a visit from you
as a great honour to me. Even if it were not so, even if for some reason I
did not desire your visit, even then I should have received you, as I have
enjoyed the greatest hospitality from your family. I did not receive you,
and at once asked my brother to go to you and explain the cause. At the
moment your card was handed me I was ill and undressed--forgive these
homely details--I was in my bedroom, while there were persons in my study
whose presence would not have been welcome to you. And so--to see you was
physically impossible, and this my brother was to have explained to you,
and you, a decent and good-hearted person, ought to have understood it; but
you were offended. Well, I can’t help it....
But can you really have written only fifteen stories?--at this rate you
won’t learn to write till you are fifty.
I am in bad health; for over a month I have had to keep indoors--influenza
and cough.
All good wishes.
Write another twenty stories and send them. I shall always read them with
pleasure, and practice is essential for you.
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MOSCOW,
November 22, 1891.
My health is on the road to improvement. My cough is less, my strength is
greater. My mood is livelier, and there is sunrise in my head. I wake up in
the morning in good spirits, go to bed without gloomy thoughts, and at
dinner I am not ill-humoured and don’t say nasty things to my mother.
I don’t know when I shall come to you. I have heaps of work _pour manger_.
Till the spring I must work--that is, at senseless grind. A ray of liberty
has beamed upon my horizon. There has come a whiff of freedom. Yesterday I
got a letter from the province of Poltava. They write they have found me a
suitable place. A brick house of seven rooms with an iron roof, lately
built and needing no repairs, a stable, a cellar, an icehouse, eighteen
acres of land, an excellent meadow for hay, an old shady garden on the bank
of the river Psyol. The river bank is mine; on that side there is a
marvellous view over a wide expanse. The price is merciful. Three thousand,
and two thousand deferred payment over several years. Five in all. If
heaven has mercy upon me, and the purchase comes off, I shall move there in
March _for good_, to live quietly in the lap of nature for nine months and
the rest of the year in Petersburg. I am sending my sister to look at the
place.
Ach! liberty, liberty! If I can live on not more than two thousand a
year, which is only possible in the country, I shall be absolutely free
from all anxieties over money coming in and going out. Then I shall work
and read, read ... in a word it will be marmelad. [Translator’s Note:
A kind of sweetmeat made by boiling down fruit to the consistency of
damson cheese.] ...
MOSCOW,
November 30, 1891.
I return you the two manuscripts you sent me. One story is an Indian
Legend--The Lotus Flower, Wreaths of Laurel, A Summer Night, The Humming
Bird--that in India! He begins with Faust thirsting for youth and ends with
“the bliss of the true life,” in the style of Tolstoy. I have cut out
parts, polished it up, and the result is a legend of no great value,
indeed, but light, and it may be read with interest. The other story is
illiterate, clumsy, and womanish in structure, but there is a story and a
certain raciness. I have cut it down to half as you see. Both stories could
be printed....
I keep dreaming and dreaming. I dream of moving from Moscow into the
country in March, and in the autumn coming to Petersburg to stay till the
spring. I long to spend at least one winter in Petersburg, and that’s only
possible on condition I have no perch in Moscow. And I dream of how I shall
spend five months talking to you about literature, and do as I think best
in the _Novoye Vremya_, while in the country I shall go in for medicine
heart and soul.
Boborykin has been to see me. He is dreaming too. He told me that he wants
to write something in the way of the physiology of the Russian novel, its
origin among us, and the natural course of its development. While he was
talking I could not get rid of the feeling that I had a maniac before me,
but a literary maniac who put literature far above everything in life. I so
rarely see genuine literary people at home in Moscow that a conversation
with Boborykin seemed like heavenly manna, though I don’t believe in the
physiology of the novel and the natural course of its development--that is,
there may exist such a physiology in nature, but I don’t believe with
existing methods it can be detected. Boborykin dismisses Gogol absolutely
and refuses to recognize him as a forerunner of Turgenev, Gontcharov, and
Tolstoy.... He puts him apart, outside the current in which the Russian
novel has flowed. Well, I don’t understand that. If one takes the
standpoint of natural development, it’s impossible to put not only Gogol,
but even a dog barking, outside the current, for all things in nature
influence one another, and even the fact that I have just sneezed is not
without its influence on surrounding nature....
Good health to you! I am reading Shtchedrin’s “Diary of a Provincial.” How
long and boring it is! And at the same time how like real life!
TO N. A. LEIKIN.
MOSCOW,
December 2, 1891.
I am writing to ask you a great favour, dear Nikolay Alexandrovitch. This
is what it is. Until last year I have always lived with my university
diploma, which by land and by sea has served me for a passport; but every
time it has been _vise_ the police have warned me that one cannot live with
a diploma, and that I ought to get a passport from “the proper department.”
I have asked everyone what this “proper department” means, and no one has
given me an answer. A year ago the Moscow head police officer gave me a
passport on the condition that within a year I should get a passport from
“the proper department.” I can’t make head or tail of it! The other day I
learned that as I have never been in the government service and by
education am a doctor, I ought to be registered in the class of
professional citizens, and that a certain department, I believe the
heraldic, will furnish me with a certificate which will serve me as a
passport for all the days of my life. I remembered that you had lately