Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
souls, then they are happier than I and my brothers, whose childhood was
suffering.
It is nice to be a lord. There is plenty of room, it’s warm, people are not
continually pulling at the bell; and it is easy to descend from one’s
lordship and serve as concierge or porter. My estate, sir, cost thirteen
thousand, and I have only paid a third, the rest is a debt which will keep
me long years on the chain.
Come and see me, Jean, together with Suvorin. Make a plan with him. I have
such a garden! Such a naive courtyard, such geese! Write a little oftener.
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MELIHOVO,
March 17, 1892.
... Ah, my dear fellow, if only you could take a holiday! Living in the
country is inconvenient. The insufferable time of thaw and mud is
beginning, but something marvellous and moving is taking place in nature,
the poetry and novelty of which makes up for all the discomforts of life.
Every day there are surprises, one better than another. The starlings have
returned, everywhere there is the gurgling of water, in places where the
snow has thawed the grass is already green. The day drags on like eternity.
One lives as though in Australia, somewhere at the ends of the earth; one’s
mood is calm, contemplative, and animal, in the sense that one does not
regret yesterday or look forward to tomorrow. From here, far away, people
seem very good, and that is natural, for in going away into the country we
are not hiding from people but from our vanity, which in town among people
is unjust and active beyond measure. Looking at the spring, I have a
dreadful longing that there should be paradise in the other world. In fact,
at moments I am so happy that I superstitiously pull myself up and remind
myself of my creditors, who will one day drive me out of the Australia I
have so happily won....
TO MADAME AVILOV.
MELIHOVO,
March 19, 1892.
HONOURED LIDYA ALEXYEVNA,
I have read your story “On the Road.” If I were the editor of an
illustrated magazine, I should publish the story with great pleasure; but
here is my advice as a reader: when you depict sad or unlucky people, and
want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder--it gives their grief as
it were a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it
is, your heroes weep and you sigh. Yes, you must be cold.
But don’t listen to me, I am a bad critic. I have not the faculty of
forming my critical ideas clearly. Sometimes I make a regular hash of
it....
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MELIHOVO,
March, 1892.
The cost of labour is almost nil, and so I am very well off. I begin to see
the charms of capitalism. To pull down the stove in the servants’ quarters
and build up there a kitchen stove with all its accessories, then to pull
down the kitchen stove in the house arid put up a Dutch stove instead,
costs twenty roubles altogether. The price of two men to dig, twenty-five
kopecks. To fill the ice cellar it costs thirty kopecks a day to the
workmen. A young labourer who does not drink or smoke, and can read and
write, whose duties are to work the land and clean the boots and look after
the flower-garden, costs five roubles a month. Floors, partitions, papering
walls--all that is cheaper than mushrooms. And I am at ease. But if I were
to pay for labour a quarter of what I get for my leisure I should be ruined
in a month, as the number of stove-builders, carpenters, joiners, and so
on, threatens to go for ever after the fashion of a recurring decimal. A
spacious life not cramped within four walls requires a spacious pocket too.
I have bored you already, but I must tell you one thing more: the clover
seed costs one hundred roubles a _pood_, and the oats needed for seed cost
more than a hundred. Think of that! They prophesy a harvest and wealth for
me, but what is that to me! Better five kopecks in the present than a
rouble in the future. I must sit and work. I must earn at least five
hundred roubles for all these trifles. I have earned half already. And the
snow is melting, it is warm, the birds are singing, the sky is bright and
spring-like.
I am reading a mass of things. I have read Lyeskov’s “Legendary
Characters,” religious and piquant--a combination of virtue, piety, and
lewdness, but very interesting. Read it if you haven’t read it. I have read
again Pisarev’s “Criticism of Pushkin.” Awfully naive. The man pulls
Onyegin and Tatyana down from their pedestals, but Pushkin remains unhurt.
Pisarev is the grandfather and father of all the critics of to-day,
including Burenin--the same pettiness in disparagement, the same cold and
conceited wit, and the same coarseness and indelicacy in their attitude to
people. It is not Pisarev’s ideas that are brutalizing, for he has none,
but his coarse tone. His attitude to Tatyana, especially to her charming
letter, which I love tenderly, seems to me simply abominable. The critic
has the foul aroma of an insolent captious procurator.
We have almost finished furnishing; only the shelves for my books are not
done yet. When we take out the double windows we shall begin painting
everything afresh, and then the house will have a very presentable
appearance.
There are avenues of lime-trees, apple-trees, cherries, plums, and
raspberries in the garden....
MELIHOVO,
April 6, 1892.
It is Easter. There is a church here, but no clergy. We collected eleven
roubles from the whole parish and got a priest from the Davydov Monastery,
who began celebrating the service on Friday. The church is very old and
chilly, with lattice windows. We sang the Easter service--that is, my
family and my visitors, young people. The effect was very good and
harmonious, particularly the mass. The peasants were very much pleased, and
they say they have never had such a grand service. Yesterday the sun shone
all day, it was warm. In the morning I went into the fields, from which the
snow has gone already, and spent half an hour in the happiest frame of
mind: it was amazingly nice! The winter corn is green already, and there is
grass in the copse.
You will not like Melihovo, at least at first. Here everything is in
miniature; a little avenue of lime-trees, a pond the size of an aquarium, a
little garden and park, little trees; but when you have walked about it
once or twice the impression of littleness goes off. There is great feeling
of space in spite of the village being so near. There is a great deal of
forest around. There are numbers of starlings, and the starling has the
right to say of itself: “I sing to my God all the days of my life.” It
sings all day long without stopping....
MELIHOVO,
April 8, 1892.
If Shapiro were to present me with the gigantic photograph of which you
write, I should not know what to do with it. A cumbersome present. You say
that I used to be younger. Yes, imagine! Strange as it may seem, I have
passed thirty some time ago, and I already feel forty close at hand. I have
grown old not in body only, but in spirit. I have become stupidly
indifferent to everything in the world, and for some reason or other the
beginning of this indifference coincided with my tour abroad. I get up and
go to bed feeling as though interest in life had dried up in me. This is
either the illness called in the newspapers nervous exhaustion, or some
working of the spirit not clear to the consciousness, which is called in
novels a spiritual revulsion. If it is the latter it is all for the best, I
suppose.
* * * * *
The artist Levitan is staying with me. Yesterday evening I went out with
him shooting. He shot at a snipe; the bird, shot in the wing, fell into a
pool. I picked it up: a long beak, big black eyes, and beautiful plumage.
It looked at me with surprise. What was I to do with it? Levitan scowled,
shut his eyes, and begged me, with a quiver in his voice: “My dear fellow,
hit him on the head with the butt-end of your gun.” I said: “I can’t.” He
went on nervously, shrugging his shoulders, twitching his head and begging
me to; and the snipe went on looking at me in wonder. I had to obey Levitan
and kill it. One beautiful creature in love the less, while two fools went
home and sat down to supper.
Jean Shtcheglov, in whose company you were so bored for a whole evening, is
a great opponent of every sort of heresy, and amongst others of feminine
intellect; and yet if one compares him with K., for instance, beside her he
seems like a foolish little monk. By the way, if you see K., give her my
greetings, and tell her that we are expecting her here. She is very
interesting in the open air and far more intelligent than in town....
TO MADAME AVILOV.
MELIHOVO,
April 29, 1892.
... Yes, it is nice now in the country, not only nice but positively
amazing. It’s real spring, the trees are coming out, it is hot. The
nightingales are singing, and the frogs are croaking in all sorts of tones.
I haven’t a halfpenny, but the way I look at it is this: the rich man is
not he who has plenty of money, but he who has the means to live now in the
luxurious surroundings given us by early spring. Yesterday I was in Moscow,
but I almost expired there of boredom and all manner of disasters. Would
you believe it, a lady of my acquaintance, aged forty-two, recognized
herself in the twenty-year-old heroine of my story, “The Grasshopper” and
all Moscow is accusing me of libelling her. The chief proof is the external
likeness. The lady paints, her husband is a doctor, and she is living with
an artist.
I am finishing a story (“Ward No. 6”), a very dull one, owing to a complete
absence of woman and the element of love. I can’t endure such stories. I
write it as it were by accident, thoughtlessly.
Yes, I wrote to you once that you must be unconcerned when you write
pathetic stories. And you did not understand me. You may weep and moan over
your stories, you may suffer together with your heroes, but I consider one
must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the
stronger will be the effect.
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MELIHOVO,
May 15, 1892.
... I have got hold of the peasants and the shopkeepers here. One had a
haemorrhage from the throat, another had his arm crushed by a tree, a third
had his little daughter sick.... It seems they would be in a desperate case
without me. They bow respectfully to me as Germans do to their pastor, I am
friends with them, and all goes well....
May 28, 1892.
Life is short, and Chekhov, from whom you are expecting an answer, would
like it to flash by brilliantly and with dash. He would go to Prince’s
Island, to Constantinople, and again to India and Sahalin.... But in the
first place he is not free, he has a respectable family who need his
protection. In the second, he has a large dose of cowardice. Looking
towards the future I call nothing but cowardice. I am afraid of getting
into a muddle, and every journey complicates my financial position. No,
don’t tempt me without need. Don’t write to me of the sea.
It is hot here. There are warm rains, the evenings are enchanting.
Three-quarters of a mile from here there is a good bathing place and good
sport for picnics, but no time to bathe or go to picnics. Either I am
writing and gnashing my teeth, or settling questions of halfpence with
carpenters and labourers. Misha was cruelly reprimanded by his superiors
for coming to me every week instead of staying at home, and now there is no
one but me to look after the farming, in which I have no faith, as it is on
a petty scale, and more like a gentlemanly hobby than real work. I have
bought three mousetraps, and catch twenty-five mice a day and carry them
away to the copse. It is lovely in the copse....
Our starlings, old and young, suddenly flew away. This puzzled us, for it