Letters of Anton Chekhov

The addressee's husband.

Maria Kiselyova's children. Chekhov wrote some delightful nonsense poetry for the amusement of Sasha Kiselyova, whom he had for some reason nicknamed Vasilisa.

A "Journal of Travel and Adventure on Land and Sea," published in Moscow and popular with juvenile readers.

10. To Vladimir Korolenko¹

Moscow, October 17, 1887

Many thanks, dear Vladimir Galaktionovich, for your book, which I have received and am now in the process of rereading. Since you already have my books, it looks as though I'll have to limit the present shipment to a thank-you note.

By the way—to keep the letter from being too short—I might tell you how glad I am to have gotten to know you. I say this sincerely and with all my heart. In the first place, I deeply respect and admire your talent; it is precious to me for many reasons. In the second place, I have the feeling that if you and I make it through another ten or twenty years, we will inevitably encounter further points of contact. Of all the currently prosperous Russian writers² I'm the least serious and most frivolous. I am on probation. In the language of poetry: I loved my pure muse, but lacked the proper respect, betrayed her, and all too often led her into realms unbefitting her. But you are serious, strong and true. As you can see, there are a great many differences between us, but nonetheless, when I read your work, especially now that I've made your acquaintance, I get the feeling that we're not such strangers after all. I don't know if I'm right or not, but I'd like to think so.

Oh and by the way again, I've enclosed a clipping from the New Times. This Thoreau³ fellow, whom you'll find out about in the article, sounds quite promising, the first chapter at least, and I'll keep clipping him out and save him for you. He's got ideas and a certain freshness and originality about him, but he's hard to read. The architec­tonics and construction are impossible. He piles attractive and unattrac­tive, slight and weighty ideas one on top of the other in such a way that they crowd each other out, squeeze the juice out of one another, and before you know it, they'll all be squealing from the crush.

I'll give you the Thoreau when you get to Moscow. In the mean­time, good-bye and keep well.

Korsh will probably put on my play.⁴ If so, I'll let you know the date of the performance. It may coincide with the period of your stay here. I hope you'll do me the honor if it does.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Like Chekhov, Vladimir Korolenko (1853-1921) made his literary de­but in 1879. Of ^all the writers of the "generation of the eighties" whom Chekhov considered to be his contemporaries and with whom he corresponded, Korolenko is the only one whose work is still remembered, reprinted and read. Unlike Chekhov, Korolenko was a political activist by temperament, and both his life and his writings were largely devoted to organized political protest and to efforts to secure a greater degree of freedom for the Russian people. He lived long enough to see the Revolution for which he had been waiting all his life and to witness the abrogation of the very rights and freedoms which this Revolution was meant to achieve. His writings of 1919— 1921, which are never reprinted in the Soviet Union (in contrast to the rest of his work, which is regularly reissued), vehemently express the revulsion of the old freedom fighter against the betrayal and perversion of the ideals to which he had devoted his life.

There was no real spiritual affinity between Chekhov and Korolenko, as is witnessed by Korolenko's qualification of Ivanov as a "socially harmful play," his failure to understand The Cherry Orchard and his oddly colorless memoir about Chekhov. But there was a great deal of mutual sympathy and warmth, which continued for many years even in the absence of much personal con­tact. After a few friendly encounters in the late 1880s, the two writers lost contact until their joint resignation from the Academy over the cancellation of Maxim Gorky's election in 1902 (see Letters 153, 154 and 158).

The wording here seems to paraphrase the title of Nikolai Kushchevsky's political novel Nikolai Negorev, or the Prosperous Russian (1871).

In 1887, a Russian translation of Henry David Thoreau's Walden_y or Life in the Woods was serialized in New Times. Annotating this passage in his edition of fragments from Chekhov's letters, Louis S. Friedland transcribed Thoreau's name from the Cyrillic as "Того," and, disregarding both grammar and logic, suggested that Chekhov probably had in mind Yevgenia Tur, a Russian lady novelist of the nineteenth century.

Ivanov.

SUCCESS AS A PLAYWRIGHT: ^ffIVANOV"

Anton Chekhov's earliest attempts to write plays go back to his school years in Taganrog. As a medical student in 1880-81, he wrote a sprawling, interminable monster of a play in which he managed to combine the more obvious situations and devices of nineteenth-century melodrama with some original departures which in retrospect seem to presage a number of themes and characters from his later mature plays. He took this play to the celebrated actress Maria Yermolova to ask her advice about the feasi­bility of its being produced. What she told him is not known, but what­ever it was, it made Chekhov put the manuscript away in a file, where it was discovered in the 1920s. It is usually published (the manuscript lacked a title page) as either Play Without a Title or, after the name of the principal character, as Platonov. It has become in recent decades a favorite of adapters and abridgers, who are wont to give the results of their efforts their own titles, such as A Country Scandal or Don Juan in the Russian Manner, and then get them produced as a new play by Chekhov. In fact, whenever one hears of a play by Chekhov one cannot quite place, it is a sure sign that somebody else has tried to trim down his untitled 1881 play to manageable size. The manuscript young Chekhov once discarded is thus gradually becoming an inexhaustible source of new Chekhov plays.

Chekhov's next serious playwriting effort, the one-act On the High Road of 1885, which he adapted from his story "In Autumn," ran afoul of a drama censor with the resoundingly Germanic name Kaiser von Nilckheim, who found it filthy and morbid and arranged to get it banned. The situa­tion and the mood of this play, which showed a group of derelicts in a sleazy inn on a stormy night, were eventually reincarnated in Gorky's

Lower Depths and still later Americanized in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.

In September of 1887, at the request of the impresario Fyodor Korsh, Chekhov undertook to write a full-length play for Korsh's theater and within less than two weeks completed the first version of Ivanov. In this play Chekhov had hoped finally to put to rest that tired old common­place of the Russian critical tradition (still with us today, alas): the super­fluous man, that sensitive and bright nobleman, unable to find the proper use for his talents. Unimaginative critics have been discovering this proto­type for decades in Lermontov's Pechorin, Turgenev's Rudin, Goncharov's Oblomov and the heroes of innumerable other books. With his habit of breaking through stereotypes, Chekhov wanted to show that for men of this ilk disappointment and frustration spring not so much from immutable social reality as from their own inability to translate their idealism into a meaningful program of action because their interest in any project or under­taking fades so quickly. With all his faults and shortcomings, the weak and ineffectual Ivanov (his ordinary name was meant to be symbolic) was contrasted in the play on the one hand with a group of provincial bores and gossips, every one of them far less attractive than he, and on the other hand with the humorless radical fanatic Dr. Lvov, who passes judgment on him for all the wrong reasons and reduces Ivanov's complex predicament to simple-minded sociological cliches.

The play was produced first by Korsh in Moscow and then by several provincial companies and, despite Nikolai Mikhailovsky's denunciations, enjoyed a considerable success, placing Chekhov in the front rank of Russian playwrights of the period. It was not until the preparations for a St. Petersburg production of Ivanov were under way one year after its initial production that Chekhov finally realized to what extent his play had been generally misunderstood. Conditioned by the conventions of the nineteenth- century well-made play, the director and the actors of the St. Petersburg production, as well as Chekhov's friend Suvorin, all saw Ivanov himself as either a sly fortune hunter or as the old familiar superfluous man. The idealistic verbiage of Dr. Lvov, furthermore, led them to take him for the play's attractive hero and caused them to overlook or to minimize his heart- lessness and cruelty. The realization of the misunderstanding hit Chekhov hard; he reworked the play drastically in order to clarify its meaning and he wrote Suvorin a long and detailed letter, explaining the play and its characters with utmost precision. This letter to Suvorin is of course a basic key to Chekhov's intentions in Ivanov; but, despite its wide availability, this key has remained unused to this day. In the Soviet Union, a produc­tion that would realize Chekhov's intentions as he spells them out would offend some of that society's most cherished beliefs about itself and its past; in the West, directors who put on this play are usually not aware of the Russian social and intellectual realities with which Chekhov is dealing. Sir John Gielgud's widely acclaimed London and New York production of Ivanov a few years ago is a good case in point. Just how thoroughly Gielgud missed the meaning of the play was made clear in his article 011 Ivanov in the New York Times of May 1, 1966: "One feels that Chekhov must have seen something of himself both in the character of Ivanov and that of Doctor Lvov, the two most intelligent men in the play, whose attempts to understand each other and win each other's con­fidence result in such violent mutual destruction." In line with this totally erroneous conception of the play and of its principal characters, Gielgud played Ivanov as an aging Russian Hamlet and allowed the actor who played the fanatical Dr. Lvov to turn him into a sort of languid romantic poet.

Yet there surely must be a way of making the polemical aspects of Ivanov clcar and comprehensible to a contemporary Western audience. A production that would bring them out in an imaginative way could gener­ate considerable excitement; and it would also tell the non-Russian public for practically the first time just what Chekhov's first important play is really about.

11. To Nikolai Leykin

Moscow, November 15, 1887

Forgive me, kind Nikolai Alexandrovich, for not sending you a story this time round. Wait a bit. My play is opening on Thursday, and as soon as that is over with, I'll sit myself down and hack away. Your lines about production of plays puzzle me. You write that the author only gets in the production's way, makes the actors uncomfortable, and more often than not contributes only the most inane comments. Let me answer you thusly: (1) the play is the author's property, not the actors';

where the author is present, casting the play is his responsibility;

all my comments to date have improved the production, and they have all been put into practice, as I indicated; (4) the actors themselves ask for my comments; (5) there is a new Shpazhinsky[9] play presently in rehearsal at the Maly; Shpazhinsky has changed the furniture three times and gotten the authorities to lay out money for new props on three occasions. And so on. If you reduce author participation to a naught, what the hell will you come up with? Remember how Gogol raged when they put on his play![10]

And wasn't he right?

You write that Suvorin agrees with you. I'm surprised. Suvorin wrote me not long ago that I should "take my actors in hand" and ad­vised me how to go about the in-hand-taking process.

In any case, thank you for bringing up the subject. I'll write Suvorin and raise the question of the limits of an author's competence in such matters.

You also write, "Why the blazes don't you forget about your play?" An eye for an eye: "Why the hell don't you forget about your shareholding operations?" Dropping the play means dropping my hopes for a profitable deal.

But since all this whining of mine must be getting on your nerves, let's move on to more timely affairs.

All the Innocent Talk[11] stories are printed on one type of paper.

I'll be in Petersburg by December.

We have a lot to talk about.

I don't know what to say to your remark about Davydov.[12] Maybe you're right. My opinion of him is based not so much on my personal impression as on Suvorin's recommendation. "You can trust Davydov," he writes.

My regards to Praskovya Nikiforovna and St. Fyodor.[13] Each time I write, my family sends its regards, but, forgive me, I always forget to include them.

When will we have dinner at Testov's?[14] Come pay us a visit.

Yours, A. Chekhov

12. To Alexander Chekhov

Moscow, November 20, 1887

Well, the play has opened. . . . Let me take it point by point. To begin with, Korsh promised me ten rehearsals and gave me only four, of which only two can be called rehearsals, because the other two were more like tournaments for the actors to display their skills of disputation and invective. Only Davydov and Glama¹ knew their parts; the rest of them relied on the prompter and inner conviction.

First Act. I'm backstage in a tiny box that looks like a prisoner's cell. The family is in an orchestra box—and trembling. Contrary to my expectations, I feel calm and collected. The actors are keyed up and tense; they keep crossing themselves. Curtain. Enter the celebrant,² unsure of himself, unfamiliar with his lines. He is then presented with a wreath, with the result that from the very first lines I don't recognize my play. Kiselevsky,³ on whom I had staked such high hopes, does not get a single line right. Literally not a single one. He says whatever comes into his head. Despite all this and the director's blunders, the first act is quite successful. Many curtain calls.

Second Act. A crowd on stage. Guests. Not knowing their lines, they fumble and talk nonsense. Every word is like a knife in my back. But—О Muse!—this act is successful too. The entire cast gets a curtain call. Even I am called twice. Everyone congratulates me on my success.

Third Act. The acting doesn't go too badly. An enormous success. I get three curtain calls. Davydov shakes my hand during one of them and Glama presses my other hand to her heart a la Manilov.⁴ Talent and virtue reign triumphant.

Act Four, Scene One. Everything goes all right. Curtain calls. Then a long, tedious intermission. Not in the habit of getting up and moving out to the buffet between scenes, the audience grumbles. The curtain goes up. A beautiful set: dinner table (wedding) seen behind an arch. The orchestra plays a fanfare, and out come the men of the wedding party. They are drunk, you see, and therefore feel obliged to clown around and cut up. A circus, a drunken brawl. I am horrified. Thereupon Kiselevsky's grand entrance. A heart-rendingly poetic passage. But, because my Kiselevsky doesn't know his lines and is drunk as a lord, the short poetic dialogue comes out long-winded and vile. The audience is perturbed. The hero dies at the end of the play because he cannot stand to live after being insulted. By this time the audience has grown so tired and so indifferent that they are unable to understand why he must die. (The actors insisted on this ending; I have an alternate one.) Both the actors and I take our curtain calls. During one of them I detect a clear hissing, though it is drowned out by applause and stamping feet.

On the whole I feel exhausted and chagrined. I am disgusted even though the play was a big success (which fact is denied only by Kicheyev⁵ and Co.). Theater lovers say they've never seen so much ferment, so much universal applause-cmrc-hissing, or heard so many arguments as they saw and heard at my play. And Korsh has never had an author take a curtain call after the second act.

The play will be performed for the second time on the twenty- third—with the alternate ending and several other changes: I'm getting rid of the wedding-party men.

Details when we get together.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Tell Burenin⁶ that I've fallen back into my routine, now that the play is out of the way, and am hard at work on my contribution for the Saturday issue.

Vladimir Davydov and Alexandra Glama-Meshcherskaya were two of the brightest names in the impressive all-star cast that Korsh assembled for the first performance of Ivanov. She appeared in the role of Sarah.

The opening night was also the occasion of a benefit performance honoring the actor Nikolai Svetlov, who played the role of Misha Borkin. In accordance with the quaint custom, his first entrance was interrupted by the ceremonial presentation of a wreath.

Ivan Kiselevsky, a highly popular actor of the time, played Count Shabelsky.

A sentimental character in Gogol's Dead Souls.

The critic Pyotr Kicheyev's review of Ivanov qualified the play as "profoundly immoral," accused it of an "insolent and cynical confusion of ideas" and described its form as "incoherent."

The arch-reactionary critic and playwright Viktor Burenin was at the time one of the editors of New Times, where Alexander Chekhov was also employed.

13. To Alexander Chekhov

Moscow, November 24, 1887

Well, dearest Gusev,¹ the dust has finally settled and everything has calmed down. Here I am as usual, sitting at my desk and placidly writing stories. You can't possibly imagine what it was like! The devil only knows what they've made out of so insignificant a piece of junk as my miserable little play. (I've sent a copy to Maslov.)² As I wrote you, the premiere caused more excitement in the audience and backstage than the prompter had seen in all his thirty-two years with the theater. People were screaming and yelling and clapping and hissing, there was almost a brawl in the buffet, some students in the gallery tried to throw someone out and two people were ejected by the police. The excitement affected everybody. Masha almost fainted, Dyukovsky,³ whose heart started palpitating, ran out of the theater, and Kiselyov⁴ for no earthly reason grabbed himself by the head and wailed in all seriousness, "What am I going to do now?"

The actors were in a state of nervous tension. Everything I've written you and Maslov about their acting and their attitudes must of course be held in strict confidence. A great deal can be explained and justified. It turns out that the actress who played the leading role has a daughter who was on her deathbed. How could she keep her mind on the stage? Kurepin⁵ did well to praise the actors.

The day after the performance the Moscow Press published a review by Pyotr Kicheyev calling my play insolently cynical and im­moral claptrap. The Moscow News praised it.

The second performance went well, though it did have its surprises. Without any rehearsals, a new actress took over for the one with the sick daughter. Again we had curtain calls after the third act (two of them) and the fourth, but this time no one hissed.

There you have it. My Ivanov will go on again this Wednesday. Now everyone's quieted down and fallen back in their rut. We've marked off November 19th on the calendar and will celebrate it every year with a drunken spree; it will be a day long remembered by our family.

I won't be writing you any more about the play. If you feel like getting an idea of what it's like, ask Maslov to let you have a look at his copy. Reading the play won't tell you what all the excitement was about; you won't find anything special in it. Nikolai, Schechtel and Levitan—all of them painters—assure me that it's so original on stage that watching it is a strange experience. None of this comes through when you read it.

If you notice anyone at New Times about to come down on actors in my play, ask them to refrain from calumny. At the second per­formance they were splendid.

Well, in a few days, I'll be leaving for Petersburg. I hope to get away by December 1st. We'll celebrate your eldest puppy's name day together at any rate. . . . Warn him there won't be any cake.

Congratulations on your promotion. If you really are a secretary now, then insert a notice in the paper saying that "Ivanov had its second performance on November 23rd at the Korsh Theater. The actors, especially Davydov, Kiselevsky, Gradov-Sokolov and Kosheva,^G earned many curtain calls. The author was called to the stage after the third and fourth acts." Something along those lines ... A notice like that will make them do the play again, and 111 get an extra fifty or a hundred rubles. But if it's inconvenient for you, then forget about it.

How's Anna Petrovna⁷ doing? Allah Kerim⁸ . . . The Petersburg climate doesn't agree with her.

I've received the forty rubles. Thank you.

Have I been getting on your nerves? I've felt like a psychopath all November. Gilyarovsky⁹ is leaving for Petersburg today.

Keep well and forgive the psychopathy. I'm over it now. Today I'm normal.

I've sent Maslov a thank-you note for his telegram.

Yours,

Schiller Shakespearovich Goethe

Chekhov used this name for many years as an affectionate nickname in his correspondence with his older brother before he gave it to the principal character (a dying peasant soldier, returning from Sakhalin to Russia) in the story "Gusev," which he wrote during his visit to Ceylon in 1890.

Writer and playwright Alexei Maslov (Bezhetsky) was a fellow em­ployee of Alexander's at the St. Petersburg offices of New Times. See also Letter 27, note 11.

A schoolteacher who was a friend of the Chekhov family.

The husband of Maria Kiselyova.

The drama reviewer of New Times.

Leonid Gradov-Sokolov appeared as Kosykh and Bronislava Kosheva played Babakina.

Alexei Suvorin's wife.

This originally Arabic phrase meaning "God is merciful" was an expletive commonly used by various Moslem peoples of the Caucasus and the Crimea; it was also popularized in the Oriental tales of Russian romantic writers.

Vladimir Gilyarovsky was a colorful adventurer, circus performer and writer, a friend of Chekhov's who frequently appears in various memoirs connected with Chekhov.

14. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow, December 30, 1888¹

Nikulina thanks you for the corrections. Gorev is playing Sabinin. Rehearsals have not yet begun. I am certain the play will be successful

because the actors' eyes are clear and their faces do not look treacherous; that means they like the play and believe in its success themselves. Nikulina has had me to dinner. Thank you.²

The director sees Ivanov as a superfluous man in the Turgenev manner. Savina³ asks why Ivanov is such a blackguard. You write that "Ivanov must be given something that makes it clear why two women throw themselves at him and why he is a blackguard while the doctor is a great man." If all three of you have understood me this way, it means my Ivanov is a failure. I must have lost my mind and written something entirely different from what I had intended. If my Ivanov comes across as a blackguard or superfluous man and the doctor as a great man, if no one understands why Sarah and Sasha love Ivanov, then my play has evidently failed to pan out, and there can be no ques­tion of having it produced.

Here is how I understand my protagonists. Ivanov is a nobleman who has been to the university and is in no way remarkable. He is easily excitable, hot-headed, strongly inclined to be carried away, honest and straightforward—like most educated noblemen. He lived on his estate and served in the zemstvo. His words to the doctor (Act I, Scene 5) indicate what he did, how he behaved, what occupied and what fascinated him: "Don't marry Jewesses or psychopaths or blue stockings . . . don't take on thousands of foes all by yourself, don't do battle with windmills, don't knock your head against the wall. May God protect you from all sorts of scientific farming methods, unusual schools and hot-headed speeches. . . ." That's what his past is like. Sarah, who has seen his scientific farming methods and other projects, describes him to the doctor as follows: "He's a remarkable person, doctor, and I'm sorry you didn't know him two or three years ago. He's despondent now; he doesn't say or do anything. But the way he used to be . . . oh, lovely!" (Act I, Scene 7). His past, like that of most Russian intellectuals, is wonderful. Russian gentlemen or university graduates who do not boast of their past are few and far between. The present is always worse than the past. Why? Because Russian excitability has one specific property: it quickly turns into weariness. As soon as he leaves the school bench, the Russian recklessly takes on a burden beyond his endurance. He simultaneously becomes involved with the schools, the peasants, scien­tific farming and the Herald of Europe;⁴ he makes speeches; he writes to cabinet ministers; he fights evil and applauds good; instead of loving simply or haphazardly, he must love blue stockings, or psychopaths, or Jewesses, or even the prostitutes he tries to save, and so on and so forth. But no sooner does he reach the age of thirty or thirty-five than he starts feeling weary and bored. He doesn't even have a respectable mustache yet, but he says "Don't get married, old boy. . . . Take it from me" with great authority. Or "What is liberalism essentially? Between you and me, Katkov⁵ was often right." He is already willing to reject the zevistvo and scientific farming and science and love. My Ivanov tells the doctor (Act I, Scene 5), "You, dear friend, graduated only last year. You are still young and vigorous, and I am thirty-five. I have the right to give you some advice. . . ." That's the way those prematurely weary people speak. Then, with an authoritative sigh they'll say, "Don't get married to this one or that one (see one of the categories above). Choose someone ordinary and colorless, someone who is neither striking nor has anything much to say. Structure your entire life accord­ing to accepted patterns. The more colorless and monotonous the sur­roundings, the better. And the life I've been through, it's been wearisome. Lord, how wearisome it's been!"

Since he feels physically weary and bored, he doesn't understand what he is undergoing now or what has taken place. In horror he tells the doctor (Act I, Scene 3), "You say she's going to die soon, and I feel no love or pity. All I feel is a sort of emptiness and weariness. ... To someone looking at me from outside it probably looks horrible, but I myself can't understand what's going on in my soul. . . ." When narrow- minded, dishonest people get into a situation like this, they usually place all the blame on their environment or join the ranks of the Hamlets and superfluous men, and let it go at that. The straightforward Ivanov, however, openly admits to the doctor and the audience that he doesn't understand himself: "I don't understand, I don't understand. . . ." That he genuinely does not understand himself is clear from his long third-act soliloquy when, left alone to converse with the audience and make his confession to them, he even weeps.

The change that has taken place within him offends his sense of decency. He seeks its causes from without and fails to find them, and when he starts seeking them within himself all he finds is an inde­finable feeling of guilt. This feeling is a Russian feeling. If someone in his house has died or fallen ill, or if he owes or has lent someone money, a Russian always feels guilty. Ivanov is constantly holding forth about a guilty feeling he has, and this feeling of guilt grows within him from every jolt. In Act I he says, "I must be terribly guilty, but my thoughts are confused, I am chained down by a sort of indolence, and I am powerless to understand myself. . . ." In Act II he tells Sasha, "My con­science pains me day and night. I feel that I'm profoundly guilty, but I can't understand of what."

To weariness, boredom and guilt feelings add another enemy: loneliness. Had Ivanov been a government official, an actor, a priest, or a professor, he would have resigned himself to his situation. But he lives on his estate. He is in the provinces. People are either drunkards orcard players or like the doctor. None of them are concerned with his feelings or the change within him. He is lonely. Long winters, long evenings, a barren garden, barren rooms, a grumbling count, a sick wife. . . . And there's nowhere for him to go. That's why he is con­stantly tormented by the problem of what to do with himself.

And now a fifth enemy. Ivanov is weary, he doesn't understand himself, but life doesn't care. It presents him with its legitimate de­mands and, whether he likes it or not, he must solve its problems. His sick wife is a problem, his pile of debts is a problem, Sasha hanging on his neck is a problem. How he goes about solving all these problems should be evident from his third-act soliloquy and the contents of the last two acts. People like Ivanov don't solve problems; they fall under their burden. They become flustered, they feel helpless and nervous, they complain and make fools out of themselves, and in the end give free rein to their frazzled and undisciplined nerves, lose the ground from under their feet and enter the ranks of the "broken" and "mis­understood."

Disappointment, apathy, frayed nerves and weariness are the inevitable consequences of excessive excitability, and this excitability is to a great degree characteristic of our young people. Take literature. Take the present. Socialism is one form of excitement. But where is it? It's in Tikhomirov's⁶ letter to the tsar. The socialists have gotten married and are criticizing the zemstvo. Where is liberalism? Even Mikhailovsky says the sides are no longer clearcut. And what is all this Russian enthusiasm worth? We're weary of the war, we've so wearied of Bulgaria⁷ it's ironic, we've wearied of Zucchi⁸ and even of operettas.

This susceptibility to weariness (as Doctor Bertenson⁹ will confirm) finds expression in more than merely whining or feeling bored. The life of the weary man cannot be represented like this:

— It is not particularly even. The weary do not

As you can see, the descent forms something rather different from a gradual inclined plane. Sasha declares her love. Ivanov shouts in ecstasy: "A new life!" But the next morning he has as much faith in that life

lose their ability to work up a high pitch of excitement, but their ex­citement lasts for a very short time and is followed by an even greater sense of apathy. Graphically we can represent this as follows:

as he does in ghosts (see his third-act soliloquy). When his wife insults him, he loses control, gets excited and flings a cruel insult at her. He is called a blackguard to his face. If this doesn't finish off his frazzled brain, it does make him excited and forces him to pass sentence on himself.

So as not to weary you to exhaustion, I will turn now to Doctor Lvov. Lvov is the model of an honest, straightforward, hot-headed, but narrow-minded and limited man. It is about his kind that intelligent people say: "He's stupid, but his heart is in the right place." Everything resembling breadth of vision or spontaneity of feeling is alien to Lvov. He's a stereotype personified, a walking ideology. He looks at every phenomenon and person through a narrow frame and judges everything by his prejudices. He's ready to worship anyone who shouts, "Make way for honest labor!"¹⁰ and anyone who doesn't is a blackguard and kulak. There is nothing in between. He grew up on the novels of Mikhailov¹¹ and on the stage saw the "new people," namely kulaks and sons of this age as depicted by the new playwrights, such "money grubbers" as Proporyev, Okhlyabyev, Navarygin¹² and so on. He mastered what they had to teach, mastered it so well that while reading Rudin he never fails to wonder whether Rudin is or is not a blackguard. Literature and the stage have brought him up to approach every individual in life and in literature with this question. If he'd had the chance to see your play, he would have taken you to task for not making it clear whether Messrs. Kotelnikov, Sabinin, Adashev and Matveyev¹³ are or are not blackguards. This is an important matter for him. He is not satisfied that all men are sinful. He wants either saints or blackguards.

He was prejudiced before he ever arrived in the district. He immediately saw a kulak in every well-to-do peasant and a blackguard in Ivanov, whom he couldn't understand. If a man's wife is ill and he is off visiting the rich woman on the neighboring estate, can he be any­thing but a blackguard? It's quite clear he's murdering his wife to marry the rich woman.

Lvov is honest and straightforward, and he calls a spade a spade whatever the consequences. If necessary, he'll throw a bomb under a carriage, punch an official in the face, call anyone a blackguard. He'll stop at nothing. He never feels any pangs of conscience: what should an "honest laborer" do but exterminate "the powers of darkness"?

Such people are necessary and for the most part likeable. It would be dishonest to caricature them for purposes of stage effect, and anyway, there is no reason for it. True, caricatures are more pointed and therefore more comprehensible, but it's better to leave out a few strokes than to overdo it.

And now a word about the women. What makes them love him? Sarah loves Ivanov because he's a good man, because he's passionate and brilliant and speaks with as much ardor as Lvov (Act I, Scene 7). She loves him as long as he is excited and interesting; as soon as he grows nebulous in her eyes and loses his well-defined personality, she ceases to understand him and at the end of the third act speaks her mind plainly and pointedly.

Sasha is a damsel of the latest vintage. She is well educated, intelligent, honest, etc. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, so she singles out thirty-five-year-old Ivanov. He is better than all the rest. She knew him when she was a little girl and saw him in action at close range before he wearied of everything. He is a friend of her father's.

She is a female whom males win over not by the brilliance of their plumage, or their versatility, or courage, but by complaints, whining and failures. She is a woman who loves men on their way down. No sooner does Ivanov lose heart than up pops the damsel. That's all she was waiting for. What else! Now she has a noble and sacred mission. She will revive her fallen man, set him on his feet, give him happiness. She doesn't love Ivanov; she loves her mission. Daudet's Argenton said, "Life is not a novel."¹⁴ Sasha doesn't realize this. She doesn't realize that for Ivanov love is merely an additional complication, another stab in the back. And what happens? Sasha works on him for a whole year, yet instead of reviving he sinks lower and lower.

My fingers hurt. I'm coming to the end. ... If nothing I've described above is in the play, there can be no question of having it produced. It must mean I didn't write what I intended. Have the play withdrawn. I don't mean to preach heresy from the stage. If the audience leaves the theater thinking all Ivanovs are blackguards and Doctor Lvovs great men, I might as well go into retirement and give up my pen. Corrections and insertions won't help. No corrections can bring a great man down from his pedestal, and no insertions are capable of turning a blackguard into an ordinary sinner. I could bring Sasha in at the end, but I can't add a thing to Ivanov and Lvov. I haven't the skill. And even if I were to add something, I have a feeling I'd only make it worse. Have faith in my feelings. After all, they belong to the author.

My apologies to Potekhin and Yurkovsky¹⁵ for putting them through all this needless trouble. I hope they forgive me. Frankly speak­ing, it was neither fame nor Savina that tempted me to have the play produced. I was counting on earning about a thousand rubles from it. But I'd rather borrow the thousand than risk making a fool of myself. Don't try to tempt me with success. Unless I die, success is still ahead.

Want to bet that sooner or later I'll soak the management for six or seven thousand? How about it?

I wouldn't let Kiselevsky play the count for anything! My play caused him quite a bit of chagrin in Moscow. He went around complain­ing to everyone about being forced to play my son of a bitch of a count. Why chagrin him again?

People say it will be awkward to refuse because he's already had the part. Then why isn't it awkward to let Sazonov or Dalmatov¹⁶ play Ivanov? After all, Davydov had the part of Ivanov!

How weary I must have made you with this letter. Enough, bastal

Happy New Year! Hurra-a-ah!

Lucky you! You'll be drinking or have already been drinking real champagne, and all I have is the dregs.

My sister is ill. Her joints ache, she has a high temperature, a headache, etc. Our cook has the same thing. Both are bedridden. I fear it may be typhus.

Do forgive me for this desperately long, tiresome letter. My regards to your family. I kiss Anna Ivanovna's hand. Keep well.

Yours, A. Chekhov

If the public can't understand "iron in the blood," then to hell with it, the blood, I mean, the blood without iron.¹⁷

I've read through this letter. The word "Russian" often crops up in my characterization of Ivanov. Don't be angry. As I wrote the play, I had in mind only what I needed, only typical Russian traits. And excessive excitability, guilt feelings, and weariness are all purely Russian. Germans never get excited. That's why Germany has no dis­illusioned, superfluous, or weary people. The Frenchman's excitability constantly remains on one and the same plane; it never takes any sharp rises or falls. That's why the Frenchman's normal state is one of excitement and why it stays with him well into decrepit old age. In other words, the French don't spend their energy on excessive excite­ment; they spend their energy sensibly and therefore never go bankrupt.

Of course I don't use terms like Russian, excitability, weariness, etc., in the play; I'd hoped that the reader and the spectator would be attentive and not need a sign saying, "This is a plum, not a pumpkin."¹⁸ I have tried to express myself simply. I have not resorted to tricks and was far from suspecting that my readers and spectators would be out to trip up my characters on a phrase or lay special emphasis on the dowry talks, etc.

I failed in my attempt to write a play. It's a pity, of course.

Ivanov and Lvov seemed so alive in my imagination. I'm telling you the whole truth when I say that they weren't born in my head out of sea foam or preconceived notions or intellectual pretensions or by accident. They are the result of observing and studying life. They are still there in my mind, and I feel I haven't lied a bit or exaggerated an iota. And if they came out lifeless and blurred on paper, the fault lies not in them, but in my inability to convey my thoughts. Apparently it's too early for me to undertake playwriting.

This letter and the next one, written on the occasion of the first St. Petersburg production of Ivanov, are removed from their proper chronological sequence and included in this section for obvious thematic reasons.

While Suvorin was supervising the St. Petersburg production of Ivanov, Chekhov in Moscow was reciprocating by helping with the casting arrange­ments for the first Moscow production of Suvorin's play Tatyana Repina, a lurid melodrama about a famous actress who is abandoned by her lover and is driven by the intrigues of a Jewish banker and an evil Jewish confidante to take poison onstage during a performance. Blinded by his affection for Suvorin, Chekhov managed to overlook the shoddy literary quality of Tatyana Repina (and its explicit and ugly racist overtones) and he paid it the tribute of writing a one-act sequel for it, also called Tatyana Repina, which he had printed in an edition of three copies and presented to Suvorin as a private gesture of friendship. After Chekhov's death, this sequel was occasion­ally published and translated into other languages as an original dramatic work of Chekhov's, although it makes no sense whatsoever when it is read outside the context of Suvorin's play.

During the preparations for the Moscow production of Tatyana Repina at the famous Maly Theater, Chekhov's contribution was to carry out negotia­tions with various actors and actresses whom Suvorin wanted to appear in his play. Chekhov's letters to Suvorin during that period give a vivid and not very flattering account of backstage mores at the Maly Theater. His particular feat was to talk the actress Nadezhda Nikulina (of whom he wrote in another letter to Suvorin: "Actresses are cows who imagine themselves to be god­desses") into accepting a smaller role in the production and relinquishing the lead, for which the celebrated Maria Yermolova unexpectedly became available. The actor Fyodor Gorev was cast in the role of the heroine's lover.

Maria Savina (1854-1915) was one of the biggest names in Russian theater in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, celebrated both as an actress and for her intimate friendship with Ivan Turgenev (there was a book published after her death about her relationship with him). Her consenting to appear in Ivanov was felt as a great honor by Chekhov; later on, his opinion of her acting abilities was not as high as that of most of his con­temporaries (see note 4 to Letter 50).

A generally respected, moderately liberal literary and political journal that was published in Moscow from 1866 to 1918.

Mikhail Katkov was a right-wing journalist and publisher who opposed and criticized the reforms of the 1860s, the zemstvo system and any kind of liberalization in general.

The former revolutionary Lev Tikhomirov, who had earlier helped organize several attempts to assassinate the tsar, published in 1888 a brochure called "Why I Stopped Being a Revolutionary." His abject repentance and his appeal for the tsar's mercy eventually secured for Tikhomirov a full pardon and permission to return to Russia from abroad.

Another big news story of 1888 was the diplomatic conflict between Russia and Bulgaria, caused by Russian objections to the invitation extended to the German Prince Ferdinand of Coburg to occupy the Bulgarian throne.

The third press sensation of the year to which Chekhov here alludes had to do with the failure of the Imperial Ballet management to renew the contract of the Italian prima ballerina Virginia Zucchi after her three years of successful appearances with their company. Instead of leaving Russia upon the expiration of her contract, Zucchi chose to form her own ballet com­pany in Moscow.

The popular St. Petersburg physician Lev Bertenson, with whom Chekhov was later to correspond about the nomenclature of Sakhalin plants (see Letter 161).

A hackneyed slogan of anti-government dissent.

The numerous didactic novels of Alexander Sheller-Mikhailov (1838­1900), artistically hopeless but ideologically progressive, were widely read by socially aware young people in Chekhov's time.

Evil capitalist villains in popular melodramas by Alexander Palm and Alexander Yuzhin (pseudonym of Prince Sumbatov, who was later to become Chekhov's good friend).

Characters in Suvorin's Tatyana Repina.

In Alphonse Daudet's novel Jack.

Alexei Potekhin, a playwright of some distinction, whose skillfully written realistic dramas have been unfairly forgotten, was at the time in charge of repertory for the government-owned theaters in St. Petersburg, and was thus instrumental in selecting Ivanov for production; Fyodor Fyodorov, whose real surname was Yurkovsky, was the stage director of the St. Petersburg production.

St. Petersburg actors Nikolai Sazonov and Vasily Dalmatov were proposed for the role of Ivanov; in the end, Vladimir Davydov came from Moscow to repeat his original role.

A not entirely clear reference to something in Suvorin's letter which Chekhov is answering. Like all Suvorin's letters to Chekhov, it was either destroyed or lost.

A Ukrainian saying, which Chekhov quotes in Ukrainian. Earlier translators of this letter into English have confused the Ukrainian harbuz (pumpkin) with the Russian arbiiz (watermelon) and rendered it as either "melon" or "watermelon."

15. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow, January 7, 1889

I am enclosing a document which I ask you to countersign and send back to me. You may consider yourself a member of the Society from January 7th until exactly fifty years after your death. And this pleasure costs a mere fifteen rubles.[15]

I sent you two variants for my Ivanov today.[16] If Ivanov were to be played by an agile, energetic actor, I would have added and altered many things. I'm in fine writing form. But Ivanov, alas, is being played by Davydov, which means that I have to write as succinctly and grayly as possible, keeping in mind that all my niceties and nuances will be fused into one gray blot and make a dreary impression. You can't expect Davydov to switch back and forth between gentleness and rage, can you? Whenever he plays serious parts, a muffled, monotonous little gristmill sits in his throat and does his acting for him. I'm sorry for poor Savina; I'm sorry she's stuck with that lifeless Sasha. I'd be glad to do something for Savina, but if Ivanov mumbles his lines, there's not much point in polishing up Sasha's role. It's a hell of a part to give Savina, and I'm ashamed of doing it to her. Had I known way back when that she would be playing Sasha and Davydov Ivanov, I would have called my play Sasha and centered everything around her role; and as for Ivanov, I would have brought him in as nothing more than a sidelight, but then, who could have known?

Ivanov has two long monologues which are decisive for the fate of the play: one in the third act and one at the end of the fourth. The first must be sung, the second recited with ferocity. Davydov can't do either. He'll recite both monologues "with intelligence," in other words, with infinite lethargy.

What is Fyodorov's[17] full name?

I would very much have enjoyed delivering a paper to the Literary Society on where I found the idea for writing Ivanov. I would have publicly admitted my guilt. I cherished the audacious dream of summing up everything written thus far about whining, despondent people and of having my Ivanov put a stop to this sort of writing. It seemed to me that all Russian novelists and playwrights feel a need to portray de­jected men and that they all write by instinct, without a clearcut picture or position on the matter. My basic conception of the work came close to the mark, but the realization isn't worth a damn. I should have waited!

I'm glad I didn't listen to Grigorovich two or three years ago when he advised me to write a novel. I can just imagine how much good material I would have wasted if I had listened to him. "Talent and spontaneity will win out in the end," he said. Talent and spontaneity can cause a great deal of waste is closer to the truth. There are other things no less necessary than talent and an abundance of material. Maturity, to begin with. Then, a sense of personal freedom is also quite indispensable. And this sense didn't begin growing inside me until very recently. I had never had it before, replacing it quite successfully with frivolity, care­lessness and a lack of respect for my work.

What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis, the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man—the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests' hands, worshiping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance—write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being.[18]

There's a poet named Palmin in Moscow, a very miserly man. He recently cracked his head open, and I treated him. Today, when he came to have his bandage redone, he brought me a bottle of real ilang- ilang, costing three rubles fifty. I was touched.

Keep well, now, and forgive the long letters.

Yours, A. Chekhov

recording songs that extol personal freedom, incorporated a passage from this paragraph into his best-known song, "I Choose Freedom":

I choose freedom

Even if she's pockmarked and crude. And you go ahead and squeeze The slave out, drop by drop.

A SENSE OF LITERARY FREEDOM

In 1883, Anton Chekhov advised his brother Alexander on how to write a story that would sell to Leykin's Fragments: "1. The shorter, the better; 2. A bit of ideology and being up to date is most a. propos; 3. Carica­ture is just fine, but ignorance of civil service ranks and of the seasons is strictly prohibited" (Letter of April 17, 1883). But only three years later, on May 10, 1886, Alexander was sent a drastically different recipe for a successful short story: "1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social- economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereo­type; 6. compassion." Instead of a set of humorous rules on production of marketable topical pieces that Antosha Chekhonte knew so well how to peddle, we now get a capsule description of an authentic Chekhovian short story.

By 1888, after the recognition of his talent by Grigorovich and Suvorin and the successful performances of Ivanov, Chekhov was no longer satisfied with the brief, seemingly plotless kind of story which he pioneered and which he had brought to such a high level of perfection. For the next two years he deliberately tried his hand at larger narrative forms. Among his fictional work of that time we find some of the most highly experimental longer stories he ever wrote. "The Steppe" is an account of a journey through the south of Russia told from the vantage point of a nine-year-old boy, whose impressions and perceptions are subtly mingled with the ever- present voice of an omniscient adult narrator. In "A Dreary Story," Che­khov, who had earlier in a story called "Grisha" depicted the world as it is seen by a two-year-old child, takes the reader inside the mind of a dying intellectual in his sixties, who has behind him a rich and rewarding life which he now finds meaningless in the face of his impending death. The narrative viewpoint is even more daringly original in "The Name-Day Party," one of Chekhov's most overtly political stories, where the marriage of a liberal heiress and her conservative poseur of a husband is endangered and the life of their baby is lost because of excessive adherence to social amenities and because of passions aroused by meaningless political stereo­typing. Chekhov's tour de forcc of making the reader continuously aware that the heroine's perception of people and events in 'The Name-Day Party" is constantly affected by her physical discomfort (her advanced stage of pregnancy and the corset which social convention forces her to wear to hide her condition) is something that could have only been brought off by a writer with Chekhov's knowledge of medicine and physiology. In "An Attack of Nerves" he took up the nearly taboo subject of houses of prostitution and made his presentation of it both more objective and more poignant by showing it through the eyes of an inexperienced and painfully sensitive young university student.

The years 1888-90 were a period during which Chekhov was more ex­clusively involved with literature, literary theories and literary politics than he would ever again be in his life. In the stories he wrote in that period, in his long, detailed letters to his St. Petersburg friends we see Chekhov gain­ing in literature that same sense of personal freedom of which he wrote to Suvorin after revising the script of Ivanov and which in his personal life he had already won by the time he was nineteen. His quiet discarding of hitherto accepted forms of fictional narrative in "The Steppe" and "The Name-Day Party" caused one of the critics to complain of Chekhov's "in­ability or unwillingness to write as required by literary theories/' And this was indeed the time when Chekhov came to a reasoned and eloquently stated rejection of all the critics and critical theories of his period. It was probably the critics' own campaign against his work that made him take a closer look at their assumptions and premises; and although he took their railings and barbs with seeming equanimity, his emotional letter to Vukol Lavrov, written on the eve of his departure for Sakhalin (Letter 43), shows that he could be hurt by some of their unfair accusations.

Despite his literary success, despite the acceptance of his work in the respected "thick" journals, his socially busy winters in Moscow, and the two memorable and productive summers he spent at the Lintvaryov estate in the Ukraine, by the end of 1889 Chekhov was faced with the two most momentous failures of his entire literary carcer. The long novel that had as its provisional title Stories from the Lives of My Friends, on which he had worked with great enthusiasm for two years, refused to pan out. Chekhov judged that both its theme and its presentation (of which we know almost nothing) could never pass the censor and therefore decided to destroy the manuscript. Ilis play The Wood Demon, in which he expressed his innermost convictions about nature conservation and the intellectual bankruptcy of Russian literary criticism, was performed in Moscow at the end of 1889 and met with general indifference, its ideas and views totally unperceived by the press and public. In his letters to friends, Chekhov frequently compared his medical and biological interests to his lawful wedded wife and his literary work to a mistress. The failure of his novel and his play and his depression over the death of his brother Nikolai caused Chekhov to terminate his two-year honeymoon with the "mistress" and to cast about for a project that would take him back to the "wife." He found one in the research trip to Sakhalin.

16. To Vladimir Korolenko

Moscow, January 9, 1888

I have unwittingly cheated you, my most kind Vladimir Galaktion- ovich, by not having rescued a copy of my play for you.[19] I'll send you one when it comes out in print or give it to you when I see you. In the meantime don't be angry. Yesterday I received a letter from old man Grigorovich, and it occurred to me it would be nice to have it copied and to send it to you. There are many reasons why it's worth more than its weight in gold to me, and I have avoided reading it a second time for fear of losing my first impression. It will show you that a literary reputation and good royalties provide no salvation from such humdrum prose as sickness, cold and loneliness: the old man's life is coming to an end. His letter will also make it clear that you were not the only one who made an honest attempt to set me on the true path, and you'll understand how ashamed I feel.[20]

After reading Grigorovich's letter, I thought of you, and my conscience started bothering me. I began to see how wrong I am. I'm writing this specifically to you because I have no one around me with a need for or a right to my sincerity, and because, although I've never asked you for permission, I've formed a union with you deep in my heart.

On your friendly advice I have begun a short novelette for the Northern Herald,[21] For a start I have undertaken to describe the steppe, the people of the steppe and the things I experienced in the steppe. It's a good theme, and I'm enjoying writing about it, but unfortunately, since I'm not used to writing anything long and am afraid of writing to excess, I've gone to the other extreme: every page comes out as compact as a little story, and the scenes keep piling up, crowding each other, getting in each other's way, and ruining the general impression. Instead of a scene in which all the particulars merge into the whole like stars in the sky, I end up with an outline, a dry list of impressions. A writer, you for instance, will understand me, but the reader will get bored and drop the whole thing.

I spent two and a half weeks in Petersburg and saw a lot of people. The general impression I came away with can be summed up as follows: "Put not your trust in princes, ye sons of men. . . ."[22] I saw a lot of nice people, but no judges. However, that may be all for the best.

I'm looking forward to reading your "Going the Same Way" in the February issue of the Northern Herald. Pleshcheyev says the censors have nipped you badly.[23] Happy New Year! Keep well and happy.

Your sincerely devoted,

A. Chekhov

P.S. I find your "Escapee from Sakhalin"[24] the most outstanding work that has appeared of late. It is written like a good musical composition in accordance with all the rules an artist's instinct suggests to him. Throughout the book you show yourself to be such a powerful artist, such a powerhouse, that even your biggest faults, which would be the death of any other writer, pass by unnoticed. Women, for instance, are stubbornly absent from the entire book, and I have only just managed to detect it.

read it in Northern Herald he found his own story incomprehensible. Korolenko later reworked this story and it now appears in collections of his work as "Fyodor the Homeless."

6. "Escapee from Sakhalin" (Sokolinets), like "Going the Same Way," belongs to the group of Korolenko's stories about convicts in Siberia, which he based on the experiences of his own four-year Siberian exile and which made his literary reputation. The story describes, in grim and gory detail, the escape of a group of convicts from the penal colony on Sakhalin. Chekhov's enthusiasm for this story consolidated his interest in Eastern Siberia, which began with his reading of Goncharov's Frigate Pallada while still at school and culminated in his famous voyage to Sakhalin.

17. To Dmitry Grigorovich

Moscow, January 12, 1888 Saint Tatyana's Day.

University Anniversary I won't try to explain to you, dear Dmitry Vasilyevich, how precious and meaningful I found your splendid last letter. I must admit I couldn't keep it to myself and sent a copy to Korolenko, who by the way is a very fine man. Reading the letter did not put me to any par­ticular shame, because it came while I was already at work on a thick- journal¹ project. Here is my answer to the essence of your letter: I've undertaken something big. I've already written slightly more than fifty pages, and I'll probably be writing another seventy-five. For my thick- journal debut I've selected the steppe, which no one has described for some time now. I describe the plain, its lilac vistas, the sheep breeders, the Jews, the priests, the nocturnal storms, the inns, the wagon trains, the steppe birds and so on. Each chapter is a separate story, but all the chapters are as interconnected and closely related as the five figures of a quadrille. I'm trying to give them a common aroma and a common tone, and the better to accomplish this I follow one character through all the chapters. I feel I've made a lot of headway and that there are passages that smell of hay, but on the whole I'm ending up with some­thing rather odd and much too original. Since I'm not used to writing anything long and am constantly, as is my wont, afraid of writing too much, I've gone to the other extreme. All the pages come out compact, as if they had been condensed, and impressions keep crowding each other, piling up, and pushing one another out of the way. The short scenes, or as you call them, spangles, are squeezed tightly together; they move in an unbroken chain and are therefore fatiguing. Instead of a scene, I end up with a dry, detailed list of impressions, very much like an outline; instead of an artistically integrated depiction of the steppe, I offer the reader an encyclopedia of the steppe. Nothing works right the first time around. But that doesn't discourage me. Who knows, maybe even an encyclopedia can have its uses. Perhaps it will open the eyes of my contemporaries and show them what splendor and rich veins of beauty remain untapped, and how much leeway the Russian artist still has. If my novelette reminds my colleagues of the steppe they've for­gotten, if even one of the motifs I have so lightly and dryly touched upon gives food for thought to some insignificant little poet, then that will be my reward. You will understand my steppe, I know, and you will pardon my unwitting sins for its sake. As it now turns out, the reason I have sinned unwittingly is that I do not yet know how to write long pieces.

This summer I will go back to my interrupted novel.² It encom­passes an entire district (the local gentry and administration) and the domestic life of several families. The steppe is a rather exceptional and specialized topic; if you depict it for its own sake and not in passing, its monotony and rural character tend to become boring. But the novel deals with ordinary people, members of the intelligentsia, women, love, marriage, children—and it all makes you feel almost at home and you don't tire so easily.

The suicide of a seventeen-year-old boy is a very promising and tempting theme, but a frightening one to undertake.³ An issue so pain­ful to us all calls for a painfully forceful response, and do we young writers have the inner resources for it? No. When you guarantee the success of this theme, you are judging by your own standards. But then, in addition to talent, the men of your generation had erudition, school­ing, iron and phosphorus, while contemporary talents have nothing of the sort. Frankly speaking, there is reason to rejoice that they keep away from serious problems. Let them have a go at your seventeen-year-old, and I am certain that X, completely unaware of what he is doing, will slander him and pile lie upon blasphemy with the purest of intentions; Y will give him a shot of pallid and petty tendentiousness; while Z will explain away the suicide as a psychosis. Your boy is of a good, pure nature. He seeks after God—He is loving, sensitive and deeply hurt. To handle a figure like that, an author has to be capable of suffering, while all our contemporary authors can do is whine and snivel. As for me, in addition to everything I've said above, I happen to be sluggish and lazy.

Vladimir Davydov came to see me a few days ago. He was in my Ivanov, and we have become friends. When he learned I was going to write you, he took heart, sat down at my desk and wrote you the letter I have enclosed.

Have you been reading Korolenko and Shcheglov?⁴ People are talking a lot about Shcheglov, who in my opinion is talented and original. Korolenko is still the favorite of both public and critics; his book is selling splendidly. Fofanov is beginning to make a name for him­self among the poets. He is genuinely talented; the others are worthless as artists. Our prose writers are still more or less acceptable, but the poets are very weak. As a group they are illiterate and lack education and a world view.⁵ Koltsov the cattle dealer, who couldn't write literate Russian, was much more genuine, intelligent and educated than all our young contemporary poets put together.⁶

My "Steppe" will be published in the Northern Herald. I'll write Pleshcheyev to have a copy reserved for you.

I'm very glad your pains have left you. They are the crux of your illness; the rest is not so important. There's nothing serious about your cough, nothing with any connection to your illness. It doubtless comes from a cold and will go away as soon as the weather turns warmer. We'll be drinking a lot of toasts tonight to the people who taught me to cut up corpses and write prescriptions. We'll probably be drinking a toast to you too, because on every single Tatyana's Day we drink to Turgenev, Tolstoy and you. Writers and critics drink to Chernyshevsky, Saltykov and Gleb Uspensky, but the crowd (students, doctors, mathematicians and so on) to which my Aesculapian back­ground binds me, still holds fast to the good old days and refuses to betray the old and much beloved stand-bys. I am firmly convinced that as long as Russia still has forests, ravines and summer nights, and as long as snipes still call and lapwings wail, neither you, nor Turgenev, nor Tolstoy—like Gogol—will ever be forgotten. The people you have portrayed may die off and be forgotten, but you will remain whole and unscathed. Such is your power, and such your fortune.⁷

Forgive me for having exhausted you with such a long letter, but what can I do? My hand ran away with me, and I felt like having a good long talk with you.

I hope this letter will find you in a warm spell, sprightly and well. Come to Russia this summer. The Crimea, they say, is just as pleasant as Nice.

Once again I thank you for the letter and send you all my best. I remain your truly, sincerely devoted

A. Chekhov

longer works and to publish them in the "thick" literary journals which were read by more cultivated readers and reviewed by prominent critics.

Stories from the Lives of My Friends was the working title of this novel, to which Chekhov was to devote two years of enthusiastic work.

In the letter from Grigorovich, which he is here answering, Chekhov was urged to write a novel dealing with the suicide of a teen-aged boy; Grigorovich considered this subject highly topical and predicted Chekhov a huge success if he would undertake it.

On Shcheglov, see Letter 20.

An astoundingly correct appraisal of the sorry state of Russian poetry in the 1880s. After two decades of radical-utilitarian tyranny in criticism, the understanding and appreciation of all poetry fell so low that the verbose and bathetic Semyon Nadson, the most popular poet of the eighties, could be acclaimed as a new incarnation of Pushkin merely because his main topics were the evils of oppression and tyranny. Konstantin Fofanov (1862—1911), minor and uneven as his poetry was, almost single-handedly created a sort of native Russian poetic Impressionism, occasionally reminiscent of French Impressionist paintings, and kept a tiny spark of poetic feeling glowing until the brilliant poetic revival of Russian Symbolism began in the early nineties.

Alexei Koltsov (1809-42), sometimes called the Robert Burns of Russia, was indeed a cattle dealer by trade. He wrote charming imitation folk songs, many of which ended up as folklore and became genuine folk songs.

The lumping together of Grigorovich's name with those of Gogol and Tolstoy may be attributed to Chekhov's fondness for the old man and to the inflated reputation Grigorovich still enjoyed at the time. But the crucial point of this paragraph, the opposition of Gogol's, Turgenev's and Tolstoy's names (note the absence of Dostoyevsky) to those of Chernyshevsky, Saltykov- Shchedrin (valued at that time not for his great novel The Golovlyov Family but for his savage, satirical lampoons of government officials and the post- reform gentry) and the muckraking Gleb Uspensky, implies a principled and reasoned preference of literary quality and depth to topical relevance in literature. This juxtaposition would have puzzled the typical literary critic of the time (for whom Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky were national classics of equal magnitude) and would have seemed intolerably reactionary to a typical radicalized university student.

18. To Alexei Pleshcheyev[25]

Moscow, February 5, 1888

Thank you so much, dear Alexei Nikolayevich! Yesterday I received the seventy-five rubles and took them to Putyata.² The money came just in time, because though Putyata is lying in bed, he is at the same time rapidly marching toward his grave.

Have you received my "Steppe"? Has the Northern Herald

rejected it or accepted it into the fold? Instead of sending it parcel post as I had originally intended, I sent it registered mail yesterday. That way it will get there faster. I hope it did not come too late.

I'm very anxious to read Korolenko's story. He's my favorite contemporary writer. His colors are rich and vivid, his language im­peccable—though a bit recherche in places—his images noble. Leontyev³ is also good. Though he does not write as boldly or beautifully, he is warmer than Korolenko, more restful and feminine. But—Allah Kerim— why must they both specialize so? Korolenko refuses to forsake his convicts, and Leontyev feeds his readers on a steady diet of army officers. I can understand specialization in art when it comes to genres: landscapes, history and the like, and I understand type casting and train­ing instrumentalists, but I cannot reconcile myself to specializations in convicts, officers or priests. That's not specialization; that's predilection. You in St. Petersburg don't care for Korolenko, and here in Moscow we don't read Shcheglov, but I firmly believe in both their futures. Oh, if only we had decent critics!

Mardi gras is upon us. You've practically promised to come, and I'm expecting you.

Tonight is Davydov's benefit performance. He's doing the Bourgeois gentilhomme. It will be stuffy, crowded and noisy, and I'll spend the whole night after the performance coughing. I've gotten out of the habit of attending theaters.

If my "Steppe" has not been rejected, would you drop a word on my behalf at the Northern Herald when you get a chance and ask them to send me a subscription? I'm looking forward to Korolenko's "Going the Same Way."

I've bored you with my letters.

Good-bye. My regards to all your family.

Yours sincerely,

A. Chekhov

biography. From 1887 to 1889, Pleshcheyev was one of Chekhov's most sympathetic and perceptive readers, as his letters to Chekhov printed in Literary Heritage, vol. 68, demonstrate. But he showed himself incapable of understanding "The Duel" (possibly because Chekhov chose to publish it in New Times rather than in Northern Herald) and he refused to publish the text of The Wood Demon, finding the conservationist views of its hero in­comprehensible (". . . what sort of an idealist is he if he likes the forest and not the people?"). Pleshcheyev's surname has three syllables, incidentally (it rhymes with Nureyev), even though some of Chekhov's biographies in English reduce it to only two.

Chekhov was active in the Literary Fund, an organization devoted to aiding needy writers. He is here thanking Pleshcheyev for his contribution sent in response to an appeal to help the Moscow journalist Nikolai Putyata, who was destitute and ill.

I.e., Ivan Shcheglov. See Letter 20.

19. To Alexei Pleshcheyev

Moscow, March 6, 1888

Today, dear Alexei Nikolayevich, I read two critiques of my "Steppe": Burenin's[26] article and Pyotr Ostrovsky's[27] letter. The latter is very congenial, sympathetic and intelligent. Besides the warm concern that constitutes its essence and purpose, it has many virtues, some that are even purely external: (1) If you look at it as a review, it is written with feeling, understanding and deliberation,[28] and it reads like a good, solid report. I haven't found it to contain a single heartrending word,⁴ which clearly distinguishes it from run-of-the-mill critical articles, which are as overgrown with forewords and heartrending words as a neglected pond with algae. (2) It is eminently comprehensible; you can tell at once what he's driving at. (3) It is free from philosophizing about atavism, reincarnation and the like, keeps as plainly and cold-bloodedly to elementary matters as a good textbook, tries to be precise, etc., etc. And many more things too numerous to mention. I read Pyotr Nikolaye- vich's letter three times through, and Im sorry he hides himself from the public. He would make a worthwhile addition to our corps of journalists. It's not that he has definite views and convictions or a clear- cut world view—nowadays everyone does; the important thing is that he has a method. For the analyst, be he scientist or critic, method con­stitutes one half of talent.

Tomorrow I'm going to pay Pyotr Nikolayevich a visit; I have a proposal for him. I'm going to remind him of 1812 and guerrilla warfare when anyone who so desired could attack the French without donning a uniform.⁵ Maybe he'll like my idea that in our time, when literature has fallen prisoner to a thousand score false doctrines,⁶ a guerrilla corps of critic irregulars would be far from superfluous. If he wishes to bypass journals and newspapers, break ambush, and charge forward into the foe Cossack-style, he can do so with the aid of the pamphlet. Pamphlets are the rage; they are so inexpensive and easy to read. With this in mind our priests bombard the public daily with their pharisaical eructa­tions. Pyotr Nikolayevich stands nothing to lose.

Now—how is your health? Do you ever get out into the fresh air? Judging by Burenin's criticism of Merezhkovsky, it must be freezing in St. Petersburg now, somewhere between 15⁰ and 20° below zero.⁷ And even though it's still damned cold, the poor birds are already on their way back to Russia. They are driven on by homesickness, by love for their native land. If poets only knew how many millions of birds fall victim to love and longing for their homes, how many freeze on the way, what tortures they endure in March and early April when they come home to roost, they would long ago have written about it. Put yourself in the place of a rail who walks all the way instead of flying,⁸ or the wild goose who is willing to surrender himself to man rather than freeze to death. . . . It's a hard world to live in.

I'll be going to Petersburg at the beginning of Lent, two or three days after I receive my Northern Herald payment. If you happen to be at the office on Tuesday, could you remind the cashier when you see her of my existence and lack of funds?

I didn't publish a line all February, so my budget's in a state of havoc.

I hope you haven't forgotten about the Volga.⁹

Keep well. I wish you a good appetite, sound sleep, and as much money as possible.

Good-bye.

Yours, A. Chekhov

latable neoclassical verse comedy, which is a marvel of verbal richness and precision in the original Russian. The line Chekhov quotes comes from Act II, Scene I, where an important government official asks that his appoint­ment book be read to him "with feeling, understanding and deliberation."

"Heartrending words" (zhalkie slova) is a phrase repeatedly used by the hero's valet in Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov to describe his master's gentle remonstrances.

The guerrilla-warfare imagery here and later in this paragraph seems to be derived, at least in part, from Book III of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

The idea that Russian literature in the second half of the nineteenth century was a prisoner not only of the government censors but also of the anti-government ideologues was frequently expressed at the beginning of the twentieth century by such Symbolist writers as Merezhkovsky, Bryusov and Blok. It must have seemed startlingly original at the time this letter was written. This concept is utterly sacrilegious in the Soviet Union and com­mentators there have to pretend that Chekhov can't possibly be saying what he does in fact say in this passage and numerous others like it.

Centigrade, of course. In his review of Chekhov's "The Steppe," Burenin ridiculed a recent poem by Merezhkovsky hailing the onset of spring, quoting the recent freezing temperatures in St. Petersburg. On Merezhkovsky, see Letter 27.

The rail's migrations on foot were mentioned by Chekhov two years earlier in his story "Agafya."

In his letter to Chekhov of February 5, 1888, Pleshcheyev informed him that he and Korolenko were planning to take a trip along the Volga that summer and asked whether Chekhov would care to join them.

20. To Ivan Leontyev (Shcheglov)[29]

Moscow, May 3, 1888

Dear Alba,²

You can finally congratulate me: the day after tomorrow, May 5th, I'm off for dahin. . . . Because of which fact you shall address your answer to this letter thusly: The Estate of A. V. Lintvaryova, Sumy, Kharkov Province. Pleshcheyev is coming to stay with me some time after the tenth. Why don t you come too? How about it? At any rate I'll be expecting you all summer. Who knows? You might just decide to come after all! I won't expect you in June, though; I'll be traveling around all month. If you do come, bring along three pounds of good ham sausage, the most expensive kind (111 foot the bill).

I've sent the Northern Herald a story.³ I'm a little ashamed of it. It's awfully boring and cloyingly full of philowisdomizing.⁴ I feel bad about it, but there's nothing I can do: I need money as much as air.

Tomorrow I'm finishing a story for New Times.⁵ This summer I won't be writing anything but trifles.

I received a letter from Lehmann⁰ informing me that "we (that is, everyone in Petersburg) have agreed to print advertisements for one another in our books," asking me to comply, and warning me that "only those authors who are more or less in solidarity with us may be included" among the elect. I responded by sending my consent and asking him how he knew with whom I am or am not in solidarity? How all of you in Petersburg enjoy being stifled! Aren't you stifled by expressions like solidarity, the unity of young writers, a community of interests and so on? Solidarity and the like I can understand on the stock exchange, in politics, in religious affairs (sects), etc., but solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary. We can't all think and feel in the same way. We have different goals or no goals at all; we know one another slightly or not at all. As a result there's nothing to which solidarity can firmly attach itself. And is it necessary? No. To help a colleague, to respect his person and his work, to refrain from gossiping about him and envying him, lying to him and acting hypocritical toward him, all this requires that one be not so much a young writer as simply a human being. Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody alike and there won't be any need for artificially blown-up solidarity. The insistent efforts toward achieving the sort of private, professional, cliquish solidarity that you in Petersburg want will inevitably lead to spying, suspiciousness and controls, and without meaning to we will each turn into something like a Jesuit socius of the other. I am not in solidarity with you, dear Jean, but I promise you to the grave complete freedom as a writer, that is, you may write wherever and however you please, think like Koreysha⁷ if you like, go back on your convictions and ideas a thousand times and so on and so forth, and my attitude toward you as a person won't change an iota and I'll always print advertisements for your books on my book jackets. I can promise the same to many other of my colleagues and would like them to do the same for me. As I see it, this sort of relationship is only normal. It is the only way we can have respect and even friendship and sympathy during life's dif­ficult moments.⁸

Now I've let my tongue run away with me again. May the heavens keep you!

Yours,

A. Chekhov

publishing his work under the pen name of Ivan Shcheglov. When this letter was written, Chekhov considered Shcheglov (to whom he alternately refers in his correspondence by his real name and his pen name) to be the most interesting new writer of the decade, on a par with Korolenko and Vsevolod Garshin. In a long letter to Shcheglov of February 22, 1888, Chekhov char­acterized him as a writer of the bourgeoisie, able to depict that class in a manner comparable to that of Alphonse Daudet. But Shcheglov's promisingly inaugurated literary career petered out by the mid-nineties, and by the turn of the century both he and his writings were generally forgotten. His private diary entries made after Chekhov's death, when Shcheglov realized that pos­terity would remember his name only because he had once corresponded with Chekhov, make heartbreaking reading. Shcheglov published a memoir about his encounters with Chekhov.

Chekhov and Shcheglov were given to using nicknames in their corre­spondence. One set of nicknames originated when one of Pleshcheyev's daugh­ters, upon seeing a photograph of Chekhov in Shcheglov's presence, declared that he would be an ideal choice to play the title role in Goethe's Egmont. This led Shcheglov to address his letters to Chekhov as "Dear Egmont" and Chekhov reciprocated by calling Shcheglov "Dear Alba," after another char­acter in Goethe's tragedy. The other set of nicknames they used involved substituting the French versions of their first names, Jean and Antoine, for Ivan and Anton.

"Lights."

In the original, the word is filosomudrie, which combines the first part of the Greek word for "philosophy" with the second part of its Russian caique, lyubomudrie.

"An Unpleasantness."

Anatoly Lehmann wrote mainly manuals on plucked-string instruments and on how to play billiards. He was exceedingly active in literary politics of the day, trying repeatedly to organize writers into various groups or clubs which he hoped to direct. In Pleshcheyev's letters to Chekhov, Lehmann is referred to as "the woodlouse."

Ivan Yakovlevich Koreysha (1790-1861) was nineteenth-century Rus­sia's most famous holy idiot. He was confined in a Moscow mental institution, where he regularly held court for his admirers. A profound occult meaning was read by his followers into his most trivial utterances, such as "More sugar, please!" Wives of millionaire merchants were known to consult him about business ventures and arranging marriages for their children.

In the Soviet Union, where all writers are presumed to be in full solidarity with each other and with the state at all times and where they demonstrate this solidarity by voting unanimously to denounce Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (which none of them had read at the time) or to expel Solzhenitsyn from the Writers' Union, this letter makes embarrassing reading. It was printed, uncut, in the 1944-51 edition of Chekhov, but omitted from the 1963-64 collection of his letters for obvious reasons.

21. To Alexei Suvorin

Sumy,¹ May 30, 1888

Dear Alexei Sergeyevich,

This is in answer to your letter which I received only yesterday. The envelope was torn, crumpled and soiled, which my hosts and kinsmen have interpreted as having profound political overtones.

I'm living on the banks of the Psyol in a wing of an old mansion. I rented it at random, sight unseen, and have as yet had no cause to regret it. The river is wide and deep with an abundance of islands, fish and crayfish. The banks are beautiful, and there is greenery everywhere. But, best of all, it is so spacious here that I have the feeling that my hundred rubles have earned me the right to live on a boundless expanse. Here, nature and life follow a pattern that has so gone out of style that it gets rejected in editorial offices. To say nothing of the nightingales singing day and night, the dogs barking in the distance, the old over­grown gardens, the very poetic and melancholy boarded-up manors where souls of beautiful women dwell; to say nothing of the ancient, moribund butlers who look back fondly on their serf days and of young ladies pining for the most stereotyped kind of love. Not far from here there is even as overworked a cliche as a sixteen-wheel water mill complete with a miller and his daughter, who is always sitting at the window, apparently waiting for something.² Everything I see and hear around me seems long since familiar from ancient tales and legends. The only new thing I have come across is a mysterious bird, "the water bittern," that sits somewhere off in the reeds and day and night utters a cry that sounds partly like someone whacking an empty barrel and partly like a bellowing cow shut up in the barn. Every Ukrainian has seen this bird in the course of his life, but each one describes it dif­ferently. In other words, no one has seen it. There are other new things around, but since they aren't native to the area, they're not entirely new.

Every day I take a boat to the mill, and in the evening I row over to the islands to fish with the fishing addicts from the Khariton- enko factory. Our conversations are often interesting. On Whitsunday Eve the addicts are going to spend all night fishing on the islands, and so will I. There are some splendid types among them.

My hosts have turned out to be very nice, hospitable people, a family worthy of study and consisting of six members. The mother is a kind, plump old woman who has known her share of suffering. She reads Schopenhauer and goes to church but only to services honoring her favorite saints. She conscientiously pores over each issue of the.

Herald of Europe and the Northern Herald and knows of writers I've never dreamed existed. It means a lot to her that the painter Makovsky³ once stayed in the wing of her mansion and that a young writer is staying there now. When she talks with Pleshcheyev, she feels a tremor of awe throughout her body, and she is constantly rejoicing over "having been granted the grace" of seeing the great poet.

Her eldest daughter, a physician, the pride of the family, and—as the peasants reverently call her—a saint, is truly an extraordinary phenomenon. A brain tumor has rendered her totally blind, and she suffers from epilepsy and constant headaches. She knows what awaits her and speaks stoically and with remarkable sang-froid about her ap­proaching death. As a doctor I have grown used to seeing people who are going to die soon, and I've always felt somehow strange when people close to death talked, smiled, or cried in my presence. But here, when I see this blind woman out on the terrace laughing, joking or listening to my Twilight⁴ being read to her, I get the feeling that what's strange is not that she is about to die, but that instead of feeling the approach of our own deaths we write Twilights as though we were never going to die.

The second daughter, also a physician, is an old maid, a quiet, shy, infinitely kind and loving, homely creature. Patients are sheer torture for her, and she is anxious to the point of psychosis over them. At our medical consultations we always disagree: I bear glad tidings where she sees death; and I double the doses she prescribes. But, where death is obvious and inevitable, my doctor friend reacts quite unprofes- sionally. Once she and I were seeing patients at the local clinic. One of them was a young Ukrainian woman with a malignant tumor of the glands on her neck and the back of her head. The malignancy had spread so far that any treatment was unthinkable. And because the woman was experiencing no pain then, but would die six months later in terrible agony, the lady doctor looked at her with a profoundly guilt- ridden expression as if to apologize for her own good health and to show her shame for the helplessness of medical science. She takes an active interest in running the household and understands it down to the last detail. She even understands horses. When for instance the side horse won't pull or starts to get restless, she knows just what to do and issues the coachman instructions. She dearly loves family life, and though fate has denied her one of her own, she nonetheless seems to yearn for it. In the evening when there's music and singing in the main house, she strides briskly and nervously up and down the dark tree-lined path like a caged-in animal. I can't imagine she has ever done anyone any harm, and I have the feeling she has never been and never will be happy for a single moment.

The third daughter, a graduate of the Bestuzhev courses,⁵ is a young girl of masculine build—strong, as bony as a bream, muscular, suntanned and raucous. When she laughs, you can hear her a mile away. She is a passionate Ukrainophile. She's built a school on the estate at her own expense and teaches Krylov's fables in Ukrainian translation to the little Ukrainians. She visits Shevchenko's⁶ grave the way a Turk goes to Mecca. She doesn't cut her hair, wears a corset and a bustle, and takes an active interest in running the household. She loves to sing and laugh and wouldn't turn down even the most banal love affair even though she has read Marx's Das Kapital, but there's not much chance of her getting married, she's so homely.

The elder son, a quiet, modest, bright, untalented and hardwork­ing young man, is completely without pretensions and appears to be content with his lot. He was expelled from the university in his fourth year there, but doesn't brag about it. He talks very little. He loves farm­ing and the land and lives in harmony with the Ukrainians.

The second son is a young man obsessed with the idea that Tchaikovsky is a genius. He is a pianist, and yearns for a Tolstoyan life.

There you have a brief description of the people among whom I now live. As for the Ukrainians, the women remind me of Zankovet- skaya, and all the men of Panas Sadovsky.⁷ There are always many guests around.

Pleshcheyev has come to visit me. Everyone looks upon him as a demigod and they consider it a stroke of fortune if he deigns to honor their yogurt with his attention. People offer him bouquets, invite him everywhere, etc. A Poltava schoolgirl named Vata, a guest of my hosts, is particularly zealous in looking after him. And he "listens and goes on eating" and smoking his cigars, which gives the admiring ladies headaches. He is sluggish and lazy, the way old men tend to be, but that doesn't prevent the fair sex from taking him out for boat rides or visits to neighboring estates and singing him songs. He is the same sort of symbol here as in Petersburg, that is, an icon people pray to because it's old and hung once upon a time beside the wonder-working icons.⁸ I, for my part, regard him as a vessel full of tradition, interesting reminiscences and pleasant platitudes, though of course he is also a good, warm, sincere person.

I have written a story and sent it off to New Times.⁹

What you say about "Lights" is perfectly just. The "Nikolai and Masha"¹⁰ situation runs glaringly through it, but what can be done about it? Not being in the habit of writing long stories, I am over­anxious. Each time I start writing, I am frightened by the thought that my story has no right to be as long as it is, and so I try to make it as short as possible. The final scene between Kisochka¹¹ and the engineer seemed to me like an insignificant detail that only weighed down the story, so I threw it out and had no choice but to put "Nikolai and Masha" in its place.

You write that neither the conversation about pessimism nor Kisochka's story help to solve the problem of pessimism. In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc.; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessi­mism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is repro­duce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language. Shcheglov-Leontyev criticizes me for finishing the story with "You can't figure anything out in this world!"¹² To his mind, the artist who is a psychologist must figure things out because otherwise, why is he a psychologist? But I don't agree with him. It's about time that everyone who writes—especially genuine literary artists—admitted that in this world you can't figure anything out. Socrates admitted it once upon a time, and Voltaire was wont to admit it. The crowd thinks it knows and understands everything; the stupider it is, the broader it imagines its outlook. But, if a writer whom the crowd believes takes it upon himself to declare he understands nothing of what he sees, that alone will con­stitute a major gain in the realm of thought and a major step forward.

As for your play,¹³ you are wrong to run it down. Its shortcom­ings are not due to a lack of talent or observation; they are due to the nature of your creative ability. You are more inclined toward an austere sort of writing, the sort that love for and frequent readings of classical models has inculcated in you. Try to picture your Tatyana written in verse, and you'll see how its shortcomings take on a different physiog­nomy. If it were written in verse, no one would notice that all the characters speak the same language, no one would reproach them for philosophizing and editorializing instead of talking—in a classical form, a verse form, all this would merge into the general background, like smoke into the air—and no one would feel the lack of vulgar language and other petty vulgarities in which contemporary comedy and drama must abound and which your Tatyana completely lacks. Give your heroes Latin names, dress them in togas, and the result will be the same. . . . The shortcomings in your play are irremediable because they are organic. Console yourself with the thought that they are the product of your positive traits and that if you were to make a gift of them to other playwrights, Krylov or Tikhonov¹⁴ for example, their plays would become more interesting and more intelligent.

Now a word about the future. In late June or early July I am going to Kiev. From there I will follow the Dnieper down to Yekaterin- oslav, then to Alexandrovsk and on to the Black Sea. Г11 be stopping in Feodosia. If you really do go to Constantinople, might I go with you? We could visit Father Paisy,¹⁵ who would demonstrate to us that Tol­stoy's teachings come from the devil. Г11 spend all of June writing, and so in all likelihood Г11 have enough money for the trip. From the Crimea I will go to Poti, from Poti to Tiflis, from Tiflis to the Don, and from the Don to the Psyol. ... In the Crimea Im going to start work on a lyric play.

That's quite a long letter I've written! Ill have to close now. Give my regards to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya.¹⁶ Alexei Nikolaye- vich¹⁷ sends you his greetings. He's slightly ill today: he's having trouble breathing and his pulse is limping along like Leykin. Ill have to start treating him. Good-bye, keep well, and God grant you all the best.

Your sincerely devoted,

A. Chekhov

male name cited is an amalgam consisting of the first name of one popular Ukrainian actor combined with the last name of another.

The liberal Lintvaryovs were awed by Pleshcheyev's one-time associa­tion with Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov and other radical saints of the 1860s. His earlier friendship and correspondence with Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, probably meant very little to them. The phrase "listens and goes on eating" applied to Pleshcheyev in this paragraph is quoted from Ivan Krylov's fable 'The Cat and the Cook/' where it describes a cat helping itself to a variety of foods.

"An Unpleasantness/'

"Nikolai and Masha" refers to some unidentified work of literature mentioned in Suvorin's letter (now lost) which Chekhov is answering. There are certainly no such characters in Chekhov's "Lights," as the translator of Lillian Hellman's edition of his letters had assumed.

Kisochka ("Kitten") is the nickname of Natalia, the heroine of Che­khov's "Lights," one of his more memorable depictions of educated women taken advantage of by callous males. After the engineer who is the narrator- villain of the story tells how he seduced and betrayed her in a particularly heartless way, Chekhov concludes his narrative with the words: "You can't figure out anything in this world."

On May 29, 1888, Shcheglov wrote to Chekhov: "I was not entirely satisfied with your latest story 'Lights.' Of course I swallowed it in one gulp, there is no question about that, because everything you write is so appetizing and real that it can be easily and pleasantly swallowed. But that finale 'You can't figure out anything in this world . . .' is abrupt; it is certainly the writer's job to figure out what goes on in the heart of his hero, otherwise his psychology will remain unclear."

On June 9, Chekhov answered Shcheglov as follows: "I permit myself not to agree with you about my 'Lights.' It is not the psychologist's job to understand things that he in fact does not understand. Let us not be char­latans and let us state openly that you can't figure out anything in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything."

Suvorin's Tatyana Repina.

Viktor Krylov was a prolific and popular hack of a playwright; on Vladimir Tikhonov, see Letter 30.

A minor provincial Rasputin of the 1880s, who was at one time a friend of Chekhov's uncle Mitrofan in Taganrog.

Suvorin's second wife and their two children.

Pleshcheyev.

22. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow, September 11, 1888

I hope this letter will find you still in Feodosia, dear Alexei Sergey evich.

I will be glad to undertake to proofread the directory of Moscow doctors for your yearbook and I'll be happy if you are satisfied with my work. The proofs haven't been sent to me yet, but most likely they will be sent out soon. I expect to take certain liberties with them and will do what I can, but I'm afraid that it won't resemble the Petersburg directory when I'm done, that is, it will be fatter or leaner. If you find my apprehensions well founded, send the printers a telegram and ask them to send along the Petersburg proofs for guidance. It's not right to make Petersburg a lean cow and Moscow a fat one or vice versa within the same section. Both capitals should be treated with equal respect; if anything, Moscow should have less.

I'd like to take this opportunity to include an "Insane Asylums in Russia." It's an up-and-coming issue and one of great interest to doc­tors and land administrators. I'll merely provide a brief list. Next year with your permission I will take over the entire medical section of your yearbook. All I'm doing now is pouring new wine into old bottles, and I won't be able to do anything more, because for the time being I don't have any material available or any plan.

You advise me not to chase after two hares at once and to forget about practicing medicine. I don't see what's so impossible about chasing two hares at once even in the literal sense. Provided you have the hounds, the chase is feasible. In all likelihood I am lacking in hounds (in the figurative sense now), but I feel more alert and more satisfied with myself when I think of myself as having two occupations instead of one. Medicine is my lawful wedded wife, and literature my mistress. When one gets on my nerves, I spend the night with the other. This may be somewhat disorganized, but then again it's not as boring, and any­way, neither one loses anything by my duplicity. If I didn't have medi­cine, I'd never devote my spare time and thoughts to literature. I lack discipline.

The last letter I wrote you was full of incongruities (I was in the dumps), but I give you my word that when I spoke of my relations with you I had only myself in mind, not you.[30] I have always interpreted your advance payments, your kind disposition toward me and so on at face value. A person would have to know you very poorly and at the same time be a twenty-two-carat psychopath to suspect a stone in the bread you offer. While I was going on about my apprehensiveness, all I had in mind was my own charming trait of shying away from publishing a second story in a paper where I've just had a story published because I fear that people as decent as myself might get the idea that I'm pub­lishing so often only for the sake of lucre. Please, please forgive me for inaugurating this ridiculous and useless "polemic" for no earthly reason.

I received a letter from Alexei Alexeyevich[31] today. Pass on the following advice to him (it is based on experience): never let illustra­tors get away with anything, and never trust them, no matter how sweet and eloquent they are. Tell him—and Borya too, now that I think of it —that I know Godefroy[32] the bareback rider. She's not at all pretty. She had nothing to offer but advanced training in horsemanship and fine muscles; everything else about her is ordinary and vulgar. Judging by her face, though, she must be a nice woman.

The young lady from Sumy[33] who tried to stop me from going to see you was thinking in terms of "tendentiousness" and "spirit," not of the sort of corruption you write about. She feared your political in­fluence over my person. Yes, she is a good, pure soul, but when I asked her where she knew Suvorin from and whether she read New Times, she faltered, wiggled her fingers, and said, "In a word, I don't advise you to go." Yes, our young ladies and their political beaux are pure souls, but nine-tenths of their pure souls isn't worth a damn. All their inactive sanctity and purity are based on hazy and naive sympathies and anti­pathies to individuals and labels, not to facts. It's easy to be pure when you can hate the Devil you don't know and love the God you wouldn't have brains enough to doubt.[34]Regards to everyone.

Yours, A. Chekhov

23. To Alexei Pleshcheyev

Moscow, October 4, 1888

I had barely mailed you a letter, dear Alexei Nikolayevich, when I received the news from you. Svetlov will be quite displeased. I will advise him of your answer immediately and will strongly recommend A Bad Man to him as a suitable replacement.[35]

If your letter had arrived two hours earlier, I would have mailed my story directly to you. As it is, it's now on its way to Baskov Lane.

I'd be happy to read what Merezhkovsky² had to say. Good-bye for now. Write me once you've read my story. You won't like it, but I'm not afraid of you and Anna Mikhailovna.³ The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are deter­mined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one. I hate lies and violence in all of their forms, and consistory secretaries are just as odious to me as Notovich and Gradovsky.⁴ Pharisaism, dullwittedness and tyranny reign not only in merchants' homes and police stations. I see them in science, in litera­ture, among the younger generation. That is why I cultivate no partic­ular predilection for policemen, butchers, scientists, writers or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist.

But I've gone on too much as it is. Keep well.

Yours, A. Chekhov

certainly the most personal and revealing statement in the entire corpus of his correspondence. Kornei Chukovsky called this letter "a gauntlet flung in the face of an entire age, a rebellion against everything it held sacred."

A more typical Soviet commentator, Maria Semanova, mentioning this letter in her book Chekhov and Soviet Literature (1966), hastens to assure her readers that Chekhov's desire to be a free artist and his defense of the most absolute freedom "had nothing whatsoever to do with that 'freedom of the arts' that was militantly preached by the bourgeois writers and was so resolutely condemned by V. I. Lenin in his essay Tarty Organization and Party Literature'" (p. 19).

Pleshcheyev's letter which Chekhov is here answering contained an enthusiastic account of Merezhkovsky's recent essay on Chekhov, which Che­khov had not yet seen. On Merezhkovsky, see Letter 27.

Anna Mikhailovna Yevreinova was the owner and publisher of Northern Herald. Despite Chekhov's apprehensions both she and Pleshcheyev liked "The Name-Day Party" very much.

Osip Notovich and Grigory Gradovsky were two unscrupulous left- liberal journalists.

24. To Alexei Pleshcheyev

Moscow, October 9, 1888

Forgive me for writing on plain paper, Alexei Nikolayevich. There's not a single sheet of letter paper left, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to wait for some to be brought from the store.

Many thanks for reading my story and for your last letter. I value your opinions. I have no one to talk to in Moscow, and I'm glad I have good people in Petersburg who don't find corresponding with me boring. Yes, my dear critic, you are right! The middle part of my story is boring, gray and monotonous.¹ I was lazy and careless when I wrote it. Because I'm used to writing short stories having only a beginning and an end, I get bored and start dragging things out when I realize I'm writing a middle. You're also right to come straight out with your sus­picion that I might be afraid of people thinking me a liberal. It gives me an opportunity to take a good deep look into myself. The way I see it, I can be accused of gluttony, drunkenness, frivolity, coldness—of anything at all rather than wishing to seem or not to seem. I've never been secretive. If I am fond of you or Suvorin or Mikhailovsky,² I don't ever hide it. If I find my heroine Olga Mikhailovna, a liberal and a for­mer university student, likable, I don't hide it in my story. Everyone should be able to see that. Nor do I hide my respect for the zemstvo system, which I like, nor for the practice of trial by jury. What is suspicious in the story is my attempt at balancing off the pluses with the minuses. But it's not conservatism I'm balancing off with liberalism —they're not at the heart of the matter, as far as I'm concerned—it's the lies of my heroes with their truths. Pyotr Dmitrich³ lies and clowns around in court, he is heavy-handed and a hopeless case, but I can't hide that he is a nice, gentle person by nature. Every other word Olga Mikhailovna utters is a lie, but there is no need to hide that telling lies causes her pain. The Ukrainophile cannot serve as evidence. I did not have Pavel Lintvaryov⁴ in mind. Good heavens! Pavel Mikhailovich is an intelligent, modest fellow who can think for himself and never tries to force his ideas on anyone. The Lintvaryovs' Ukrainophilia is love for the warmth, the costumes, the language and their native land. It is appealing and moving. What I had in mind was those idiot pseudo- intellectuals who denigrate Gogol for not having written in Ukrainian and who try to seem better than the average and to play an important role—when in fact they are pale, untalented, wooden ignoramuses with nothing in their heads or hearts—by sticking labels on their foreheads. As for the man of the sixties,⁵ I tried to be cautious and brief in depict­ing him and though he actually deserves an entire sketch to himself, I spared him. He's the sort of faded, inert mediocrity who usurps the sixties. In his last year at the gymnasium he picked up five or six of someone else's ideas, stuffed and mounted them, and will keep mum­bling them doggedly until he dies. He's no charlatan; he's a little ninny who believes in what he's mumbling, but has little or no comprehension of what he's mumbling about. He's dense, deaf and heartless. You ought to hear how in the name of the sixties, which he does not understand, he crabs about the present, which he does not see. He vilifies students, schoolgirls, women, writers and everything modern. This for him is the essence of being a man of the sixties. He is as dull as a hole in the ground and as harmful as a gopher for those who believe him. The sixties were a sacred period, and letting those dumb gophers usurp it means vulgarizing it. No, I will not cross out the Ukrainophile or that fake of whom I've had enough! He began to get on my nerves way back in school and he hasn't let up yet. When I write or talk about people like him, it's stupidity and pretension I have in mind, not conservatism and liberalism.

Now a few words about minor matters. When a student at the Academy of Military Medicine is asked what department he's in, he answers simply, "The school of medicine." Only a student who finds the academy-university distinction interesting and isn't bored by it will take the trouble to explain it in normal colloquial language to the gen­eral public.⁶ You're right about the conversation with the pregnant peasant woman smacking of something in Tolstoy. I realize it now. But that conversation is unimportant; I wedged it in only so the miscarriage wouldn't seem ex abrupto. I'm a doctor, and so as not to disgrace myself, I must motivate everything in my stories that has to do with medicine. You're right about the back of the head too. I felt it while I was writing, but I lacked the courage to drop it; it seemed a shame.⁷

You are likewise correct in pointing out that a person who has just wept cannot tell a lie.⁸ But you're only partly correct. Lying is like alcoholism. A liar will lie with his dying breath. The other day an officer —an aristocrat and the fiance of a girl who is a friend of our family— tried to shoot himself to death. The fiance's father, a general, hasn't gone to the hospital to visit his son and won't go until he learns how society has reacted to the attempted suicide.

I've received the Pushkin Prize!⁹ Oh, how I wish I could have gotten those five hundred rubles in the summer when I could enjoy them. In the winter they'll only go to waste.

Tomorrow I'll sit myself down and get to work on the story for the Garshin anthology.¹⁰ I'll do my best. As soon as it starts taking shape, I'll let you know and make it definite. It probably won't be ready before next Sunday. I'm still excited and haven't been working well.

Put down the Lintvaryovs for one copy of the book, and Lensky the actor for another. But I'll be sending you a list of my subscribers anyway. How much will the book cost?

The answer to Svetlov was mailed out long ago.

Sumbatov's Chains is quite good. Lensky does a superb job in the role of Proporyev.¹¹ Keep well and happy. The prize has upset my rou­tine. My thoughts are in more of a whirl than ever. All my family sends you its best and I send my best to yours. It's cold.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Is there really no "ideology" in the last story? You once told me that my stories lack an element of protest, that they have neither sym­pathies nor antipathies. But doesn't the story protest against lying from start to finish? Isn't that an ideology? It isn't? Well, I guess that means either I don't know how to bite or I'm a flea.

I'm afraid of the censors. They'll cross out the parts where I describe how Pyotr Dmitrich presides at court. But that's how all courts are chaired these days.

Oh, how sick you must be of me!

i. Chekhov is replying to a detailed critique of "The Name-Day Party" which Pleshcheyev sent him after accepting the story for Northern Herald.

When Chekhov's work first began appearing in Northern Herald, Koro­lenko made a determined effort to effect a rapprochement between Chekhov on the one hand and the journal's leading literary critic Mikhailovsky and its star fiction writer Gleb Uspensky on the other. But Korolenko's plan did not work. Uspensky was clearly resentful and jealous of Chekhov's success, while Mikhailovsky attempted to convert Chekhov to his own mode of think­ing. After the publication of "The Steppe," Mikhailovsky wrote to Chekhov, recognizing his tremendous talent but calling his new work shapeless and comparing it to the stroll of a mindless young giant who has no idea where he is going or why. Mikhailovsky urged Chekhov to devote his talent to "worthwhile" causes and ideals and demanded that he break his "disgraceful" association with Suvorin and New Times. It was after Chekhov failed to comply with any of this advice that Mikhailovsky's most virulent attacks on his work began to appear in the press.

The husband of the heroine in "The Name-Day Party."

The elder son of the Lintvaryov family, whom Pleshcheyev met when he visited Chekhov in Luka that summer. In the original version of "The Name-Day Party" there was a satirical vignette of a morose, fanatical Ukrain- ophile whom Pleshcheyev thought Chekhov had modeled on Pavel Lintvaryov. In the final version of the story, prepared for publication in book form, Che­khov removed this character.

Another satirical figure in the story, a man who believes himself to be the keeper of the flame of the age of the great reforms and therefore "yearns for the beautiful past and rejects the present." He was also deleted by Che­khov in the final version of the story, apparently in response to Pleshcheyev's criticism.

A student from St. Petersburg who appears episodically in the story tells the heroine that he attends medical school. Pleshcheyev objected that there was no medical school at St. Petersburg University and suggested that Chekhov have him say, "I attend the Medical Academy in St. Petersburg."

Another part of Pleshcheyev's critique concerned the similarity of the heroine's discussion of childbirth with a peasant woman and her sudden focusing of attention on the back of her husband's head to certain episodes in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Pleshcheyev had referred to Pyotr's "posturings and clowning" after his wife's miscarriage.

Two days earlier, a four-man jury (one of whom was Grigorovich) convened by the Imperial Academy of Sciences voted to award Chekhov's collection In the Twilight one-half of the Pushkin Prize for literature, cutting the amount of the award from 1,000 rubles to 500. Three years before, in 1885, the maudlin poetaster Nadson was awarded the full amount, to the acclaim of the entire Russian press.

As Alexander Chekhov's letters to his brother of October 18 and 22, 1887, make clear, it was Suvorin who did all the work and lobbying to secure Che­khov's nomination for the prize.

The young writer Vsevolod Garshin, a fervent admirer and champion of Chekhov's work, committed suicide early in 1888. Chekhov was asked to contribute a story to an anthology honoring Garshin's memory. Because guilt and pain were among Garshin's principal themes, Chekhov chose as his sub­ject a painful encounter of a compassionate young man with the evils of prostitution. The result was "An Attack of Nerves."

11. The actor Alexander Lensky, with whom Chekhov soon established friendly relations, scored a great success in the role of the villain Proporyev in Prince Sumbatov's melodrama Chains. The play and the character are also alluded to in Letter 14 as having helped to form the world view of Dr. Lvov in Ivanov.

25. To Dmitry Grigorovich

Moscow, October 9, 1888

It gave me great joy, dear Dmitry Vasilyevich, to hear that you've finally recovered and returned to Russia. People who have seen you write me that you're entirely well and as vigorous as ever, that you have even given a reading of your new novel, and that you now have a long beard.

If the pains in your chest have disappeared, they probably won't come back, but the bronchitis is probably still giving you trouble; it may die down in the summer and then flare up again in the winter if you at all neglect it. Bronchitis isn't dangerous in and of itself, but it keeps you from sleeping, wears you out and upsets you. Smoke as little as you can, avoid quass and beer, stay away from smoking rooms, dress warmly in damp weather, don't read aloud and don't walk as fast as you usually do. These minor precautions are just as irritating and con­fining as the bronchitis itself, but what can you do?

I'm also happy to have received a letter from you. Your letters are brief, like good poems. I don't see you very often, yet I have the feeling, I'm even quite certain, that if you and Suvorin were not around and about in Petersburg I would lose my equilibrium and write terrible drivel.

Of course I was very lucky to get the prize. If I were to say it didn't excite me, I'd be lying. I feel as if I had just graduated, not only from the gymnasium and the university, but from some additional third place as well. I spent yesterday and today pacing back and forth like a lovesick boy, doing nothing but thinking, and getting no work done.

Of course—and of this there can be no doubt—I do not owe the prize to myself. There are young writers who are better and more needed than I am, Korolenko, for example, who is quite a good writer and an honorable man, and would have been awarded the prize if he had sub­mitted his book. It was Polonsky¹ who first thought of nominating me for the prize, and Suvorin backed him up and sent my book to the Academy. And then you, being a member of the Academy, stood up for me there.

You must admit that if it hadn't been for you three I wouldn't have had any more chance of seeing that prize than I do of seeing my own ears. I'm not going to be modest and assure you that you three were biased or that I do not deserve the prize, and so on. To say that would have been old hat and a bore. I only want to say that I do not owe this good fortune to myself. I offer my infinite thanks, and I will continue being grateful the rest of my life.

I haven't done any work at all for minor journals this year. I publish my shorter stories in New Times, and the longer ones I give to the Northern Herald, which pays me a hundred fifty rubles for sixteen pages of text. I won't abandon New Times, though, because I feel at­tached to Suvorin; and anyway, New Times is not a minor newspaper. I don't have any definite plans for the future. I feel an urge to write a novel, and I have a marvelous theme. At times I'm overcome by a pas­sionate desire to sit down and start work, but I don't seem to have the energy. I have already begun and I'm afraid to go on. I've decided to take my time, to write only during the best hours, to revise and polish. I'm going to spend several years on it; I don't dare write it out all at once in one year, I'm terrified of my impotence, and anyway there's no need to hurry. I have a talent for disliking this year what I wrote last year, and I have the feeling that I'll be stronger next year than I am now. And that's why I'm in no hurry to risk a definitive decision at this point. After all, if the novel turns out to be bad, it could mean that my cause is lost forever. All the ideas, women, men and nature scenes I have amassed for the novel will remain whole and unharmed. I won't squander them on trivia, I promise. The novel encompasses several families and an entire district—its forests, rivers, ferries and railroad. Two figures, one male and one female, form the district's focal point, and the pawns group themselves around them. I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view—I change it every month—and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.²

Until the novel's hour strikes, I'll go on writing what I like, namely stories of sixteen to twenty-four pages—and shorter. Stretching insignificant themes to cover large canvases is boring, though profitable. Touching on major themes and wasting precious images on urgent piecework is a pity. Ill just have to wait for a more suitable time.

I have no right to forbid my brother to sign his own name. Before he began signing his stories, he asked my permission, and I told him I had nothing against it.³

I had a wonderful summer. I lived in Kharkov, in Poltava Prov­ince, and went to the Crimea, Batum, Baku, and experienced the Georgian military road. I have many impressions. If I lived in the Cau­casus, I'd write fairy tales there. An amazing country!

I won't get to Petersburg before November, but I'll report to you the day I arrive. In the meantime, let me thank you once again with all my heart and wish you health and happiness.

Your sincerely devoted,

A. Chekhov

Yakov Polonsky (1820-98) was the author of some of the more attrac­tive lyrics written in Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. His poems were highly regarded by Turgenev and Alexander Blok and some of them were set to music by Tchaikovsky. Polonsky is also the poet of whom Solzhenitsyn wrote in his prose poem "The Poet's Grave." An early admirer of Chekhov, he dedicated a poem to him and Chekhov reciprocated by dedicat­ing to Polonsky his story "Happiness."

This was the subsequently destroyed Stories from the Lives of My Friends.

Grigorovich had expressed objections to the publication of Alexander Chekhov's articles under the signature "A. Chekhov."

26. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow, October 27, 1888

Yezhov¹ is no sparrow; he's more like a puppy who (to use the elegant language of the hunt) has not yet reached doghood. All he does is run around sniffing and pouncing upon birds and frogs indiscrimin­ately. I'm still having trouble figuring out his breed and capabilities. His youth, decency and unspoiled nature (in the Moscow-newspaper sense) speak strongly in his favor.

I sometimes preach heresies, but I haven't once gone so far as to deny that problematic questions have a place in art. In conversations with my fellow writers I always insist that it is not the artist's job to try to answer narrowly specialized questions. It is bad for the artist to take on something he doesn't understand. We have specialists for deal­ing with special questions; it is their job to make judgments about the peasant communes, the fate of capitalism, the evils of intemperance, and about boots² and female complaints. The artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is as limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Any­one who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes. The very fact of these actions pre­supposes a question; if he hadn't asked himself a question at the start, he would have nothing to guess and nothing to select. To put it briefly, I will conclude with some psychiatry: if you deny that creativity in­volves questions and intent, you have to admit that the artist creates without premeditation or purpose, in a state of unthinking emotionality. And so if any author were to boast to me that he'd written a story from pure inspiration without first having thought over his intentions, I'd call him a madman.

You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author. There's not a single question answered in Anna Karenina or Eugene Onegin, but they are still fully satisfying works because the questions they raise are all formulated correctly. It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference.

Yezhov is not yet fully grown. Another writer I've recommended to your attention, Gruzinsky (Lazarev),³ is more talented, intelligent and strong.

I saw off Alexei Alexeyevich⁴ with an injunction to go to bed no later than midnight. Spending whole nights in work and conversation is just as harmful as staying out all night carousing. He looked more cheer­ful in Moscow than he did in Feodosia. We had a good time together, each according to his means: he treated me to operas, I treated him to bad meals.

My Bear is playing at Korsh's tomorrow. I've written another farce, too; it has two male roles and one female.⁵

You write that the hero of my "Name-Day Party" is a figure worth developing. Good Lord, I'm not an insentient brute, I realize that. I realize I hack up my characters, ruin them, and I waste good material. To tell you the truth, I would have been only too glad to spend half a year on "The Name-Day Party." I like taking my own good time about things, and see nothing attractive about slapdash publication. I would gladly describe all of my hero, describe him with feeling, understanding and deliberation,⁶ I'd describe his emotions while his wife was in labor, the trial, his sense of disgust after being acquitted, I'd describe the mid­wife and doctors having tea in the middle of the night, I'd describe the rain. ... It would be sheer pleasure for me, because I love digging deep and rummaging. But what can I do? I began the story on September ioth with the thought that I have to finish it by October 5th at the latest; if I miss the deadline 111 be going back on my word and will be left without any money. I write the beginning calmly and don't hold myself back, but by the middle I start feeling uneasy and apprehensive that the story will come out too long. I have to keep in mind that the Northern Herald is low in funds and that I am one of its more expensive contributors. That's why my beginning always seems as promising as if I'd started a novel, the middle is crumpled together and timid, and the end is all fireworks, like the end of a brief sketch. Whether you like it or not, the first thing you have to worry about when you're working up a story is its framework. From your mass of heroes and semi-heroes you choose one individual, a wife or a husband, place him against the background, and portray only that person and emphasize only him. The others you scatter in the background like so much small change. The result is something like the firmament: one large moon surrounded by a mass of tiny stars. But the moon doesn't work, because it can only be understood once the other stars are understandable, and the stars are not sufficiently delineated. So instead of literature I get a patchwork quilt.⁷ What can I do? I don't know. I have no idea. I'll just have to trust to all-healing time.

To tell the whole truth, even though I did receive the prize, I still have not begun my literary career. The plots for five stories and two novels are languishing away in my head. One of the novels I con­ceived so long ago that some of the characters have grown out of date before my ever getting them down on paper. I have a whole army of people in my head begging to be let out and ordered what to do. Every­thing I've written to date is nonsense compared with what I would like to have written and would be overjoyed to be writing. It doesn't make any difference to me whether I'm writing "The Name-Day Party," or "Lights," or a farce, or a letter to a friend—it's all boring, mechanical and vapid and at times I feel chagrined on behalf of some critic who ascribes great significance to, say, my "Lights," I feel as if I'm deceiving him with my writings, just as I deceive many people with my now serious, now in­ordinately cheerful face. I don't like being a success. The themes sitting around in my head are irritated by and jealous of what I've already written. It annoys me to think that all the nonsense has already been written, while all the good things lie abandoned in a stockroom like unsold books. Of course a great deal of my lament is exaggerated; much of it is only my imagination, but it does contain a measure of truth, a large measure. What do I call good? The images that I feel are best, that I love and jealously hold on to so as not to waste and mangle them on short-order "Name-Day Parties." If my love errs, then I am wrong, but it's also possible that it does not. I am either a conceited fool or an organism genuinely capable of being a fine writer. Everything now being written leaves me cold and indifferent, whereas everything stored in my head interests, moves and excites me, from which I conclude that everyone is on the wrong track and I alone know the secret of what needs to be done. That's most likely what all writers think. But the devil himself would break his neck over these problems.

Money won't help me figure out what I should do. An extra thousand rubles won't settle my problem, and a hundred thousand is a castle in the air. Besides, whenever I do have money (maybe because I'm so unused to it, I don't know), I become extremely carefree and lazy; I feel as if I could wade across the seas. I need privacy and time.

Forgive me for monopolizing your attention with my own person. My pen got the better of me. For some reason I can't get down to work these days.

Thank you for agreeing to print those little articles of mine.⁸ For God's sake, don't stand on ceremony; shorten them, lengthen them, change them around, throw them out, do whatever you like. As Korsh says, I give you carte blanche. I'll be glad if they don't take up someone else's place.

Look up the section on sending money through the mails in your yearbook. Your Alexei Alexeyevich has been making up his own regulations. His medical section is beneath all criticism—you can pass that on to him as the opinion of a specialist!⁹

Write me the Latin name for Anna Ivanovna's eye ailment, and I'll write you back whether it's serious or not. If atropine has been pre­scribed, it's serious, though not absolutely. And what's wrong with Nastya? If you're thinking of curing your boredom in Moscow, you're wrong: the boredom here is something terrible. Many writers and critics have been arrested, including that busybody Goltsev, author of "The Ninth Symphony."¹⁰ Mamyshev,¹¹ who visited me today, is trying to get one of them out.

Regards to all.

Yours, A. Chekhov

There's a mosquito flying around my room. Where did it come from? Thanks for the eye-catching advertisements of my books.

to Suvorin and other publishers, Yezhov maintained an outwardly friendly relationship with him while conducting a low-key campaign of gossip and slander behind his back (as the memoirs and journals of their mutual ac­quaintances have subsequently revealed). After Chekhov's death, Yezhov pub­lished in 1909 a scurrilous essay in which he endeavored to prove that Che­khov was a petty and dishonest man and an inept writer.

"To make judgments . . . about boots" paraphrases the ending of Push­kin's poem "The Bootmaker," in which the Greek painter Apelles advises a pre­sumptuous bootmaker to pass judgment only on things he can understand.

Alexander Lazarev (1861—1927), whose pen name was A. Gruzinsky, was a now-forgotten minor writer whom Chekhov knew in his humor-maga­zine period and whom he helped to gain access to publication in New Times and other major newspapers and journals. Lazarev wrote a whole series of affectionate memoirs about his association with Chekhov (the only portion of his writings that keeps his name alive today), in some of which he polemicized against the allegations of his one-time friend and colleague Yezhov.

Suvorin's son, who had visited Chekhov in Moscow.

Chekhov's farce The Bear was performed for the first time on October 28, 1888. Berated by the critics, it immediately became his most popular work with actors, audiences and, above all, with amateurs. It remained a major source of income for the rest of his life ("I live off the labors of my bear" he was to write on several occasions). The other farce mentioned is The Proposal.

The same Griboyedov quotation that appeared in Letter 19.

"Patchwork quilt" is our replacement for "Trishka's Coat" of the orig­inal. Chekhov is referring to a fable by Krylov in which a peasant ruins a good coat by cutting parts out of it to patch the elbows.

In October of 1888, New Times published two of Chekhov's most signifi­cant editorial articles (both appeared anonymously). "Moscow Hypocrites" was a denunciation of that city's municipal administration for having abrogated the recently passed piece of labor legislation that cut Sunday working hours of salesmen in Moscow, stores to three (instead of ten to twelve hours on Sundays as well as on all the other days, as was the practice previously). Chekhov's particular indignation was aroused by the rationale that, with a shortened working day, the younger salesmen were sure to go carousing instead of attending church. His other editorial was a paean to explorers such as Przhevalsky and Livingstone and to the moral uplift implicit in their lives.

This despite Chekhov's own assistance with the medical portions of the yearbook (something like a Russian version of the World Almanac).

The liberal editor Viktor Goltsev, subsequently a friend and corre­spondent of Chekhov's, was placed under arrest for three weeks for harboring a political prisoner escaped from Siberia.

Vasily Mamyshev was a criminal investigator in Zvenigorod and Su­vorin's brother-in-law.

27. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow, November 3, 1888

Greetings, Alexei Sergeyevich. I am presently donning my tails to go to the opening of the Society for Arts and Literature, to which I've been invited as a guest. There's going to be a formal ball. I don't know what sort of goals or resources the Society has or who its mem­bers are, and so on. All I do know is that it is headed by Fedotov,¹ an author of many plays. I am glad not to have been elected a member, because I have no desire to lay down twenty-five rubles in dues for the right to be bored. If anything interesting or amusing happens, I'll write you about it. Lensky's going to give a reading of my stories.

There's an article about yours truly in the Northern Herald (for November) by the poet Merezhkovsky.² It's a long article, but I com­mend the conclusion to your attention; it is typical. Merezhkovsky is still very young; he's a student—in science, possibly.³ Anyone who has mastered the wisdom of the scientific method and therefore knows how to think scientifically undergoes any number of delightful temptations. Archimedes wanted to turn the earth upside-down, and present-day hotheads want to embrace the scientifically unembraceable: they want to discover physical laws for creativity, they want to grasp the general law and the formulae by which the artist, who feels them instinctively, creates landscapes, novels, pieces of music and so on. These formulae probably do exist in nature. We know that nature has a, b, c, d, do, re, mi, fa, sol, and curves, straight lines, circles, squares, green, red, blue. . . . We know that all this in a given combination will yield a melody or a poem or a picture, just as simple chemical elements in a given com­bination yield a tree or a stone or the sea, but all we know is that they are combined; yet the principle according to which they are combined is concealed from us. Anyone who is at home with the scientific method senses intuitively that a piece of music and a tree have something in common and that both one and the other are created in accordance with identically regular and simple laws. Hence the question of what these laws are. Hence the temptation to write a physiology of creativity (Boborykin) and among the younger and more diffident to make reference to science and the laws of nature (Merezhkovsky). A phys­iology of creativity probably does exist in nature, but all dreams of it must be abandoned at the outset. No good will come of critics taking a scientific stance: they'll waste ten years, they'll write a lot of ballast and confuse the issue still further—and that's all they'll do. It's always good to think scientifically; the trouble is that thinking scientifically about art will inevitably end up by degenerating into a search for the "cells" or "centers" in charge of creative ability, whereupon some dull- witted German will discover them somewhere in the temporal lobes, another will disagree, a third German will agree, and a Russian will skim through an article on cells and dash off a study for the Northern Herald, and the Herald of Europe will take to analyzing the study, and for three years an epidemic of utter nonsense will hover in the Russian air, providing dullards with earnings and popularity and engendering noth­ing but irritation among intelligent people.

For those who are haunted by the scientific method and whom God has granted the rare talent of thinking scientifically, there is in my opinion only one way out: the philosophy of creativity. By gathering together all the best creations of artists through the ages and applying the scientific method, we can grasp the common denominator that causes them to resemble one another and lies at the root of their value. That common denominator will then be law. Works usually called immortal have a great deal in common; remove the element they have in common, and the work loses its value and charm. That element is therefore in­dispensable and constitutes the conditio sine qua поп for every work aspiring to immortality.

Writing criticism is more useful to the younger generation than writing poetry. Merezhkovsky writes smoothly and youthfully, but on every page he loses his nerve and makes reservations and concessions— a sure sign he himself isn't quite clear on where he stands. He honors me with the name of a poet, my stories he calls novellas, and my heroes failures—all the old cliches. It's high time we gave up these failures, superfluous men and so on, and thought up something on our own. Merezhkovsky calls my monk, the one who composes Orthodox hymns, a failure.⁴ How is he a failure? God grant everyone a life like his: he believed in God, he had enough to eat and he was creatively gifted. Classifying people as successes and failures is looking at human nature from a narrow, biased vantage point. Are you a success or not? Am I? What about Napoleon? And your Vasily?⁵ Where is the criterion? You have to be a god to distinguish the successes from the failures without making a mistake. I'm off to the ball.

I'm back from the ball. The Society's goal is "unity." A learned German once taught a cat, a mouse, a hawk and a sparrow to eat out of the same plate. That German had a system; this Society has none. It was deadly dull. Everyone wandered from room to room pretending not to be bored. A young lady sang, Lensky read my story (someone in the audience said, "A pretty weak story!" and Levinsky⁶ was stupid and cruel enough to interrupt him with "Why, there's the author! Let me introduce you to him" whereupon the man nearly sank through the floor with embarrassment), there was some dancing, we had a miserable supper, the waiters short-changed us. If indeed actors, painters, writers and critics do in fact constitute the elite of society, it's too bad. A fine society that must be where the elite is so poor in color, desire and in­tention, so poor in taste, beautiful women and initiative. By putting up some Japanese figure in the vestibule, sticking a Chinese parasol in the corner and draping a rug over the banister, they think they're being artistic. They've got Chinese parasols, but no newspapers. If when an artist decorates his apartment he can't do any better than a museum- piece with a halberd or shield, and fans on the walls, if that's really the way he wants it, if he deliberately plans it that way, then he's no artist, he's a sanctimonious ape.⁷

I received a letter from Leykin today. He writes he's been to see you. He's a kindhearted and harmless person, but bourgeois to the marrow of his bones. Whenever he visits anyone or says anything, he always has an ulterior motive. He carefully thinks out his every word, and stores away your every word for future reference, no matter how casually you may have meant it, in the firm conviction that he, Leykin, has to have things this way, because otherwise his books won't sell, his enemies will triumph, his friends will abandon him and his shareholders will disown him. A fox fears every minute for his skin and so does Leykin. A subtle diplomat he is! If he talks about me, it means he wants to take a jab at the "nihilists" (Mikhailovsky), who have spoiled me, and at my brother Alexander, whom he hates. His letters to me are full of warnings, caveats, advice and confidences. That miserable, lame martyr! He could live out his life in peace and quiet, but a demon keeps getting in his way.

A slight calamity has befallen my family. I'll tell you about it when we get together. A thunderbolt has descended on the head of one of my brothers, and it prevents me from working and robs me of peace and quiet.⁸ What a job it is, О Creator, to head a household!⁹

French women put atropine in their eyes to be coquettish and make their pupils bigger, and there are no side effects.¹⁰

Petipa is reading Maslov's play.¹¹ Korsh's theater is in an uproar. The steam coffeepot exploded and scalded Rybchinskaya's face, Glama- Meshcherskaya has gone to Petersburg, Solovtsov's lifelong friend Glebova is ill, etc.¹² There's no one left to act, nobody listens to anybody else, all they do is scream and argue. ... A lavish costume play will

apparently be turned down in horror, and I would so like to have seen them stage The Seducer of Seville. Not only for Maslov's sake, but be­cause I have an attachment to the stage and a certain amount of self- esteem. Weve got to do whatever we can to see that the theater passes from the hands of the grocers into the hands of writers and critics. Other­wise it is doomed.

The coffeepot has slaughtered my Bear. With Rybchinskaya sick, there's no one to play in it.

We all send our best. My warmest regards to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Its best to publish one-acters in the summer; winter is bad for them. In the summer I will supply a one-acter a month, and in the winter I'll have to do without the pleasure.¹³

Enroll me as a member in the Literary Society. I'll go to their meetings when I'm in Petersburg.¹⁴

Alexander Fedotov, the husband of the actress Glykeria Fedotova, was mainly known as the head of a drama school and a stage director, although he also wrote plays.

Although Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1866-1941) is remembered in the West, if he is at all, for the historical novels he wrote at the turn of the century (his Romance of Leonardo da Vinci was recently shown to have served as a basic source for Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis of Leonardo), his most durable contribution to Russian literature lies not in his novels or in his facile and voluminous verse, but in his literary criticism. His articles on Chekhov, published in Northern Herald over Mikhailovsky's objections and at the insistence of the journal's publisher Anna Yevreinova, are not particu­larly perceptive or original, but they are the beginning of the evolution which enabled Merezhkovsky by the turn of the century to write his book on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, which is the beginning of all meaningful modern Dostoyev­sky criticism, and his very imaginative study of Gogol, which put an end to the short-sighted view that Gogol was an ethnographic realist. It was Merezh­kovsky who more than anyone else brought back into Russian criticism the understanding that literature has philosophical, psychological and aesthetic dimensions in addition to social ones and that the erotic and mystical aspects of the human spirit, as reflected in literature, deserve to be studied and under­stood rather than shunned and ignored. Because of Merezhkovsky's anti- materialistic views and his emigation after the Revolution, his significance is systematically downgraded and minimized in Soviet literary studies.

Merezhkovsky had actually majored in history and philology at St. Petersburg University, not in natural sciences as Chekhov had believed.

The monk Ieronim, who appears in Chekhov's story "On Easter Eve."

Suvorin's manservant.

The publisher of the humor magazine The Alarm Clock, where some of Chekhov's earliest published work appeared.

Chekhov later moved some of the decor mentioned in this paragraph into the apartment of the heroine of his story "The Grasshopper."

Chekhov's brother Nikolai, through sheer carelessness, failed for five consecutive years to get his identity card (which everyone in Russia was required to have by law) renewed. This was a grave offense punishable by imprisonment or forcible drafting into the army. It took considerable effort on the part of Chekhov and his influential friends to extricate Nikolai from his predicament.

A paraphrase of the last two lines of Act I of Griboyedov's The Mis­fortune of Being Clever, which read:

What a job it is, О Creator,

To be the father of a grown-up daughter!

In his previous letter, Chekhov had told Suvorin that the atropine prescribed for Anna Suvorina's eye ailment might indicate that the condition was a serious one. This alarmed Suvorin and now Chekhov is trying to reassure him.

Alexei Maslov (who published articles under the pen name of Bezhet- sky) was regularly employed by Suvorin at the St. Petersburg office of New Times. He had asked Chekhov to offer his play (The Seducer of Seville) to the Moscow impresario Fyodor Korsh. Maslov was also a close friend of the composer Tchaikovsky; Suvorin's journal contains some rather intimate de­tails about Tchaikovsky's affair with the poet Alexei Apukhtin, as told to Suvorin by Maslov. The Russian actor Marius Petipa was the son of the famous French choreographer Marius Petipa.

Nikolai Solovtsov and Natalia Rybchinskaya played the leading roles during the original run of The Bear. After Rybchinskaya's accident, Alexan­dra Glama-Meshcherskaya and Maria Glebova (Solovtsov's wife) were pro­posed as replacements but neither was available. Solovtsov was the actor for whom The Bear was written and to whom it was dedicated.

Since Suvorin's letters are missing, it is not clear for just what Che­khov proposed to supply these one-acters.

The St. Petersburg branch of the Literary Society. Chekhov's applica­tion for membership was almost blackballed because of his supposed "lack of views and principles."

28. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow,

between November 20 and 25, 1888¹ ... Oh what a story I've started! Ill bring it along and ask you to read it. The subject is love. I've chosen the form of a fictionalized sketch. A decent man runs off with another decent man's wife and

writes position papers about it: one when he lives with her and another when he breaks up with her. In passing I mention the theater, the prejudices involved in "ideological incompatibility," the Georgian Military Road, family life, the contemporary intellectual's inability to cope with family life, Pechorin, Onegin, Mount Kazbek² . . . Good heavens, what a hodgepodge! My brain is flapping its wings, but I don't know where to fly.

You write that writers are God's chosen people. I won't argue. Shcheglov calls me the Potyomkin³ of literature, so I'm not the one to speak of the thorny path and disappointments and the like. I don't know if I've ever suffered more than shoemakers, mathematicians or train conductors; I don't know who is making pronouncements through my lips, God or someone slightly worse. Let me bring up just one minor irritating point which I have experienced and you probably have too. Here is what I mean. You and I like ordinary people; they like us because they regard us as out of the ordinary. I, for instance, am for­ever being invited out and wined and dined like the general at the wedding. My sister is indignant at being invited everywhere merely because she's the writer's sister. No one wants to like the ordinary people in us. Consequently, if tomorrow we were to appear as ordinary mortals in the eyes of our acquaintances, they'd stop liking us and pity us instead. Now that's bad. And what's just as bad is that the things they like in us are often the things we neither like nor respect in ourselves. It's bad that I was right when I wrote the discussion on being famous between the engineer and the professor in my "First-Class Passenger."⁴

I'm going to retire to a farm. The hell with them. You have your Feodosia.

And speaking about Feodosia and the Tatars, the Tatars have had their land stolen from them, but no one gives a thought to their welfare. There is a need for Tatar schools. Why don't you write an article sug­gesting that the Ministry turn over the money they spend on Dorpat Wurst University where Useless Germans study to schools for the Tatars, who are useful to Russia? I'd write about this myself, but I don't know how.⁵

Leykin has sent me another one of those hilarious farces of his own making. He is really one of a kind.

Keep well and happy.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Tell Maslov that the fate of his play is being decided and that it could go either way. The one Spanish play⁶ they put on was a flop, so they're hesitant about putting on another one.

The beginning of this letter is missing; it has been dated on the basis of internal evidence.

This is the earliest draft of "The Duel," which Chekhov was to complete three years later. Pechorin and Onegin are the heroes of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, respectively. Mount Kazbek in the Caucasus has appeared prominently in works of Russian writers, ranging from Lermontov (The Demon) to Nabokov (Ada).

The invidious comparison of Chekhov to the favorite of Catherine the Great (often spelled Potemkin) was made by Shcheglov and several other younger writers of the eighties. The implication is that Chekhov owed his success to good luck rather than to ability.

Each of these two men in Chekhov's story, who share a compartment on a train, believes himself to be a celebrity in his own field and each is surprised to learn that the other man has never heard of him.

Chekhov's fondness for the Tatars was expressed in the appealingly depicted Tatar characters in the two stories he wrote after his return from Sakhalin, "The Duel" and "In Exile." It ripened into a systematic champion­ing of Tatar causes after Chekhov established his residence in the Crimea (cf. Letter 128, note 3).

The Spanish playwright Jose Echegaray's The Great Galeoto was a flop when presented by Korsh's company. Maslov's play was "Spanish" in terms of its setting only.

29. To Alexander Chekhov¹

Moscow, January 2, 1889

О Most Wise Secretary,

I wish your radiant person and your progeny a very happy new year. I hope you win two hundred thousand and become a state councilor on active duty, but most of all that you remain healthy and supplied with our daily bread in sufficient quantity for a glutton like you.

The last time I was in Petersburg we met and parted as if we had had some sort of misunderstanding. Г11 be back soon, and to put an end to the misunderstanding I feel I must in all conscience make the following sincere statement. I was seriously angry at you and left in anger, and this I will confess. During my very first visit I was repelled by your shocking, completely unprecedented treatment of Natalia Alexandrovna² and the cook. Forgive me please, but treating women like that, no matter who they are, is unworthy of a decent, loving human being. What heavenly or earthly power has given you the right to make them your slaves? Constant profanity of the most vile variety, a raised voice, reproaches, sudden whims at breakfast and dinner, eternal com­plaints about a life of forced and loathsome labor—isn't all that an expression of blatant despotism? No matter how insignificant or guilty a woman may be, no matter how close she is to you, you have no right to sit around without pants in her presence, be drunk in her presence, utter words even factory workers don't use when they see women nearby. You think of decency and good breeding as prejudices, but you have to draw the line somewhere—at feminine frailty perhaps, or the children, or the poetry of life if there's no prose left. No decent husband or lover will permit himself to talk [. . .] with a woman, or coarsely, for the sake of a joke, to treat the marital bed with irony, [. . .]. That corrupts a woman and takes her away from the God she believes in. A man who respects a woman, a man who is well bred and really loving will not permit himself to be seen without his pants by the maid or yell, "Katka, let me have the pisspot!" at the top of his lungs. When men sleep with their wives at night, they behave decently; in the morning they rush to put on a tie so as not to offend the woman by their improper appearance, to wit, their careless dress. This point may be pedantic, but it is based on something you'll understand if you think about what a terrifying educational role the environment and all sorts of trifles play in man's life. The difference between a woman who sleeps between clean sheets and the woman who sacks out on filthy ones and roars with laughter when her lover [. . .] is like the difference between a salon and a low dive.

Children are sacred and pure. Even thieves and crocodiles place them among the ranks of the angels. Whatever pit we may be crawling into, we must surround them with an atmosphere befitting their rank. You cannot with impunity use filthy language in their presence, insult your servants, or snarl at Natalia Alexandrovna: "Will you get the hell away from me! I'm not holding you here!" You must not make them the plaything of your moods, tenderly kissing them one minute and frenziedly stamping at them the next. It's better not to love at all than to love with a despotic love. Hate is much more honest than the love of a Nasr-ed-Din, who sometimes makes his dearly beloved Persians satraps and other times impales them on stakes. You shouldn't take the names of your children in vain, and you have the habit of calling every kopeck you give or want to give to someone "money taken from the children." Taking money away from someone implies that you've given some in the first place, and talking about your own charity and handouts is not particularly becoming. It's like begrudging somebody something. Most people live for their families, but rare is the person who dares to think himself praiseworthy for doing so, and it would be hard to find anyone courageous enough to say as you do: "I'm taking it away from my children," whenever he lends anyone a ruble. You really have to lack respect for your children or their sanctity to be able to say—when you are well fed, well dressed and tipsy every day—that all your salary goes for the children. Stop it.

Let me ask you to recall that it was despotism and lying that ruined your mother's youth. Despotism and lying so mutilated our childhood that it's sickening and frightening to think about it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt in those times when Father threw a tantrum at dinner over too much salt in the soup and called Mother a fool. There is no way Father can forgive himself all that now.

Despotism is three times criminal. If the Day of Judgment is not a fantasy, you will get worse treatment at the hands of the Sanhedrin than Chokhov and Gavrilov.³ It's no secret to you that the heavens have given you something ninety-nine out of a hundred men lack: you are by nature infinitely magnanimous and gentle. That's why a hundred times more is demanded of you. Besides, you've been to the university and are considered a journalist.

Your difficult situation, the bad disposition of the women it falls to your lot to live with, the idiocy of your cooks, your forced and loathsome labor and all the rest cannot serve to justify your despotism. It's better to be the victim than the hangman.

Natalia Alexandrovna, the cook and the children are weak and defenseless. They have no rights over you, while you have the right to throw them out the door at any moment and have a good laugh at their weakness if you so desire. Don't let them feel that right of yours.

I have interceded to the best of my ability, and my conscience is clear. Try to be magnanimous and consider the misunderstanding settled. If you are a direct and not a devious person, you won't say that this letter has any bad motives, that for instance I wrote it to insult you or was inspired by rancor. All I'm looking for in our relationship is sincerity. I have no desire for anything more. We have nothing else to contest.

Write me that you too have stopped being angry and that our bone of contention no longer exists.

The whole family sends its regards.

Yours, A. Chekhov

life in St. Petersburg, where he was regularly employed at New Times. His sense of unrealized ambition was aggravated by alcoholism and by a series of unfortunate common-law marriages, all of which combined to make him an embittered man. Alexander's memoirs about Anton Chekhov's childhood, written after his famous brother's death, reflect his bitterness and his desire for revenge against his father, whom Alexander blamed for his wrecked life. Non-Russian biographers of Chekhov have been extremely gullible about Alexander's sensational disclosures (the biography by Ernest J. Simmons un­critically paraphrases pages and pages of Alexander's memoirs), even though Mikhail Chekhov and Maria repeatedly pointed out the mistakes and fabrica­tions their older brother's memoirs contain. Alexander's letters to Anton Che­khov, rather painful in their self-conscious buffoonery, were published in a separate volume in Moscow in 1939. They are highly informative on the liter­ary life of Chekhov's time.

Natalia Golden, Alexander's second common-law wife.

"Chokhov" was Anton's humorous nickname for his cousin Mikhail (see Letter 1); Ivan Gavrilov was the merchant in whose warehouse Mikhail and Chekhov's father Pavel were employed. The point is that Alexander, who has had the benefit of a university education and who works as a writer, has a greater obligation to behave in a civilized manner than their unlettered cousin and his employer.

30. To Vladimir Tikhonov[36]

Moscow, March 7, 1889

Dearest benefriend² Vladimir Alexeyevich,

I was a bit surprised at your review.³ I had no idea you were so at home in journalistic style. It is all extremely articulate and polished, well reasoned and matter of fact. It even made me envious, because I've never quite gotten the hang of the journalistic style.

Thank you for your kind words and warm sympathy. I had so little kind treatment as a child that now that Im an adult I look on it as something out of the ordinary, something that is still a new experience for me. That's why I would like to treat others kindly but I don't know how, Fve grown hardened and lazy even though I know that we writers can't get along without kindness.

I haven't heard any news about Korsh's theater lately. All I know is that Solovtsov has left and that old man Poltavtsev is apparently also leaving. Agramov is the new stage director.⁴

God grant that you successfully complete the comedy you are now gestating and that it give you everything you desire. The greater its success, the better off our entire generation of writers will be. I, as opposed to Wagner,⁵ believe that none of us will be an "elephant" or any other beast among writers and that we can prevail only through the efforts of our entire generation, and not otherwise. Instead of being known as Chekhov, Tikhonov, Korolenko, Shcheglov, Barantsevich or Bezhetsky, we will be called "the eighties" or "the end of the nineteenth century." A guild, so to speak.⁶

I have nothing new to report. I'm planning to write a novel of sorts and have already begun. I'm not writing any plays and won't write any in the near future because I have neither the subject matter nor the desire. To write for the theater, you must love it; without love, nothing worthwhile will come of it. Without love even success has no appeal. Next season 111 start going to the theater regularly and try to educate myself in matters of the stage.

Give my regards to your brother. My entire family sends you their best. I send you a friendly handshake and my most cordial wishes. Write.

Yours, A. Chekhov

For a brief period in the 1880s the comedies of Vladimir Tikhonov (1857-1914) enjoyed a temporary renown. Chekhov described Tikhonov as "something of a drunk and something of a liar," but he seemed to like his company and he corresponded with him over a period of years. The entries from Tikhonov's personal journal that pertain to his encounters with and his opinions of Chekhov were published in the Chekhov volume of Literary Her­itage. They are a primary source for documenting the widespread envy and resentment that Chekhov's success aroused among his fellow writers and journalists. Tikhonov records their statements and feelings, but he himself is quite admirably free of any rancor; having decided quite early that he was fated to remain a minor figure, he could take a selfless pleasure in Chekhov's ascent.

The Russian has a hybrid word that combines parts of "benefactor" and "friend."

Tikhonov published a highly favorable review of the St. Petersburg production of Ivanov.

Actor-director Nikolai Solovtsov had left the Korsh company for a new theater headed by the impresario Maria Abramova, taking with him Yevgeny Poltavtsev and some of the other actors and actresses. Mikhail Agramov took over Solovtsov's job as the stage director of the Korsh theater. It was Maria Abramova's company that put on the original stage production of Chekhov's The Wood Demon.

Nikolai Wagner, a professional zoologist and writer of books for chil­dren, had applied to Chekhov (according to the letter from Tikhonov which Chekhov is answering) Turgenev's words about Tolstoy: "He is an elephant among us." Nikolai Wagner should not be confused with another zoologist, also named Wagner (first name Vladimir) who in 1891 collaborated with Chekhov on an expose of the inhuman treatment of animals at the Moscow zoo published in New Times under the title "The Charlatans" and who served in part as the model for the character of von Koren in "The Duel."

6. Contrary to Chekhov's prediction, only his own name and that of Korolenko survive today on their own merits. The other four have long since become footnotes to Chekhov's biography and letters. Kazimir Barantsevich (or Kazimierz Barancewicz) was a Pole who wrote in Russian and was widely published in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Chekhov was later to compare Barantsevich's writings to a stale, unappetizing fried fish left over at a railway station buffet.

31. To Anna Yevreinova[37]

Moscow, March 10, 1889

Dear Anna Mikhailovna,

I have received the payment.[38] Thank you. I received more than expected, and I'm afraid you didn't subtract my debt. I do owe the office a bit, you know.

Yesterday I finished and made a clean copy of a story, but it's for my novel, the project that is presently taking up all my time. Oh, what a novel! If it weren't for the accursed censorship situation, I'd promise it to you for November. There's nothing in the novel inciting anyone to revolution, but the censors will ruin it anyway. Half the char­acters say, "I don't believe in God," it has a father whose son has been sent to life-long forced labor for armed resistance, a police chief who is ashamed of his uniform, a marshal of the nobility whom everybody hates, etc.[39] There's a wealth of material for the red pencil.

I have plenty of money now, enough to get me through Septem­ber. Nor am I bound by any commitments. This is the ideal time to work on the novel.[40] If I don't write it now, when will I? That's how I see it, though I'm almost certain that I'll grow tired of the novel within two or three weeks and that I'll lay it aside again.

I have an idea for a brief story. I'll try to have the story done in time for the May or June issue. But if it could wait until July or August, my novel would say "Many thanks" to you.

Get the censors off your back, for heaven's sake.⁵ Even though they haven't crossed out anything of mine so far, I still fear and dis­like them. Even Turkey should have no censorship for thick journals and newspapers.⁶ The theater is another matter.

Just you wait! ГИ buy up all the thick journals and close them down, except the Northern Herald. Then we'll install electric lighting and our own private printing presses, hire a majestic doorman, pur­chase rubber-tired carriages for the editorial board, invite Milan of Serbia⁷ to be our colleague (for the Foreign Bureau), take on Ashinov⁸ as doorman . . . and well have forty thousand subscribers. Though, of course, I still haven't seen my rich fiancee even once.⁹ Nor has she seen me. Ill touch her by writing, "Don't love me, love my cause. . . ."¹⁰

I am anxiously awaiting my copies of Ivanov. Shall I challenge Mr. Demakov¹¹ to a duel?

Ill be staying in Moscow until May and writing. An urge to write has come over me. I keep writing and writing and never leave the house.

My regards to Maria Dmitrievna¹² and Alexei Nikolayevich.¹³

My family sends you their greetings, and I wish you good health and all my best.

Your sincerely devoted,

A. Chekhov

You have Gilyarovsky's story about rafts floating down river. This is the very time to run it.¹⁴

Northern Herald was classed as a publication that had to undergo pre-publication censorship. Other journals and newspapers (e.g., New Times) were free of all preliminary censorship, it being understood that the editor would be held responsible for any objectionable material. Chekhov is urging Yevreinova to petition for release from pre-publication censorship ("Get the censors off your back").

In the period between 1905 and ca. 1921, Russian literature and the press were to all intents and purposes freed from pre-publication censorship. It was reinstated a few years after the October Revolution; after the 1930s, when the government became the sole publisher and banned all private pub­lishers and publications, pre-publication censorship attained a degree of stringency unimaginable in Chekhov's time.

He had been forced to abdicate his throne a few days earlier.

He was a Russian adventurer who had tried to occupy a portion of the Abyssinian coast to start a Russian colony and was very much in the news at the time.

There was a running gag in Chekhov's correspondence with Yevreinova about her finding a millionairess he could marry so as to be able to write without financial worries.

A line from a "Socialist Song" quoted in Turgenev's novel Virgin Soil.

The owner of the printing plant where Northern Herald was printed.

Maria Fyodorova, the editorial secretary of Northen Herald and Anna Yevreinova's long-time intimate friend and companion.

Pleshcheyev.

According to Pleshcheyev's letter to Chekhov, the jolly and athletic Gilyarovsky so charmed Yevreinova that she talked Pleshcheyev into accept­ing the manuscript against his own better judgment.

32. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow, March 11, 1889

When you were enumerating the charms of the Kharkov estate, you didn't mention any river. There's no getting along without a river. If it's near the Donets, then buy it, but if it's the Lopan or just some ponds, then don't.¹ There's a professor of surgery here, a little man with short-cropped hair, with ears that stick out and with eyes like Yuzefo- vich's,² who owns a nearby estate. He invites everyone he likes to buy the estate next to his. He usually places both hands on the waist of the per­son he has taken a fancy to, looks him sentimentally in the eyes, and says with a sigh, "What good times we would have together!" I too am looking at you sentimentally and saying what good times we would have together! You're doing me great harm by not buying the estate.

All I need is your photograph, I don't need photographs of myself, but there are people who make believe they very much need my photo­graph. Since even I have my admirers, there must be a shoe to fit everyone.³

Guess what! I'm writing a novel!! I keep writing and writing and there's no end in sight. I started it, the novel, I mean, by making major revisions and cuts in what I'd already done. I already have nine clearly delineated characters. And what an intricate plot! I've called it Stories from the Lives of My Friends and am writing it in the form of separate stories that are complete within themselves and closely linked by a com­mon plot, idea and characters. Each story will have its own title. Don't go thinking the novel will be made up of shreds and tatters. No, it will be a genuine novel, a whole body, in which every character will be organically indispensable. Grigorovich, to whom you relayed the content of the first chapter, was alarmed at my using a student who dies and thus does not last through the entire novel, and will therefore seem superfluous. But that student is a nail from a large boot as far as I'm concerned. He's a mere detail.

I can barely manage the technique. I'm still weak in that area, and I have the feeling I'm making scores of bad mistakes. Some passages will ramble on and others will be silly. I'll try to avoid faithful wives, suicides, kulaks, virtuous peasants, devoted slaves, moralizing old ladies, kindly nannies, provincial wits, red-nosed captains and the "new people," though in places I come awfully close to cliches.⁴

I've just received the proofs of "The Princess"⁵ and will mail them directly to the printers tomorrow.

For dessert, here's a classified ad from Russian News:

mature person wanted

to help with housework and education of children in a family on estate near Moscow. Must be acquainted with views on life and education set forth by our writers: Dr. Pokrovsky, Goltsev, Sikorsky and Lev Tolstoy.⁶ Imbued with the beliefs of those writers and convinced of the importance of physical labor and the harm of excessive mental exertion, she must direct her educational activities toward instilling strict truth, goodness and love for one's neighbor in the children.

Address all inquiries in writing to No. 2183 of the "V. Miller" Employ­ment Agency, Kabanov House, Petrovka, Moscow.

That's what they call freedom of conscience. For room and board a young lady is obliged to be imbued with the views of Goltsev and Co., while the children, apparently to show their gratitude for having such liberal, intelligent parents, are obliged to watch after themselves day and night to make sure they love their neighbor and don't overexert themselves mentally.

It's odd how people fear freedom.

By the way, New Times carried a quote not long ago in the "Other Newspapers and Journals" column from a newspaper praising German maids for working all day like forced laborers and receiving only two or three rubles a month for it. New Times endorses this praise and adds of its own accord that our trouble is that we keep more servants than we need. To my mind Germans are scoundrels and poor political economists. In the first place, it is wrong to equate servants with prisoners. Second, servants have legal rights and are made from the same flesh and blood as Bismarck; they are free employees, not slaves. Third, the higher the recompense labor receives, the more fortunate the state, and we should all do everything in our power to see that labor is as well recompensed as possible. To say nothing of the Christian point of view. As far as having too many servants is concerned, they are kept on only where there is a lot of money and they receive more than civil service department heads. They should not be taken into account because they represent a chance phenomenon, not an es­sential one.

Why aren't you coming to Moscow? What good times we would have together!

Yours, A. Chekhov

the unknown and unidentifiable Pokrovsky and Sikorsky on the other (all of them considered the highest authorities on life and education) must have produced a grotesque effect even in Chekhov's day.

33. To Alexei Suvorin

Sumy, early May, 1889[41]

I can't believe my eyes. Only recently it was snowy and cold, and now I'm sitting at an open window and listening to the continuous screams of the nightingales, hoopoes, orioles and other beasties in a green garden. The Psyol is majestically affectionate, the hues of the sky and the horizon warm. The apple and cherry trees are in bloom. The geese are walking their goslings. In short, it's spring with all the trimmings.

Stiva[42] never sent the boats, so there is nothing for us to go rowing in. The Lintvaryovs' boats are out in the woods somewhere with the woodsman. I am therefore limited to walks up and down the shore and to keen envy of the fishermen darting around the Psyol in their light craft. I get up early, go to bed early, eat a lot, write and read. The painter[43] is coughing and being irritable. He's in a bad way. Since I don't have any new books, I'm going back over the rudiments and reading things I've already read. By the way, I'm reading Goncharov and am amazed. I'm amazed at myself: what made me think Goncharov a first- rate writer all these years? His Oblomov is a pretty shoddy piece of work. Ilya Ilyich himself[44] is far-fetched and not imposing enough to have a whole book written about him. He is an obese loafer like many others, with a simple, unexceptional, petty character. To raise this sort of person to a social type is far more than he deserves. I ask myself: if Oblomov hadn't been a loafer, what would he have been? And I answer: nothing. And if so, then let him go on snoring. The other char­acters are petty too; they reek of Leykinism, they were chosen care­lessly and are half contrived. They are not typical of their time and have nothing new to add. Stoltz does not engender any confidence in me. The author says he's a fine fellow, but I don't believe him. He's a slippery rascal who thinks highly of himself and is extremely smug. He's half contrived and three-quarters stilted. Olga is contrived and has been dragged in for no reason. And, worst of all, the entire novel is freezing, freezing cold. I am crossing Goncharov off my list of demigods.

But how spontaneous, how powerful Gogol is in comparison! What an artist he is! His "Carriage"[45] alone is worth two hundred thousand rubles. Sheer delight, nothing more or less. He is the greatest

Russian writer. The best part of The Inspector General is the first act; the worst part of The Marriage is Act Three.[46] I'm going to read him aloud to the family.

When are you off? How happy I would be to go to some Biarritz or other, where there's music and lots of women. If it weren't for the painter, I'd rush out after you. The money would turn up somewhere. I give you my word that next year if I'm still alive and well I will go to Europe without fail. If I could only wangle about three thousand from the theater management and finish the novel.

Your bookstand at the Sumy station is out of both In the Twilight and Stories and has been out of them for a long time. And I'm a fashionable writer in Sumy, because I live nearby. If Mikhail Alexeye- vich[47] were to send another fifty or so copies, they'd all be sold.

The dogs howl hideously at night. They keep me awake.

My Wood Demon is shaping up.[48]

My cordial regards to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya. I dreamt of Mile. ЁтШе[49] last night. Why? I don't know.

Be happy and don't forget me in your orisons.¹⁰

Yours, Akaky Tarantulov¹¹

The French governess of Suvorin's two youngest children.

The formula "Remember me in your holy prayers" existed in Russia as an acceptable form of salutation when writing to church dignitaries. But in his 1837 translation of Havilet, Nikolai Polevoy utilized it to render Ham­let's words to Ophelia, "Nymph, in thy orisons/Be all my sins remember'd." Chekhov used this Shakespearean quotation parodistically in The Cherry Orchard (Lopakhin's teasing of Varya in Act II), but for many years, long before he wrote that play, he was wont to use an assortment of free variations on this quotation as a humorous concluding salutation in many of his letters.

Akaky Tarantulov appears in a brief satirical skit "A Forced Declara­tion," which Chekhov published anonymously in New Times in April of 1889. In the space of a few lines, the skit parodies popular melodramas, indicts the mistreatment of horses by Russian cabbies (a theme treated along similar lines but at greater length by both Dostoyevsky and Mayakovsky) and pokes fun at authoritarian nonwriters who join literary associations and then try to control them.

34. To Alexei Suvorin

Sumy, May 4, 1889

I am writing this, Alexei Sergeyevich, just after getting back from the hunt: I was out catching crayfish. The weather is marvelous. Every­thing is singing, blooming and sparkling with beauty. By now the garden is all green, and even the oaks are covered with leaves. The trunks of the apple, pear, cherry and plum trees have been painted white to protect them from worms.¹ All of these trees have white blossoms, making them look strikingly like brides during the wedding ceremony: white dresses, white flowers and so innocent an appearance that they seem to be ashamed of being looked at. Myriads of beings are born every day. Nightingales, bitterns, cuckoos and other feathered creatures keep up a ceaseless din day and night, and the frogs accompany them. Every hour of the day and night has its own specialty: during the hour be­tween eight and nine in the evening, for instance, the garden is filled with what is literally the roar of maybugs. The nights are moonlit, the days bright. As a result, I'm in a good mood, and if it weren't for the coughing painter and the mosquitoes—even Elpe's² formula is no protec­tion against them—I'd be a perfect Potyomkin. Nature is a very good sedative. It makes you reconciled, that is, it gives a person equanimity. And you need equanimity in this world. Only people with equanimity can see things clearly, be fair and work. This, of course, applies only to intelligent and honorable people; selfish and shallow people have enough equanimity as it is.

You write I've grown lazy. This doesn't mean I've gotten any lazier than I was. I'm working now as much as I did three to five years ago. Working and looking as if I am working from nine in the morning until the midday meal and from evening tea until I go to sleep has be­come a habit with me, and in this respect I am like a government of­ficial. So if my work does not produce two stories a month or a yearly income of ten thousand, it's the fault of my psycho-organic makeup, not my laziness. I don't love money enough for medicine, and I lack the necessary passion—and therefore talent—for literature. The fire in me burns with an even, lethargic flame; it never flares up or roars, which is why I never find myself writing fifty or sixty pages in one night or getting so involved in my work that I force myself to stay up when I feel sleepy; I therefore never do anything outstandingly stupid or any­thing notably intelligent. I fear that in this respect I am very similar to Goncharov, whom I don't like and who is ten heads above me in talent. I have very little passion. Add to that the following psychopathic trait: for two years now, seeing my works in print has for some reason given me no pleasure. I've grown indifferent to reviews, conversations about literature, gossip, successes, failures, high royalties—in short, I've be­come a damn fool. My soul seems to be stagnating. I explain this by the stagnation in my personal life. It's not that I'm disappointed or exhausted or cranky; it's just that everything has somehow grown less interesting. I'll have to light a fire underneath myself.

Can you believe it? I've got the first act of The Wood Demon ready. It's turned out all right, though a bit long. I have a greater sense of my own strength than when I was writing Ivanov. The play will be ready by the beginning of June. Watch out, theater management! That's five thousand in my pocket. It's an awfully strange play; I'm amazed to see such strange things emerging from my pen. My only fear is that the censors won't pass it. I'm also writing a novel that appeals to me more and lies closer to my heart than The Wood Demon, where I have to be devious and put up a false front. Last night I remembered I'd promised Varlamov to write a farce for him. Today I wrote it, and I've already sent it off.³ You see how fast I turn things out! And you write I've grown lazy.

So you've finally taken notice of King Solomon. When I first talked to you about him, all you ever did was nod indifferently. In my opinion, it was Ecclesiastes that gave Goethe the idea to write his Faust.⁴

I was extremely pleased with the tone of your letter to the editor about Likhachov. I feel that this letter could serve as a model for polemics of all kinds.⁵

I went to theater in Sumy and saw Second Youth.⁶ The trousers the actors wore and the living rooms they acted in turned the play into The Servants' Quarters.⁷ During the last act there was a drum beaten offstage. They are going to put on Tatyana Repina and Ivanov. I'm going to attend. I can just imagine what the Adashev⁸ will be like!

Send me my copy of Tatyana Repina if it's out.

My brother writes me he's having a terrible time with his play.⁹ I'm very glad. Let him. He looked down his nose at Tatyana Repina and my Ivanov when he saw them performed, drank cognac during the inter­missions, and deigned to offer his criticism. Everyone passes judgment on plays as though they were very easy to write. What they don't know is that it is difficult to write a good play and twice as difficult—and terrifying, besides—to write a bad play. I would like to see the entire public merge into one person and write a play. Then you and I would sit in Box I and hiss it off the stage.

Alexander suffers from too many rewrites. He is very inexperi­enced. I'm afraid he uses a lot of false effects, spends all his time fight­ing them, and wears himself out in the fruitless battle.

Bring me some banned books and newspapers from abroad.¹⁰ If if weren't for the painter, I'd go with you.

God knows what He is doing. He took Tolstoy and Saltykov[50]unto Himself and thereby reconciled what appeared to us irreconcilable. Now both are rotting, and both are equally indifferent. I hear that people are rejoicing over Tolstoy's death; their joy seems quite bestial to me. I don't believe in the future of Christians who hate the police yet at the same time welcome someone's death and see death as an angel of deliverance. You can't imagine how disgusting it is to see women rejoice in this death.

When will you be back from abroad? Where will you go then?

Will I really sit it out until autumn on the banks of the Psyol? Why, that's horrible! After all, spring won't last that long.

Lensky has invited me to accompany him on tour to Tiflis. I'd go if not for the painter, who's not doing any too brilliantly.

Tell Anna Ivanovna that from the bottom of my heart I wish her a most cheerful journey.

If you happen to play the roulette, bet twenty-five francs for me to test my luck.

Well, God grant you health and all the best.

Yours, A. Chekhov

the inland river Psyol, oaks are said to be covered with blossoms, and the fruit trees have been given "a white coat" by "the busy worms." Elsewhere in that volume, gobies (a species of fish) are confused with bulls, cod be­comes "a fish from the Caspian," a siskin (a free bird) is rendered as "bird in a cage," and chanterelles as "various kinds of mushrooms." In the English translation of Chekhov's biography by Daniel Gilles, almost every animal Che­khov mentions is replaced by another, vaguely similar one: a cockroach be­comes a beetle, dachshunds become bassets, and a woodcock is taken for a quail. All this is particularly regrettable because Chekhov is not the hazy writer some of his translators take him to be, but a very precise and ob­servant one.

"Elpe" was the pen name of Lazar Popov (a phonetic transcription of his initials), who wrote a popular science column for New Times.

Chekhov's farce A Tragedian in Spite of Himself, which was written at the request of the actor Konstantin Varlamov.

Chekhov was fascinated by King Solomon and Ecclesiastes for several years. His notebooks contain indications that he contemplated writing a play about Solomon at one point.

Suvorin had published a letter to the editor in his own newspaper, asserting the right of New Times to criticize the St. Petersburg municipal administration and its mayor, Likhachov, despite certain favors the news­paper had owed to the mayor in the past.

A melodrama by Pyotr Nevezhin about the breakup of an upper-class family, first performed in 1887 and enormously popular for about a decade after that.

A fragment from Gogol's unfinished comedy The Order of St. Vladimir, which was occasionally performed as a separate little play.

A character in Suvorin's Tatyana Repina.

Encouraged by the success of his brother's Ivanov, Alexander Chekhov also decided to try his hand at playwriting. In his letters written in the spring of 1889, Anton repeatedly offered his brother advice on how to write a play. Thus, on April 11, he wrote Alexander: "My advice is to try to be original in your play and as intelligent as possible; but also, have no fear of appearing stupid. Freethinking is what's needed and only he who is not afraid of writing stupid things is a real freethinker. Don't smooth things over, don't polish them, be clumsy and daring. Brevity is the sister of talent. Keep in mind that declarations of love, infidelities of husbands and wives, the tears of widows and orphans and all other kinds of tears have long since been described. But the main thing: Mommy and Daddy gotta eat. So write!"

And on May 11: "A great deal of rewriting should not disturb you, because the more mosaiclike the results, the better. The characters in your play only stand to gain from this. The main thing is to avoid the personal element. Your play won't be worth a thing if all of its characters resemble you [. . .] Is there no life outside yourself? And who cares about my life and your life, my thoughts and your thoughts? People should be shown people, not your own self."

Despite all this advice and a great deal of encouragement from his

employer, Suvorin, Alexander never completed his play. Ten years later he published a one-act farce which was given a few performances.

Throughout the years of their friendship, Suvorin regularly supplied Chekhov with illegal, anti-government Russian publications that were printed abroad. (See also Letter 170, note 5.)

The widely disliked ultra-reactionary minister of education, Count Dmitry Tolstoy, and the popular anti-government satirist Mikhail Saltykov- Shchedrin died within a few days of each other.

35. To Alexei Suvorin

Sumy, May 7, 1889

I've read Bourget's Disciple¹ in your paraphrase and in Russian translation (Northern Herald). This is the way I see it. Bourget is a talented, very intelligent and well-educated man. He is thoroughly familiar with the scientific method and is as imbued with it as if he had studied science or medicine. He is no stranger to the field he has chosen to handle—a merit unknown by past or present Russian writers. As for his bookish, learned psychology, he knows about it as little as the best of psychologists. Knowing it is just about the same as not knowing it, since it is more a fiction than a science, a kind of alchemy, and it is high time for it to be filed away in the archives. And so I don't intend to say any­thing about whether Bourget is a good or bad psychologist. The novel is interesting. Once I had read it, I understood why you were so taken by it. It's intelligent, interesting, witty in places and somewhat fantastic. As for its faults, the main one among them is his pretentious crusade against materialist doctrine. Forgive me, but I just can't understand that sort of crusade. It never leads anywhere and does nothing but introduce needless confusion in the sphere of ideas. Against whom is he crusading and why? Where is the enemy and what is so dangerous about him? To begin with, materialism is not a school or doctrine in the narrow journalistic sense. It is neither chance occurrence nor passing fancy; it is something indispensable and inevitable and beyond human power. Everything that lives on earth is necessarily materialistic. In animals, in savages and in Moscow merchants everything that is elevated and non- animal is conditioned by unconscious instinct; everything else in them is materialistic—and not by their own choosing, certainly. Creatures of a higher order, thinking humans, are also necessarily materialists. They search for truth in matter because there is nowhere else for them to search: all they can see, hear and feel is matter. They can neces­sarily seek out truth only where their microscopes, probes and knives are effective. Prohibiting materialist doctrine is tantamount to preventing man from seeking out the truth. Outside of matter there is no experience or knowledge, and consequently no truth. Is it perhaps bad that Monsieur Sixte, as it seems, pokes his nose into areas outside his field and is insolent enough to study the inner man on the basis of cell theory? But is it his fault that psychic phenomena are so strikingly similar to physical ones that it is almost impossible to figure out where the former start and the latter end? It seems to me that, when a corpse is being dissected, even the most inveterate spiritualist must necessarily come up against the question of where the soul is. And if you know how great the similarity is between mental and physical illnesses and when you know that both one and the other are treated with the very same remedies, you can't help but refuse to separate soul from body.

As for the "psychological experiments," instilling vices in children and the figure of Sixte himself, all this is exaggerated beyond belief.

The title of spiritualist is honorary, not scholarly. As scientists they are unnecessary. And anyway, in everything they do and try to accomplish they are just as necessarily materialist as Sixte himself. If they win out over the materialists and wipe them off the face of the earth (which is impossible), their very victory will prove them the greatest of materialists, for they will have destroyed an entire cult, nearly a religion.