Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
different....
April 26, 1893.
... I am reading Pisemsky. His is a great, very great talent! The best of
his works is “The Carpenters’ Guild.” His novels are exhausting in their
minute detail. Everything in him that has a temporary character, all his
digs at the critics and liberals of the period, all his critical
observations with their assumption of smartness and modernity, and all the
so-called profound reflections scattered here and there--how petty and
naive it all is to our modern ideas! The fact of the matter is this: a
novelist, an artist, ought to pass by everything that has only a temporary
value. Pisemsky’s people are living, his temperament is vigorous.
Skabitchevsky in his history attacks him for obscurantism and treachery,
but, my God! of all contemporary writers I don’t know a single one so
passionately and earnestly liberal as Pisemsky. All his priests, officials,
and generals are regular blackguards. No one was so down on the old legal
and military set as he.
By the way, I have read also Bourget’s “Cosmopolis.” Rome and the Pope and
Correggio and Michael Angelo and Titian and doges and a fifty-year-old
beauty and Russians and Poles are all in Bourget, but how thin and strained
and mawkish and false it is in comparison even with our coarse and simple
Pisemsky! ...
What a good thing I gave up the town! Tell all the Fofanovs, Tchermnys,
_et tutti quanti_ who live by literature, that living in the country
is immensely cheaper than living in the town. I experience this now every
day. My family costs me nothing now, for lodging, bread, vegetables, milk,
butter, horses, are all our own. And there is so much to do, there is not
time to get through it all. Of the whole family of Chekhovs, I am the only
one to lie down, or sit at the table: all the rest are working from morning
till night. Drive the poets and literary men into the country. Why should
they live in starvation and beggary? Town life cannot give a poor man rich
material in the sense of poetry and art. He lives within four walls and
sees people only at the editors’ offices and in eating-shops....
MELIHOVO,
January 25, 1894.
I believe I am mentally sound. It is true I have no special desire to live,
but that is not, so far, disease, but something probably passing and
natural. It does not follow every time that an author describes someone
mentally deranged, that he is himself deranged. I wrote “The Black Monk”
without any melancholy ideas, through cool reflection. I simply had a
desire to describe megalomania. The monk floating across the country was a
dream, and when I woke I told Misha about it. So you can tell Anna Ivanovna
that poor Anton Pavlovitch, thank God! has not gone out of his mind yet,
but that he eats a great deal at supper and so he dreams of monks.
I keep forgetting to write to you: read Ertel’s story “The Seers” in
“Russkaya Mysl.” There is poetry and something terrible in the
old-fashioned fairy-tale style about it. It is one of the best new things
that has come out in Moscow....
YALTA,
March 27, 1894.
I am in good health generally, ill in certain parts. For instance, a cough,
palpitations of the heart, haemorrhoids. I had palpitations of the heart
incessantly for six days, and the sensation all the time was loathsome.
Since I have quite given up smoking I have been free from gloomy and
anxious moods. Perhaps because I am not smoking, Tolstoy’s morality has
ceased to touch me; at the bottom of my heart I take up a hostile attitude
towards it, and that of course is not just. I have peasant blood in my
veins, and you won’t astonish me with peasant virtues. From my childhood I
have believed in progress, and I could not help believing in it since the
difference between the time when I used to be thrashed and when they gave
up thrashing me was tremendous.... But Tolstoy’s philosophy touched me
profoundly and took possession of me for six or seven years, and what
affected me was not its general propositions, with which I was familiar
beforehand, but Tolstoy’s manner of expressing it, his reasonableness, and
probably a sort of hypnotism. Now something in me protests, reason and
justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is
something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat. War is an evil
and legal justice is an evil; but it does not follow from that that I ought
to wear bark shoes and sleep on the stove with the labourer, and so on, and
so on. But that is not the point, it is not a matter of _pro and con_;
the thing is that in one way or another Tolstoy has passed for me, he is
not in my soul, and he has departed from me, saying: “I leave this your
house empty.” I am untenanted. I am sick of theorizing of all sorts, and
such bounders as Max Nordau I read with positive disgust. Patients in a
fever do not want food, but they do want something, and that vague craving
they express as “longing for something sour.” I, too, want something sour,
and that’s not a mere chance feeling, for I notice the same mood in others
around me. It is just as if they had all been in love, had fallen out of
love, and now were looking for some new distraction. It is very possible
and very likely that the Russians will pass through another period of
enthusiasm for the natural sciences, and that the materialistic movement
will be fashionable. Natural science is performing miracles now. And it may
act upon people like Mamay, and dominate them by its mass and grandeur. All
that is in the hands of God, however. And theorizing about it makes one’s
head go round.
TO L. S. MIZINOV.
YALTA,
March 27, 1894.
DEAR LIKA,
Thanks for your letter. Though you do scare me in your letter saying you
are soon going to die, though you do taunt me with having rejected you, yet
thank you all the same; I know perfectly well you are not going to die, and
that no one has rejected you.
I am in Yalta and I am dreary, very dreary indeed. The aristocracy, so to
call it, are performing “Faust,” and I go to the rehearsals and there I
enjoy the spectacle of a perfect flower-bed of black, red, flaxen, and
brown heads; I listen to the singing and I eat. At the house of the
principal of the high school I eat tchibureks, and saddle of lamb with
boiled grain; in various estimable families I eat green soup; at the
confectioner’s I eat--in my hotel also. I go to bed at ten and I get up at
ten, and after dinner I lie down and rest, and yet I am bored, dear Lika. I
am not bored because “my ladies” are not with me, but because the northern
spring is better than the spring here, and because the thought that I must,
that I ought to write never leaves me for an instant. To write and write
and write! It is my opinion that true happiness is impossible without
idleness. My ideal is to be idle and to love a plump girl. My loftiest
happiness is to walk or to sit doing nothing; my favourite occupation is to
gather up what is not wanted (leaves, straws, and so on) and to do what is
useless. Meanwhile, I am a literary man, and have to write here in Yalta.
Dear Lika, when you become a great singer and are paid a handsome salary,
then be charitable to me, marry me, and keep me at your expense, that I may
be free to do nothing. If you really are going to die, it might be
undertaken by Varya Eberly, whom, as you know, I love. I am so all to
pieces with the perpetual thought of work I ought to do and can’t avoid
that for the last week I have been continually tormented with palpitations
of the heart. It’s a loathsome sensation.
I have sold my fox-skin greatcoat for twenty roubles! It cost sixty, but as
forty roubles’ worth of fur has peeled off it, twenty roubles was not too
low a price. The gooseberries are not ripe here yet, but it is warm and
bright, the trees are coming out, the sea looks like summer, the young
ladies are yearning for sensations: but yet the north is better than the
south of Russia, in spring at any rate. In our part nature is more
melancholy, more lyrical, more Levitanesque; here it is neither one thing
nor the other, like good, sonorous, but frigid verse. Thanks to my
palpitations I haven’t drunk wine for a week, and that makes the
surroundings seem even poorer....
M. gave a concert here, and made one hundred and fifty roubles clear
profit. He roared like a grampus but had an immense success. I am awfully
sorry I did not study singing; I could have roared too, as my throat is
rich in husky elements, and they say I have a real octave. I should have
earned money, and been a favourite with the ladies....
TO HIS BROTHER ALEXANDR.
MELIHOVO,
April 15, 1894.
... I have come back from the flaming Tavrida and am already sitting on the
cool banks of my pond. It’s very warm, however: the thermometer runs up to
twenty-six....
I am busy looking after the land: I am making new avenues, planting
flowers, chopping down dead trees, and chasing the hens and the dogs out of
the garden. Literature plays the part of Erakit, who was always in the
background. I don’t want to write, and indeed, it’s hard to combine a
desire to live and a desire to write....
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MELIHOVO,
April 21, 1894
Of course it is very nice in the country; in fine weather Russia is an
extraordinarily beautiful and enchanting country, especially for those who
have been born and spent their childhood in the country. But you will never
buy yourself an estate, as you don’t know what you want. To like an estate
you must make up your mind to buy it; so long as it is not yours it will
seem comfortless and full of defects. My cough is considerably better, I am
sunburnt, and they tell me I am fatter, but the other day I almost fell
down and I fancied for a minute that I was dying. I was walking along the
avenue with the prince, our neighbour, and was talking when all at once
something seemed to break in my chest, I had a feeling of warmth and
suffocation, there was a singing in my ears, I remembered that I had been
having palpitations for a long time and thought--“they must have meant
something then.” I went rapidly towards the verandah on which visitors were
sitting, and had one thought--that it would be awkward to fall down and die
before strangers; but I went into my bedroom, drank some water, and
recovered.
So you are not the only one who suffers from staggering!
I am beginning to build a pretty lodge....
May 9.
I have no news. The weather is most exquisite, and in the foliage near the
house a nightingale is building and shouting incessantly. About twelve
miles from me there is the village of Pokrovskoe-Meshtcherskoe; the old
manor house there is now the lunatic asylum of the province. The Zemsky
doctors from the whole Moscow province met there on the fourth of May, to
the number of about seventy-five; I was there too. There are a great many
patients but all that is interesting material for alienists and not for
psychologists. One patient, a mystic, preaches that the Holy Trinity has
come upon earth in the form of the metropolitan of Kiev, Ioannikiy. “A
limit of ten years has been given us; eight have passed, only two years are
left. If we do not want Russia to fall into ruins like Sodom, all Russia
must go in a procession with the Cross to Kiev, as Moscow went to Troitsa,
and pray there to the divine martyr in the noble form of the metropolitan
Ioannikiy.” This queer fellow is convinced that the doctors in the asylum
are poisoning him, and that he is being saved by the miraculous
intervention of Christ in the form of the metropolitan. He is continually
praying to the East and singing, and, addressing himself to God, invariably
adds the words, “in the noble form of the metropolitan Ioannikiy.” He has a
lovely expression of face....