Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
Tolstoy! In these days he is not a man but a super-man, a Jupiter. In the
_Sbornik_ he has published an article about the relief centres, and the
article consists of advice and practical instructions. So business-like,
simple, and sensible that, as the editor of _Russkiya Vyedomosti_ said, it
ought to be printed in the _Government Gazette_, instead of in the
_Sbornik_....
December 13, 1891.
Now I understand why you don’t sleep well at night. If I had written a
story like that I should not have slept for ten nights in succession. The
most terrible passage is where Varya strangles the hero and initiates him
into the mysteries of the life beyond the grave. It’s terrifying and
consistent with spiritualism. You mustn’t cut out a single word from
Varya’s speeches, especially where they are both riding on horseback. Don’t
touch it. The idea of the story is good, and the incidents are fantastic
and interesting....
But why do you talk of our “nervous age”? There really is no nervous age.
As people lived in the past so they live now, and the nerves of to-day are
no worse than the nerves of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Since you have
already written the ending I shall not put you out by sending you mine. I
was inspired and could not resist writing it. You can read it if you like.
Stories are good in this way, that one can sit over them, pen in hand, for
days together, and not notice how time passes, and at the same time be
conscious of life of a sort. That’s from the hygienic point of view. And
from the point of view of usefulness and so on, to write a fairly good
story and give the reader ten to twenty interesting minutes--that, as
Gilyarovsky says, is not a sheep sneezing....
I have a horrible headache again to-day. I don’t know what to do. Yes, I
suppose it’s old age, or if it’s not that it’s something worse.
A little old gentleman brought me one hundred roubles to-day for the
famine.
TO A. I. SMAGIN.
MOSCOW,
December 16, 1891.
... Alas! if I don’t move into the country this year, and if the purchase
of the house and land for some reason does not come off, I shall be playing
the part of a great villain in regard to my health. It seems to me that I
am dried and warped like an old cupboard, and that if I go on living in
Moscow next season, and give myself up to scribbling excesses, Gilyarovsky
will read an excellent poem to welcome my entrance into that country place
where there is neither sitting nor standing nor sneezing, but only lying
down and nothing more. Do you know why you have no success with women?
Because you have the most hideous, heathenish, desperate, tragic
handwriting....
TO A. N. PLESHTCHEYEV.
MOSCOW,
December 25, 1891.
DEAR ALEXEY NIKOLAEVITCH,
Yesterday I chanced to learn your address, and I write to you. If you have
a free minute please write to me how you are in health, and how you are
getting on altogether. Write, if only a couple of lines.
I have had influenza for the last six weeks. There has been a complication
of the lungs and I have a cruel cough. In March I am going south to the
province of Poltava, and shall stay there till my cough is gone. My sister
has gone down there to buy a house and garden.
Literary doings here are quiet but life is bustling. There is a great deal
of talk about the famine, and a great deal of work resulting from the said
talk. The theatres are empty, the weather is wretched, there are no frosts
at all. Jean Shteheglov is captivated by the Tolstoyans. Merezhkovsky sits
at home as of old, lost in a labyrinth of deep researches, and as of old is
very nice; of Chekhov they say he has married the heiress Sibiryakov and
got five millions dowry--all Petersburg is talking of it. For whose
benefit and for what object this slander, I am utterly unable to imagine.
It’s positively sickening to read letters from Petersburg.
I have not seen Ostrovsky this year....
We shall probably not meet very soon, as I am going away in March and shall
not return to the North before November. I shall not keep a flat in Moscow,
as that pleasure is beyond my means. I shall stay in Petersburg.
I embrace you warmly. By the way, a little explanation in private. One day
at dinner in Paris, persuading me to remain there, you offered to lend me
money. I refused, and it seemed to me my refusal hurt and vexed you, and I
fancied that when we parted there was a touch of coldness on your side.
Possibly I am mistaken, but if I am right I assure you, my dear friend, on
my word of honour, that I refused not because I did not care to be under an
obligation to you, but simply from a feeling of self-preservation; I was
behaving stupidly in Paris, and an extra thousand francs would only have
been bad for my health. Believe me that if I had needed it, I would have
asked you for a loan as readily as Suvorin.
God keep you.
TO V. A. TIHONOV.
MOSCOW,
February 22, 1892.
... You are mistaken in thinking you were drunk at Shtcheglov’s name-day
party. You had had a drop, that was all. You danced when they all danced,
and your jigitivka on the cabman’s box excited nothing but general delight.
As for your criticism, it was most likely far from severe, as I don’t
remember it. I only remember that Vvedensky and I for some reason roared
with laughter as we listened to you.
Do you want my biography? Here it is. I was born in Taganrog in 1860. I
finished the course at Taganrog high school in 1879. In 1884 I took my
degree in medicine at the University of Moscow. In 1888 I gained the
Pushkin prize. In 1890 I made a journey to Sahalin across Siberia and back
by sea. In 1891 I made a tour in Europe, where I drank excellent wine and
ate oysters. In 1892 I took part in an orgy in the company of V. A. Tihonov
at a name-day party. I began writing in 1879. The published collections of
my works are: “Motley Tales,” “In the Twilight,” “Stories,” “Surly People,”
and a novel, “The Duel.” I have sinned in the dramatic line too, though
with moderation. I have been translated into all the languages with the
exception of the foreign ones, though I have indeed long ago been
translated by the Germans. The Czechs and the Serbs approve of me also, and
the French are not indifferent. The mysteries of love I fathomed at the age
of thirteen. With my colleagues, doctors, and literary men alike, I am on
the best of terms. I am a bachelor. I should like to receive a pension. I
practice medicine, and so much so that sometimes in the summer I perform
post-mortems, though I have not done so for two or three years. Of authors
my favourite is Tolstoy, of doctors Zaharin.
All that is nonsense though. Write what you like. If you haven’t facts make
up with lyricism.
TO A. S. KISELYOV.
MELIHOVO,
STATION LOPASNYA,
MOSCOW-KURSK LINE.
March 7, 1892.
This is our new address. And here are the details for you. If a peasant
woman has no troubles she buys a pig. We have bought a pig, too, a big
cumbersome estate, the owner of which would in Germany infallibly be made a
_herzog_. Six hundred and thirty-nine acres in two parts with land not
ours in between. Three hundred acres of young copse, which in twenty years
will look like a wood, at present is a thicket of bushes. They call it
“shaft wood,” but to my mind the name of “switch wood” would be more
appropriate, since one could make nothing of it at present but switches.
There is a fruit-garden, a park, big trees, long avenues of limes. The
barns and sheds have been recently built, and have a fairly presentable
appearance. The poultry house is made in accordance with the latest
deductions of science, the well has an iron pump. The whole place is shut
off from the world by a fence in the style of a palisade. The yard, the
garden, the park, and the threshing-floor are shut off from each other in
the same way. The house is good and bad. It’s more roomy than our Moscow
flat, it’s light and warm, roofed with iron, and stands in a fine position,
has a verandah into the garden, French windows, and so on, but it is bad in
not being lofty, not sufficiently new, having outside a very stupid and
naive appearance, and inside swarms with bugs and beetles which could only
be got rid of by one means--a fire: nothing else would do for them.
There are flower-beds. In the garden fifteen paces from the house is a pond
(thirty-five yards long, and thirty-five feet wide), with carp and tench in
it, so that you can catch fish from the window. Beyond the yard there is
another pond, which I have not yet seen. In the other part of the estate
there is a river, probably a nasty one. Two miles away there is a broad
river full of fish. We shall sow oats and clover. We have bought clover
seed at ten roubles a pood, but we have no money left for oats. The estate
has been bought for thirteen thousand. The legal formalities cost about
seven hundred and fifty roubles, total fourteen thousand. The artist who
sold it was paid four thousand down, and received a mortgage for five
thousand at five per cent, for five years. The remaining four thousand the
artist will receive from the Land Bank when in the spring I mortgage the
estate to a bank. You see what a good arrangement. In two or three years I
shall have five thousand, and shall pay off the mortgage, and shall be left
with only the four thousand debt to the bank; but I have got to live those
two of three years, hang it all! What matters is not the interest--that is
small, not more than five hundred roubles a year--but that I shall be
obliged all the time to think about quarter-days and all sorts of horrors
attendant on being in debt. Moreover, your honour, as long as I am alive
and earning four or five thousand a year, the debts will seem a trifle, and
even a convenience, for to pay four hundred and seventy interest is much
easier than to pay a thousand for a flat in Moscow; that is all true. But
what if I depart from you sinners to another world--that is, give up the
ghost? Then the ducal estate with the debts would seem to my parents in
their green old age and to my sister such a burden that they would raise a
wail to heaven.
I was completely cleaned out over the move.
Ah, if you could come and see us! In the first place it would be very
delightful and interesting to see you; and in the second, your advice would
save us from a thousand idiocies. You know we don’t understand a thing
about it. Like Raspluev, all I know about agriculture is that the earth is
black, and nothing more. Write. How is it best to sow clover?--among the
rye, or among the spring wheat? ...
TO I. L. SHTCHEGLOV.
MELIHOVO,
March 9, 1892.
... Yes, such men as Ratchinsky are very rare in this world. I understand
your enthusiasm, my dear fellow. After the suffocation one feels in the
proximity of A. and B.--and the world is full of them--Ratchinsky with his
ideas, his humanity, and his purity, seems like a breath of spring. I am
ready to lay down my life for Ratchinsky; but, dear friend,--allow me that
“but” and don’t be vexed--I would not send my children to his school. Why?
I received a religious education in my childhood--with church singing, with
reading of the “apostles” and the psalms in church, with regular attendance
at matins, with obligation to assist at the altar and ring the bells. And,
do you know, when I think now of my childhood, it seems to me rather
gloomy. I have no religion now. Do you know, when my brothers and I used to
stand in the middle of the church and sing the trio “May my prayer be
exalted,” or “The Archangel’s Voice,” everyone looked at us with emotion
and envied our parents, but we at that moment felt like little convicts.
Yes, dear boy! Ratchinsky I understand, but the children who are trained by
him I don’t know. Their souls are dark for me. If there is joy in their