Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
The “Journal of Surgery” has been sanctioned by the Censor. We are
beginning to bring it out. Be so good as to do us a service--have the
enclosed advertisement printed on your front page and charge it to my
account. The journal will be a very good one, and this advertisement can
lead to nothing but unmistakable and solid benefit. It’s a great benefit,
you know, to cut off people’s legs.
While we are on medical topics--a remedy for cancer has been found. For
almost a year past, thanks to a Russian doctor Denisenko, they have been
trying the juice of the celandine, and one reads of astonishing results.
Cancer is a terrible unbearable disease, the death from it is agonizing;
you can imagine how pleasant it is for a man initiated into the secrets of
Aesculapius to read of such results....
MOSCOW,
February 8, 1897.
The census is over. I was pretty sick of the business, as I had both to
enumerate and to write till my fingers ached, and to give lectures to
fifteen numerators. The numerators worked excellently, with a pedantic
exactitude almost absurd. On the other hand the Zemsky Natchalniks, to whom
the census was entrusted in the districts, behaved disgustingly. They did
nothing, understood little, and at the most difficult moments used to
report themselves sick. The best of them turned out to be a man who drinks
and draws the long bow _a la_ Hlestakov [Translator’s Note: A character in
Gogol’s “Inspector General.”]--but was all the same a character, if only
from the point of view of comedy, while the others were colourless beyond
words, and it was annoying beyond words to have anything to do with them.
I am in Moscow at the Great Moscow Hotel. I am staying a short time, ten
days, and then going home. The whole of Lent and the whole of April after
it, I shall have to be busy again with carpenters and so on. I am building
a school again. A deputation came to me from the peasants begging me for
it, and I had not the courage to refuse. The Zemstvo is giving a thousand
roubles, the peasants have collected three hundred, and that is all, while
the school will not cost less than three thousand. So again I shall have
all the summer to be thinking about money, and scraping it together here
and there. Altogether life in the country is full of work and care....
The police have made a raid upon Tchertkov, the well-known Tolstoyan, have
carried off all that the Tolstoyans had collected relating to the Duhobors
and sectarians--and so all at once as though by magic all evidence against
Pobyedonostsev and his angels has vanished. Goremykin called upon
Tchertkov’s mother and said: “Your son must make the choice--either the
Baltic Province where Prince Hilkov is already living in exile, or a
foreign country.” Tchertkov has chosen London.
He is setting off on the thirteenth of February. L. N. Tolstoy has gone to
Petersburg to see him off; and yesterday they sent his winter overcoat
after him. A great many are going to see him off, even Sytin, and I am
sorry that I cannot do the same. I don’t cherish tender sentiments for
Tchertkov, but the way he has been treated fills me with intense, intense
indignation....
MOSCOW,
April 1, 1897.
The doctors have diagnosed tuberculosis in the upper part of the lungs, and
have ordered me to change my manner of life. I understand their diagnosis
but I don’t understand their prescription, because it is almost impossible.
They tell me I must live in the country, but you know living permanently in
the country involves continual worry with peasants, with animals, with
elementary forces of all kinds, and to escape from worries and anxieties in
the country is as difficult as to escape burns in hell. But still I will
try to change my life as far as possible, and have already, through Masha,
announced that I shall give up medical practice in the country. This will
be at the same time a great relief and a great deprivation to me. I shall
drop all public duties in the district, shall buy a dressing-gown, bask in
the sun, and eat a great deal. They tell me to eat six times a day and are
indignant with me for eating, as they think, very little. I am forbidden to
talk much, to swim, and so on, and so on.
Except my lungs, all my organs were found to be healthy. Hitherto I fancied
I drank just so much as not to do harm; now it turns out on investigation
that I was drinking less than I was entitled to. What a pity!
The author of “Ward No. 6” has been moved from Ward No. 16 to Ward No. 14.
There is plenty of room here, two windows, lighting a la Potapenko, three
tables. There is very little haemorrhage. After the evening when Tolstoy
was here (we talked for a long time) at four o’clock in the morning I had
violent haemorrhage again.
Melihovo is a healthy place; it stands exactly on a watershed, on high
ground, so that there is never fever or diphtheria in it. They have
decided, after general consultation, that I am not to go away anywhere but
to go on living at Melihovo. I must only arrange the house somewhat more
comfortably....
MOSCOW,
April 7, 1897.
... You write that my ideal is laziness. No, it is not laziness. I despise
laziness as I despise weakness and lack of mental and moral energy. I was
not talking of laziness but of leisure, and I did not say leisure was an
ideal but only one of the essential conditions of personal happiness.
If the experiments with Koch’s new serum give favourable results, I shall
go of course to Berlin. Feeding is absolutely no use to me. Here for the
last fortnight they have been feeding me zealously, but it’s no use, I have
not gained weight.
I ought to get married. Perhaps a cross wife would cut down the number of
my visitors by at least a half. Yesterday they were coming all day long, it
was simply awful. They came two at a time--and each one begs me not to
speak and at the same time asks me questions....
TO A. I. ERTEL.
MELIHOVO,
April 17, 1897.
DEAR FRIEND ALEXANDR IVANOVITCH,
I am now at home. For a fortnight before Easter I was lying in Ostroumov’s
clinic and was spitting blood. The doctor diagnosed tuberculosis in the
lungs. I feel splendid, nothing aches, nothing is uneasy inside, but the
doctors have forbidden me _vinum_, movement, and conversation, they have
ordered me to eat a great deal, and forbidden me to practise--and I feel as
it were dreary.
I hear nothing about the People’s Theatre. At the congress it was spoken of
apathetically, without interest, and the circle that had undertaken to
write its constitution and set to work have evidently cooled off a little.
It is due to the spring, I suppose. The only one of the circle I saw was
Goltsev, and I had not time to talk to him about the theatre.
There is nothing new. A dead calm in literature. In the editor’s offices
they are drinking tea and cheap wine, drinking it without relish as they
walk about, evidently from having nothing to do. Tolstoy is writing a
little book about Art. He came to see me in the clinic, and said that he
had flung aside his novel “Resurrection” as he did not like it, and was
writing only about Art, and had read sixty books about Art. His idea is not
a new one; all intelligent old men in all the ages have sung the same tune
in different keys. Old men have always been prone to see the end of the
world, and have always declared that morality was degenerating to the
uttermost point, that Art was growing shallow and wearing thin, that people
were growing feebler, and so on, and so on.
Lyov Nikolaevitch wants to persuade us in his little book that at the
present time Art has entered upon its final phase, that it is in a blind
alley, from which it has no outlet (except retreat).
I am doing nothing, I feed the sparrows with hemp-seed and prune a
rose-tree a day. After my pruning, the roses flower magnificently. I am not
looking after the farming.
Keep well, dear Alexandr Ivanovitch, thank you for your letter and friendly
sympathy. Write to me for the sake of my infirmity, and don’t blame me too
much for my carelessness in correspondence.
In future I am going to try and answer your letters as soon as I have read
them. Warmest greetings.
TO SUVORIN.
MELIHOVO,
July 12, 1897.
... I am reading Maeterlinck, I have read his “Les Aveugles,” “L’Intrus,”
and am reading “Aglavaine et Selysette.” They are all strange wonderful
things, but they make an immense impression, and if I had a theatre I
should certainly stage “Les Aveugles.” There is, by the way, a magnificent
scenic effect in it, with the sea and a lighthouse in the distance. The
public is semi-idiotic, but one might avoid the play’s failing by writing
the contents of the play--in brief, of course--on the programme, saying the
play is the work of Maeterlinck, a Belgian author and decadent, and that
what happens in it is that an old man, who leads about some blind men, has
died in silence and that the blind men, not knowing this, are sitting and
waiting for his return....
TO MADAME AVILOV.
NICE,
October 6, 1897.
... You complain that my heroes are gloomy--alas! that’s not my fault. This
happens apart from my will, and when I write it does not seem to me that I
am writing gloomily; in any case, as I work I am always in excellent
spirits. It has been observed that gloomy, melancholy people always write
cheerfully, while those who enjoy life put their depression into their
writings. And I am a man who enjoys life; the first thirty years of my life
I have lived as they say in pleasure and content....
TO F. D. BATYUSHKOV.
NICE,
December 15, 1897.
... In one of your letters you expressed a desire that I should send you an
international story, taking for my subject something from the life here.
Such a story I can write only in Russia from reminiscences. I can only
write from reminiscences, and I have never written directly from Nature. I
have let my memory sift the subject, so that only what is important or
typical is left in it as in a filter....
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
NICE,
January 4, 1898.
... Judging from the extract printed in _Novoye Vremya_, Tolstoy’s article
on Art does not seem interesting. All that is old. He says about Art that
it is decrepit, that it has got into a blind alley, that it is not what it
ought to be, and so on, and so on. That’s just like saying the desire to
eat and drink has grown old, has outlived its day, and is not what it ought
to be. Of course hunger is an old story, in the desire to eat we have got
into a blind alley, but still eating is necessary, and we shall go on
eating however the philosophers and irate old men moralise....
TO F. D. BATYUSHKOV.
NICE,
January 28, 1898.
... We talk of nothing here but Zola and Dreyfus. The immense majority of
educated people are on Zola’s side and believe that Dreyfus is innocent.
Zola has gained immensely in public esteem; his letters of protest are like
a breath of fresh air, and every Frenchman has felt that, thank God! there
is still justice in the world, and that if an innocent man is condemned
there is still someone to champion him. The French papers are extremely
interesting while the Russian are worthless. _Novoye Vremya_ is simply
loathsome....
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
NICE,
February 6, 1898.
... You write that you are annoyed with Zola, and here everyone has a
feeling as though a new, better Zola had arisen. In his trial he has been
cleansed as though in turpentine from grease-spots, and now shines before
the French in his true brilliance. There is a purity and moral elevation
that was not suspected in him. You should follow the whole scandal from the
very beginning. The degradation of Dreyfus, whether it was just or not,
made on all (you were of the number I remember) a painful and depressing