Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

TO HIS SISTER.

YALTA,

September 9, 1900.

DEAR MASHA,

I answer the letter in which you write about Mother. To my thinking it would be better for her to go to Moscow now in the autumn and not after December. She will be tired of Moscow and pining for Yalta in a month, you know, and if you take her to Moscow in the autumn she will be back in Yalta before Christmas. That’s how it seems to me, but possibly I am mistaken; in any case you must take into consideration that it is much drearier in Yalta before Christmas than it is after — infinitely drearier.

Most likely I will be in Moscow after the 20th of September, and then we will decide. From Moscow I shall go I don’t know where — first to Paris, and then probably to Nice, from Nice to Africa. I shall hang on somehow to the spring, all April or May, when I shall come to Moscow again.

There is no news. There’s no rain either, everything is dried up. At home here it is quiet, peaceful, satisfactory, and of course dull.

“Three Sisters” is very difficult to write, more difficult than my other plays. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, perhaps something will come of it, next season if not this. It’s very hard to write in Yalta, by the way: I am interrupted, and I feel as though I had no object in writing; what I wrote yesterday I don’t like to-day….

Well, take care of yourself.

My humblest greetings to Olga Leonardovna, to Vishnevsky, and all the rest of them too.

If Gorky is in Moscow, tell him that I have sent a letter to him in

Nizhni-Novgorod.