Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
From the madhouse I returned late at night in my troika. Two-thirds of the
way I had to drive through the forest in the moonlight, and I had a
wonderful feeling such as I have not had for a long time, as though I had
come back from a tryst. I think that nearness to nature and idleness are
essential elements of happiness; without them it is impossible....
TO MADAME AVILOV.
MELIHOVO,
July, 1894.
I have so many visitors that I cannot answer your last letter. I want to
write at length but am pulled up at the thought that any minute they may
come in and hinder me. And in fact while I write the word “hinder,” a girl
has come in and announced that a patient has arrived; I must go.... I have
grown to detest writing, and I don’t know what to do. I would gladly take
up medicine and would accept any sort of post, but I no longer have the
physical elasticity for it. When I write now or think I ought to write I
feel as much disgust as though I were eating soup from which I had just
removed a beetle--forgive the comparison. What I hate is not the writing
itself, but the literary entourage from which one cannot escape, and which
one takes everywhere as the earth takes its atmosphere....
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
MELIHOVO,
August 15, 1894.
Our trip on the Volga turned out rather a queer one in the end. Potapenko
and I went to Yaroslav to take a steamer from there to Tsaritsyn, then to
Kalatch, from there by the Don to Taganrog. The journey from Yaroslav to
Nizhni is beautiful, but I had seen it before. Moreover, it was very hot in
the cabin and the wind lashed in our faces on deck. The passengers were an
uneducated set, whose presence was irritating. At Nizhni we were met by N.,
Tolstoy’s friend. The heat, the dry wind, the noise of the fair and the
conversation of N. suddenly made me feel so suffocated, so ill at ease, and
so sick, that I took my portmanteau and ignominiously fled to the railway
station.... Potapenko followed me. We took the train for Moscow, but we
were ashamed to go home without having done anything, and we decided to go
somewhere if it had to be to Lapland. If it had not been for his wife our
choice would have fallen on Feodosia, but ... alas! we have a wife living
at Feodosia. We thought it over, we talked it over, we counted over our
money, and came to the Psyol to Suma, which you know.... Well, the Psyol is
magnificent. There is warmth, there is space, an immensity of water and of
greenery and delightful people. We spent six days on the Psyol, ate and
drank, walked and did nothing: my ideal of happiness, as you know, is
idleness. Now I am at Melihovo again. There is a cold rain, a leaden sky,
mud.
* * * * *
It sometimes happens that one passes a third-class refreshment room and
sees a cold fish, cooked long before, and wonders carelessly who wants that
unappetising fish. And yet undoubtedly that fish is wanted, and will be
eaten, and there are people who will think it nice. One may say the same of
the works of N. He is a bourgeois writer, writing for the unsophisticated
public who travel third class. For that public Tolstoy and Turgenev are too
luxurious, too aristocratic, somewhat alien and not easily digested. There
is a public which eats salt beef and horse-radish sauce with relish, and
does not care for artichokes and asparagus. Put yourself at its point of
view, imagine the grey, dreary courtyard, the educated ladies who look like
cooks, the smell of paraffin, the scantiness of interests and tasks--and
you will understand N. and his readers. He is colourless; that is partly
because the life he describes lacks colour. He is false because bourgeois
writers cannot help being false. They are vulgar writers perfected. The
vulgarians sin together with their public, while the bourgeois are
hypocritical with them and flatter their narrow virtue.
MELIHOVO,
February 25, 1895.
... I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train
or a steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him. I consider his
philosophy won’t last long, however. It’s more showy than convincing....
MELIHOVO,
March 16, 1895.
Instead of you, heaven has sent me N., who has come to see me with E. and
Z., two young duffers who never miss a single word but induce in the whole
household a desperate boredom. N. looks flabby and physically slack; he has
gone off, but has become warmer and more good-natured; he must be going to
die. When my mother was ordering meat from the butcher, she said he must
let us have better meat, as N. was staying with us from Petersburg.
“What N.?” asked the butcher in surprise--“the one who writes books?” and
he sent us excellent meat. So the butcher does not know that I write books,
for he never sends anything but gristle for my benefit....
Your little letter about physical games for students will do good if only
you will go on insisting on the subject. Games are absolutely essential.
Playing games is good for health and beauty and liberalism, since nothing
is so conducive to the blending of classes, et cetera, as public games.
Games would give our solitary young people acquaintances; young people
would more frequently fall in love; but games should not be instituted
before the Russian student ceases to be hungry. No skating, no croquet, can
keep the student cheerful and confident on an empty stomach.
MELIHOVO,
March 23, 1895.
I told you that Potapenko was a man very full of life, but you did not
believe me. In the entrails of every Little Russian lie hidden many
treasures. I fancy when our generation grows old, Potapenko will be the
gayest and jolliest old man of us all.
By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions:
everything must be as it has been hitherto--that is, she must live in
Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. Happiness
continued from day to day, from morning to morning, I cannot stand. When
every day I am told of the same thing, in the same tone of voice, I become
furious. I am furious, for instance, in the society of S., because he is
very much like a woman (“a clever and responsive woman”) and because in his
presence the idea occurs to me that my wife might be like him. I promise
you to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, won’t
appear in my sky every day; I shan’t write any better for being married....
Mamin-Sibiryak is a very nice fellow and an excellent writer. His last
novel “Bread” is praised; Lyeskov was particularly enthusiastic about it.
There are undoubtedly fine things in his work, and in his more successful
stories the peasants are depicted every bit as well as in “Master and Man.”
This is the fourth year I have been living at Melihovo. My calves have
turned into cows, my copse has grown at least a yard higher, my heirs will
make a capital bargain over the timber and will call me an ass, for heirs
are never satisfied.
MELIHOVO,
March 30, 1895.
... We have spring here but there are regular mountains of snow, and there
is no knowing when it will thaw. As soon as the sun hides behind a cloud
there begins to be a chill breath from the snow, and it is horrible. Masha
is already busy in the flower-beds and borders. She tires herself out and
is constantly cross, so there is no need for her to read Madame Smirnov’s
article. The advice given is excellent; the young ladies will read it, and
it will be their salvation. Only one point is not clear: how are they going
to get rid of the apples and cabbages if the estate is far from the town,
and of what stuff are they going to make their own dresses if their rye
does not sell at all, and they have not a halfpenny? To live on one’s land
by the labour of one’s own hands and the sweat of one’s brow is only
possible on one condition; that is, if one works oneself like a peasant,
without regard for class or sex. There is no making use of slaves nowadays,
one must take the scythe and axe oneself, and if one can’t do that, no
gardens will help one. Even the smallest success in farming is only gained
in Russia at the price of a cruel struggle with nature, and wishing is not
enough for the struggle, you need bodily strength and grit, you want
traditions--and have young ladies all that? To advise young ladies to take
up farming is much the same as to advise them to be bears, and to bend
yokes....
I have no money, but I live in the country: there are no restaurants and no
cabmen, and money does not seem to be needed.
MELIHOVO,
April 13, 1895.
I am sick of Sienkiewicz’s “The Family of the Polonetskys.” It’s the Polish
Easter cake with saffron. Add Potapenko to Paul Bourget, sprinkle with
Warsaw eau-de-Cologne, divide in two, and you get Sienkiewicz. “The
Polonetskys” is unmistakably inspired by Bourget’s “Cosmopolis,” by Rome
and by marriage (Sienkiewicz has lately got married). We have the catacombs
and a queer old professor sighing after idealism, and Leo XIII, with the
unearthly face among the saints, and the advice to return to the
prayer-book, and the libel on the decadent who dies of morphinism after
confessing and taking the sacrament--that is, after repenting of his errors
in the name of the Church. There is a devilish lot of family happiness and
talking about love, and the hero’s wife is so faithful to her husband and
so subtly comprehends “with her heart” the mysteries of God and life, that
in the end one feels mawkish and uncomfortable as after a slobbering kiss.
Sienkiewicz has evidently not read Tolstoy, and does not know Nietzsche, he
talks about hypnotism like a shopman; on the other hand every page is
positively sprinkled with Rubens, Borghesi, Correggio, Botticelli--and that
is done to show off his culture to the bourgeois reader and make a long
nose on the sly at materialism. The object of the novel is to lull the
bourgeoisie to sleep in its golden dreams. Be faithful to your wife, pray
with her over the prayer-book, save money, love sport, and all is well with
you in this world and the next. The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called
practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with
the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a
beast and at the same time be happy....
I wish you every sort of blessing. I congratulate you on the peace between
Japan and China, and hope we may quickly obtain a Feodosia free from ice on
the East Coast, and may make a railway to it.
The peasant woman had not troubles enough so she bought a pig. And I fancy
we are saving up a lot of trouble for ourselves with this ice-free port.
[Footnote: Prophetic of Port Arthur and the Japanese War.] It will cost us
dearer than if we were to take it into our heads to wage war on all Japan.
However, _futura sunt in manibus deorum._
MELIHOVO,
October 21, 1895.
Thanks for your letter, for your warm words and your invitation. I will
come, but most likely not before the end of November, as I have a devilish
lot to do. First in the spring I am going to build a new school in the
village where I am school warden; before beginning I have to make a plan
and calculations, and to drive off here and there, and so on. Secondly--can
you imagine it--I am writing a play which I shall probably not finish
before the end of November. I am writing it not without pleasure, though I
swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage. It’s a comedy, there are
three women’s parts, six men’s, four acts, landscapes (view over a lake); a
great deal of conversation about literature, little action, tons of love.
[Footnote: “The Seagull.”] I read of Ozerova’s failure and was sorry, for
nothing is more painful than failing.... I have read of the success of the