Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
and literary people; not to learn to crow like the rest of us and to
sharpen your wits, but to take the final plunge head first into literature
and to grow to love it. Besides, the provinces age a man early. Korolenko,
Potapenko, Mamin, Ertel, are first-rate men; you would perhaps at first
feel their company rather boring, but in a year or two you would grow used
to them and appreciate them as they deserve, and their society would more
than repay you for the disagreeableness and inconvenience of life in the
capital....
YALTA,
January 3, 1899.
... Apparently you have misunderstood me a little. I did not write to you
of coarseness of style, but only of the incongruity of foreign, not
genuinely Russian, or rarely used words. In other authors such words as,
for instance, “fatalistically,” pass unnoticed, but your things are
musical, harmonious, and every crude touch jars fearfully. Of course it is
a question of taste, and perhaps this is only a sign of excessive
fastidiousness in me, or the conservatism of a man who has adopted definite
habits for himself long ago. I am resigned to “a _collegiate assessor_,”
and “a _captain_ of the second _rank_” in descriptions, but “_flirt_” and
“_champion_” when they occur in descriptions excite repulsion in me.
Are you self-educated? In your stories you are completely an artist and at
the same time an “educated” man in the truest sense.
Nothing is less characteristic of you than coarseness, you are clever and
subtle and delicate in your feelings. Your best things are “In the Steppe,”
and “On the Raft,”--did I write to you about that? They are splendid
things, masterpieces, they show the artist who has passed through a very
good school. I don’t think that I am mistaken. The only defect is the lack
of restraint, the lack of grace. When a man spends the least possible
number of movements over some definite action, that is grace. One is
conscious of superfluity in your expenditure.
The descriptions of nature are the work of an artist; you are a real
landscape painter. Only the frequent personification (anthropomorphism)
when the sea breathes, the sky gazes, the steppe barks, nature whispers,
speaks, mourns, and so on--such metaphors make your descriptions somewhat
monotonous, sometimes sweetish, sometimes not clear; beauty and
expressiveness in nature are attained only by simplicity, by such simple
phrases as “The sun set,” “It was dark,” “It began to rain,” and so on--and
that simplicity is characteristic of you in the highest degree, more so
perhaps than of any other writer....
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
YALTA,
January 17, 1899.
... I have been reading Tolstoy’s son’s story: “The Folly of the Mir.” The
construction of the story is poor, indeed it would have been better to
write it simply as an article, but the thought is treated with justice and
passion. I am against the Commune myself. There is sense in the Commune
when one has to deal with external enemies who make frequent invasions, and
with wild animals; but now it is a crowd artificially held together, like a
crowd of convicts. They will tell us Russia is an agricultural country.
That is so, but the Commune has nothing to do with that, at any rate at the
present time. The commune exists by husbandry, but once husbandry begins to
pass into scientific agriculture the commune begins to crack at every seam,
as the commune and culture are not compatible ideas. Our national
drunkenness and profound ignorance are, by the way, sins of the commune
system....
TO HIS BROTHER MIHAIL.
YALTA,
February 6, 1899.
... Being bored, I am reading “The Book of my Life” by Bishop Porfiry. This
passage about war occurs in it:
“Standing armies in time of peace are locusts devouring the people’s bread
and leaving a vile stench in society, while in time of war they are
artificial fighting machines, and when they grow and develop, farewell to
freedom, security, and national glory! ... They are the lawless defenders
of unjust and partial laws, of privilege and of tyranny.” ...
That was written in the forties....
TO I. I. ORLOV.
YALTA,
February 22, 1899.
... In your letter there is a text from Scripture. To your complaint in
regard to the tutor and failures of all sorts I will reply by another text:
“Put not thy trust in princes nor in any sons of man” ... and I recall
another expression in regard to the sons of man, those in particular who so
annoy you: they are the sons of their age.
Not the tutor but the whole educated class--that is to blame, my dear sir.
While the young men and women are students they are a good honest set, they
are our hope, they are the future of Russia, but no sooner do those
students enter upon independent life and become grown up than our hope and
the future of Russia vanishes in smoke, and all that is left in the filter
is doctors owning house property, hungry government clerks, and thieving
engineers. Remember that Katkov, Pobyedonostsev, Vishnegradsky, were
nurselings of the Universities, that they were our Professors--not military
despots, but professors, luminaries.... I don’t believe in our educated
class, which is hypocritical, false, hysterical, badly educated and
indolent. I don’t believe in it even when it’s suffering and complaining,
for its oppressors come from its own entrails. I believe in individual
people, I see salvation in individual personalities scattered here and
there all over Russia--educated people or peasants--they have strength
though they are few. No prophet is honoured in his own country, but the
individual personalities of whom I am speaking play an unnoticed part in
society, they are not domineering, but their work can be seen; anyway,
science is advancing and advancing, social self-consciousness is growing,
moral questions begin to take an uneasy character, and so on, and so on-and
all this is being done in spite of the prosecutors, the engineers, and the
tutors, in spite of the intellectual class en masse and in spite of
everything....
TO MADAME AVILOV.
YALTA,
March 9, 1899.
I shall not be at the writers’ congress. In the autumn I shall be in the
Crimea or abroad--that is, of course, if I am alive and free. I am going to
spend the whole summer on my own place in the Serpuhov district. [Footnote:
Melihovo.]
By the way, in what district of the Tula province have you bought your
estate? For the first two years after buying an estate one has a hard time,
at moments it is very bad indeed, but by degrees one is led to Nirvana, by
sweet habit. I bought an estate and mortgaged it, I had a very hard time
the first years (famine, cholera). Afterwards everything went well, and now
it is pleasant to remember that I have somewhere near the Oka a nook of my
own. I live in peace with the peasants, they never steal anything from me,
and when I walk through the village the old women smile and cross
themselves. I use the formal address to all except children, and never
shout at them; but what has done most to build up our good relations is
medicine. You will be happy on your estate, only please don’t listen to
anyone’s advice and gloomy prognostications, and don’t at first be
disappointed, or form an opinion about the peasants. The peasants behave
sullenly and not genuinely to all new-comers, and especially so in the Tula
province. There is indeed a saying: “He’s a good man though he is from
Tula.”
So here’s something like a sermon for you, you see, madam. Are you
satisfied?
Do you know L. N. Tolstoy? Will your estate be far from Tolstoy’s? If it is
near I shall envy you. I like Tolstoy very much.
Speaking of new writers, you throw Melshin in with a whole lot. That’s not
right. Melshin stands apart. He is a great and unappreciated writer, an
intelligent, powerful writer, though perhaps he will not write more than he
has written already. Kuprin I have not read at all. Gorky I like, but of
late he has taken to writing rubbish, revolting rubbish, so that I shall
soon give up reading him. “Humble People” is good, though one could have
done without Buhvostov, whose presence brings into the story an element of
strain, of tiresomeness and even falsity. Korolenko is a delightful writer.
He is loved--and with good reason. Apart from all the rest there is
sobriety and purity in him.
You ask whether I am sorry for Suvorin. Of course I am. He is paying
heavily for his mistakes. But I’m not at all sorry for those who are
surrounding him....
TO GORKY.
MOSCOW,
April 25, 1899.
... The day before yesterday I was at L. N. Tolstoy’s; he praised you very
highly and said that you were “a remarkable writer.” He likes your “The
Fair” and “In the Steppe” and does not like “Malva.” He said: “You can
invent anything you like, but you can’t invent psychology, and in Gorky one
comes across just psychological inventions: he describes what he has never
felt.” So much for you! I said that when you were next in Moscow we would
go together to see him.
When will you be in Moscow? On Thursday there will be a private
performance--for me--of “The Seagull.” If you come to Moscow I will give
you a seat....
From Petersburg I get painful letters, as it were from the damned,
[Footnote: From Suvorin.] and it’s painful to me as I don’t know what to
answer, how to behave. Yes, life when it is not a psychological invention
is a difficult business....
TO O. L. KNIPPER.
YALTA,
September 30, 1899.
At your command I hasten to answer your letter in which you ask me about
Astrov’s last scene with Elena.
You write that Astrov addresses Elena in that scene like the most ardent
lover, “clutches at his feeling like a drowning man at a straw.”
But that’s not right, not right at all! Astrov likes Elena, she attracts
him by her beauty; but in the last act he knows already that nothing will
come of it, and he talks to her in that scene in the same tone as of the
heat in Africa, and kisses her quite casually, to pass the time. If Astrov
takes that scene violently, the whole mood of the fourth act--quiet and
despondent--is lost....
TO G. I. ROSSOLIMO.
YALTA,
October 11, 1899.
... Autobiography? I have a disease--Auto-biographophobia. To read any sort
of details about myself, and still more to write them for print, is a
veritable torture to me. On a separate sheet I send a few facts, very bald,
but I can do no more....
I, A. P. Chekhov, was born on the 17th of January, 1860, at Taganrog. I was
educated first in the Greek School near the church of Tsar Constantine;
then in the Taganrog high school. In 1879 I entered the Moscow University
in the Faculty of Medicine. I had at the time only a slight idea of the
Faculties in general, and chose the Faculty of Medicine I don’t remember on
what grounds, but did not regret my choice afterwards. I began in my first
year to publish stories in the weekly journals and newspapers, and these
literary pursuits had, early in the eighties, acquired a permanent
professional character. In 1888 I took the Pushkin prize. In 1890 I
travelled to the Island of Sahalin, to write afterwards a book upon our
penal colony and prisons there. Not counting reviews, feuilletons,
paragraphs, and all that I have written from day to day for the newspapers,
which it would be difficult now to seek out and collect, I have, during my
twenty years of literary work, published more than three hundred signatures
of print, of tales, and novels. I have also written plays for the stage.
I have no doubt that the study of medicine has had an important influence
on my literary work; it has considerably enlarged the sphere of my
observation, has enriched me with knowledge the true value of which for me
as a writer can only be understood by one who is himself a doctor. It has