Talking about the harm and dangers of materialist doctrine and even more so fighting it is premature, to say the least. We lack sufficient evidence to put together a case against it. There are many theories and suppositions, but no facts; all our antipathy goes no further than a fantastic bogeyman. Merchants' wives are horrified by the bogeyman. And why? No one knows. Priests make reference to lack of faith, profligacy and the like. There's no lack of faith. Everyone believes in something, even Sixte, for that matter. And as for profligacy, it's not Sixtes and Mendeleyevs who have a reputation for being the most refined profligates, lechers and drunkards; it's the poets, abbots and persons diligently attending Embassy churches.
In short, Bourget's crusade is beyond my comprehension. If when setting off for the crusade Bourget had also taken the trouble to point out to the materialists the incorporeal God in heaven and point him out in such a way that they would see Him, that would have been another question; in that case I would have understood his excursus.2
Forgive the philosophy. I'm off for the post office. Regards to you all, and keep well.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Paul Bourget's anti-materialistic novel Le Disciple was the literary sensation of 1889 throughout Europe. A Russian translation was serialized in Northern Herald and Suvorin devoted to it several enthusiastic articles in New Times. The hero of Bourget's novel is the atheistic philosopher Adrien Sixte. Sixte's disciple Robert Greslou, under the influence of Sixte's deterministic materialism, drives a young girl to suicide by way of a psychological experiment. Greslou is in turn killed by the brother of his victim, and the penitent Sixte shows that he is cured of his atheism at the end of the novel by reciting the Lord's Prayer.
The materialistic component in Chekhov's philosophical outlook and his repeated insistence on its validity was what caused some of the leading thinkers of Russian Symbolism, such as Zinaida Gippius and Lev Shestov, to dislike his work and to minimize its importance. As for Suvorin, his anti- materialistic philosophical bias was to find a full response in Vasily Rozanov, a writer he discovered and helped popularize after his contacts with Chekhov dwindled.
36. To Alexei Suvorin
Sumy, May 15, 1889
If you still haven't gone abroad, let me answer your letter about Bourget. I'll be brief. You write among other things, "Let the science of matter pursue its course, but at the same time let some place remain where one can hide from endless matter." The science of matter is indeed pursuing its course, and places where you can hide from endless matter do exist, and no one seems to be encroaching on them. If anyone is taking a beating, it's the sciences, not the holy shrines where you can hide away from science. My letter formulates the problem more correctly and inoffensively than yours, and I am closer to the "life of the spirit" than you are. You are talking about the right of one or another type of knowledge to exist, whereas I'm talking about peace, not rights. I want people not to see war where there isn't any. Different branches of knowledge have always lived together in peace. Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil—and there is absolutely no reason for them to fight. There is no struggle for existence going on between them. If a man knows the theory of the circulatory system, he is rich. If he learns the history of religion and the song "I remember a Marvelous Moment"1 in addition, he is the richer, not the poorer, for it. We are consequently dealing entirely in pluses. It is for this reason that geniuses have never fought among themselves and Goethe the poet coexisted splendidly with Goethe the naturalist.
It is not branches of knowledge that war with one another, not poetry with anatomy; it is delusions, that is, people. When a person doesn't understand something, he feels discord within. Instead of looking for the causes of this discord within himself as he should, he looks outside. Hence the war with what he does not understand. Gradually, following its own natural peaceful course throughout the Middle Ages, alchemy evolved into chemistry; astrology into astronomy. The monks didn't understand; they saw war and took to arms. Our Pisarev2 was just such a militant Spanish monk during the sixties.
Bourget is also at war. You say he's not, but I say he is. Imagine what will happen if his novel falls into the hands of a man whose children are studying natural sciences or of a bishop who is looking around for a topic for his Sunday sermon. Will the resultant effect bear any resemblance to peace? No. Imagine what will happen if the book catches the eye of an anatomist or physiologist, etc. It will not breathe peace into any man's breast; it will irritate the well informed and reward the not so well informed with false notions—nothing more.
You may object that he is warring with deviations from the norm rather than with the essence. I agree that every writer must war with deviations from the norm. But why compromise the essence itself? Sixte is regal, but Bourget has turned him into a caricature. His "psychological experiments" are a libel of man and science. Supposing I wrote a novel in which my anatomist dissects his wife and infant children alive for the sake of science, or a learned woman doctor goes to the Nile to copulate with a crocodile and a rattlesnake for scientific ends, would that novel be a libel or would it not? And I could doubtless write that sort of thing and make it interesting and clever.
That Bourget is as attractive to the Russian reader as a thunder- shower after a drought is understandable. The novel shows the reader an author and heroes smarter than himself and a life richer than his own. Russian writers are duller than their readers, their heroes are pallid and insignificant, and the life they portray meager and uninteresting. The Russian writer lives in the drainpipe, eats sowbugs and has love affairs with hussies and laundresses; he knows nothing of history or geography or science or the religion of his country or its administration or its legal procedures ... in short, he doesn't know a goddamn thing. In comparison with Bourget he's nothing but a brazen fake. I can understand why Bourget is popular, but it still doesn't follow that Sixte is right or honest when he recites the Lord's Prayer.
Well, I won't pester you any more with Bourget. You have a talent for conveying the plots of novels like Le Disciple in concise form. I was happy for you as I read. Very well done. You handled the philosophical and scientific part of the novel very well, I didn't know you had it in you. I would have gotten everything confused and ended up with something longer than Bourget's original.
I'm bored. Pleshcheyev isn't coming and I wish he would. He's a fine old man.
I'll be sending you a letter written in French and German soon.3 Regards to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya.
Have a good trip.
Yours, A. Chekhov
An art song by Mikhail Glinka, which is a setting of one of Alexander Pushkin's most popular lyrics.
On Pisarev and Chekhov, see Letter 69.
Chekhov began an intensive study of French and German at that time.
37. To Peter Tchaikovsky[51]
Moscow, October 12, 1889
Dear Pyotr Ilyich,
I'm preparing a new book of my stories for publication this month. The stories are as dull and dreary as autumn and monotonous in style, and the artistic element in them is thickly interlarded with the medical, but that still doesn't prevent me from making bold to address you a humble request: may I dedicate the book to you?2 I am very anxious to receive an affirmative answer from you because, first, the dedication would give me great pleasure and, second, it would serve in some small way to satisfy the profound feeling of respect that impels me to think of you daily. I became determined to dedicate my book to you as far back as the day we had lunch together at Modest Ilyich's3 and I learned from you that you had read my stories.
If you include a photograph together with your authorization, I will have received more than I am worth and will be grateful to the end of time. Forgive me for bothering you, and allow me to wish you all the best.
With sincere devotion,
A. Chekhov
knew and loved Tchaikovsky's music. After receiving this letter, Tchaikovsky paid Chekhov a personal visit and proposed that they collaborate on an opera libretto (which, according to Mikhail Chekhov, was to be based on one of the episodes from Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time). The project never materialized. For all their mutual admiration, the contacts between the two men were neither frequent nor particularly intimate.
Because of the aura of melancholy that surrounds the art of both in the minds of many Russians, one occasionally encounters the view that Tchaikovsky is Chekhov's counterpart in music. The obvious superficiality of this view does not detract from the beauty of its expression in one of Boris Pasternak's most perfect poems, "Winter Is Approaching" (1943), with its concluding lines:
The autumnal twilight of Chekhov, Tchaikovsky and Levitan.
Tchaikovsky's consenting to the dedication was accompanied by his photograph bearing the inscription: "To A. P. Chekhov, from his ardent admirer P. Tchaikovsky, October 14, 1889." Chekhov's collection of stories Morose People was published in 1890, with a dedication to Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky's playwright brother Modest, whom Chekhov got to know considerably better than the composer. In one of his letters to Modest, Chekhov assigned to Tchaikovsky the second place in the entire pantheon of Russian arts, second only to that of Tolstoy, "who took the first a long time ago."
38. To Alexei Suvorin
Moscow, October 17, 1889
I wrote you yesterday about the yearbook's medical section. Today Ostrovsky, of whom I've also written you before, dragged over a whole bale of his sister's stories.1
Everyone is tearing Goreva2 to pieces—unfairly, of course, because tearing people to pieces should be done in public only when ill intent is involved, and even then judiciously. But Goreva is miserably bad. I went to her theater once and almost died of boredom. Her actors are drab and their pretentiousness depressing.
Don't rejoice over becoming a character in my play. Your joy is premature; your turn is still to come. If I live long enough, I'll describe the Feodosia nights we spent together in conversation and the time we went fishing and you walked along the piles of the Lintvaryovs' windmill—that's all I need from you for the time being. You're not in the play, you can't be in the play, even though Grigorovich with his usual perspicacity manages to see otherwise.3 The play deals with a dull, self- satisfied, wooden man who has lectured on art for twenty-five years without understanding anything about it, a man who makes everyone despondent and bored, who allows no laughter or music around him, and so on and so forth, and nonetheless is extraordinarily happy. For heaven's sake, don't go believing all those people who look first of all for what's bad in everything, measure everyone else by their own standards, and attribute their own fox and badger traits to others. Oh how pleased this has made Grigorovich! And how they would all rejoice if I were to slip some arsenic in your tea and turn out to be a Third Department spy.4 Of course you may say that all this is trifling. Well, it isn't. If my play were being performed, the entire audience, following the example of a bunch of perjured good-for-nothings, would look at the stage and say, "So that's what Suvorin is like! And that's what his wife is like! Hm . . . what do you know! We had no idea."
It's all trivia, I agree. But this is the sort of trivia that makes the world fall apart. The other day I met a Petersburg writer at the theater. We struck up a conversation. When he learned from me that Plescheyev, Barantsevich, you, Svobodin5 and others had visited me at various times during the summer, he sighed sympathetically and said, "You're wrong to think that's good publicity. You're making a big mistake to count on them."
In other words, I invited you in order to have someone write me up and I tried to get Svobodin to come so as to palm off my play on him. Ever since my conversation with that writer I've had the sort of aftertaste in my mouth I'd get if, instead of vodka, I'd had a shot of ink mixed with flies. It may be trivia and of no importance, but without those trivia all human life would be sheer joy—and now it's half disgusting.
If someone serves you coffee, don't try to look for beer in it. If I present you with the professor's ideas, have confidence in me and don't look for Chekhovian ideas in them.6 No, thank you. In the whole story there is only one idea that I share, the idea that obsesses the professor's son-in-law, that swindler Gnekker, namely, "The old man's losing his mind!" Everything else I've made up and invented. Where do you see the polemics? Do you so value opinions—any opinions—that you conceive them alone as the center of gravity rather than the manner in which they're expressed or their origins, and such? Would you say that Bourget's Disciple is also polemics? The substance of all these opinions is of no value to me as an author. Their substance is not the point; it is variable and lacks novelty. The crux of the matter lies in the nature of the opinions, in their dependence on external influences, and so on.
They must be examined like objects, like symptoms, with perfect objectivity and without any attempt to agree with them or call them in question. If I had described St. Vitus's dance, you wouldn't have considered it from the point of view of a choreographer, would you? The same must be done with opinions. I had no intention at all of astounding you with my amazing views on the theater, literature and so on. All I meant to do was make use of my knowledge to depict the vicious circle that causes even a kind and intelligent man who enters it—despite his resolve to accept life from God as it is and think of everyone according to Christian precepts—to mumble and grumble like a slave whether he means to or not and speak ill of people even when he is forcing himself to say nice things about them. He wishes to stand up for his students, but all that comes out is hypocrisy and Resident-style7 abuse. But that's a long story.
Your sons are certainly very promising. They've raised the price of the Yearbook and cut back on the size. They promised me a keg of wine for my stories and didn't come across with it, and to keep me from getting angry they put my portrait opposite the Shah of Persia's.8 Speaking of the Shah, I recently read the poem "A Political Concert," which speaks about the Shah in more or less the following terms: "And the Persian Shah, the East's finest flower, went to Paris to compare his [. . .] with the Eiffel Tower." Come to Moscow. We'll go to the theater together.
Yours,
A. Chekhov
nearly identical with their descendants in Uncle Vanya), were patterned by Chekhov after Suvorin and his much younger second wife, Anna. The duplicity and tactlessness that Grigorovich displayed in this entire affair considerably diminished the respect and admiration that Chekhov previously felt for him.
Suvorin never served as a prototype for any character in Chekhov's work; however, he was to make a veiled, thoroughly disguised appearance in "Goose- foot" (Lebeda), a story Vladimir Nabokov wrote in 1932. As the Russian version of Nabokov's autobiography (Other Shores, 1954) makes clear, this story of a young boy's agonizing over his father's involvement in a duel was based on an analogous episode in the writer's own childhood, when his father, the leader of the Constitutional-Democratic party, was slandered by an article published in New Times and challenged Suvorin to a duel. This would make Suvorin the real-life prototype of the fictional Count Tumansky of the story. But the character's similarity to Suvorin does not extend beyond this initial point of departure: in the story, Tumansky is supposedly a dangerous adversary and it is by a lucky chance that the boy's father is not killed; the real-life Suvorin was nearly eighty at the time of the challenge (ca. 1912) and the duel never did take place.
The political police in tsarist Russia.
The actor Pavel Svobodin, who was trying to arrange a St. Petersburg production of The Wood Demon.
Chekhov's "A Dreary Story" had just been published and its publication gave rise to numerous discussions and misinterpretations. Everyone admired it, but even such men as Suvorin, Grigorovich and Pleshcheyev managed to read into it things that Chekhov never intended to say. His irritation with the widespread misunderstanding of his story may have contributed to his ripening decision to move away from literature for a while.
The first-person form of narration used in the story leads commentators to this day to identify the twenty-nine-year-old Chekhov with the aged and dying professor who narrates "A Dreary Story." Even though Chekhov here explicitly denies this identity, it has served as a point of departure for a number of later essays on Chekhov, and especially for Lev Shestov's "Creation Out of the Void."
"The Resident" (Zhitel) was the pen name of Alexander Dyakov, whose vitriolic columns in New Times Chekhov strongly disliked.
Suvorin's Yearbook for 1890 contained Chekhov's story "Champagne," an essay about him, and his portrait, which was printed facing a portrait of Shah Nasr-ed-Din of Persia.
THE JOURNEY TO SAKHALIN
Chekhov, probably as devoted to the purity of art as Ralph Ellison, dragged himself from a sick-bed to visit the penal colony at Sakhalin Island and speak to the conscience of his country about the tormented prisoners. Other writers have done similar deeds, for they have felt obliged to live not merely as writers but also as men engaged with the problems and passions of their time. Was Chekhov "right" in doing what he did? I don't know. All I would like to say is that his trip to Sakhalin was, for him, necessary and, in my view of things, noble.
—Irving Howe, "A Reply to Ralph Ellison"
I like your part about Chekhov arising from the sick bed to visit the penal colony at Sakhalin Island. It was, as you say, a noble act. But shouldn't we remember that it was significant only because Chekhov was Chekhov, the great writer?
—Ralph Ellison, "A Rejoinder"
(Both in The New Leader, February 3, 1964)
No other event in Chekhov's life is more surrounded by myths, more misunderstood and more frequently misinterpreted than his Sakhalin journey. There are two principal interpretations of this journey that are widespread in the West, both of them simplistic and essentially wrong. The first interpretation is political: the mortally ill Chekhov traveled to Sakhalin in order to write an expose of the mistreatment of political prisoners by the tsarist authorities. This view, partially embodied in Irving Howe's statement quoted above, assumes that Chekhov's motives for the trip are obvious to everyone and are generally known. The second, opposing interpretation, as expressed in Lillian Hellman's commentary to her edition of Chekhov's letters and, significantly enough, by the annotators of the 1944-51 Soviet edition of Chekhov, assumes that Chekhov had some mysterious private motive for going to Sakhalin which he for some reason failed to state to anyone in the vast body of letters he wrote during the trip and in his subsequently written book about it.
The assumptions about Chekhov's health are wrong to begin with. Although he undoubtedly had incipient tuberculosis in 1890, he was in no sense a sick or dying man. For all the hardships of the journey and the backbreaking work of census taking, the fresh air, regular hours and wholesome food he enjoyed in Siberia and Sakhalin, followed by a leisurely sea voyage through the warm Indian Ocean, must have been a tremendous improvement as far as his health was concerned over his hectic Moscow social life, long nights of drinking with other writers in smoke-filled nightclub rooms and his general hyperactive pace in the period immediately preceding his departure. His swimming exploits in the Indian Ocean, his amorous exploits in Siberia and on Ceylon, his healthy and suntanned appearance upon his return and the energy with which he undertook the extended journey through Western Europe very soon thereafter all easily demolish the myth that the Sakhalin journey was detrimental to Chekhov's health.
As for the assertion that the journey was a subversive act or an act of political defiance, its proponents should be told that Sakhalin was not any kind of political prison to begin with. It was a recently acquired territory, bleak and inhospitable, which the Russian government was trying to colonize with convicted murderers, swindlers, thieves and embezzlers. It was a penal colony in the original sense of the term, the sort of colony that the British and French governments maintained on the East Coast of North America in the eighteenth century and to which Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders were sent, the kind of colony that was used to get Australia settled. There were very few political prisoners on Sakhalin (they were usually kept on the mainland in Siberia, where the government could keep a better eye on them), and the only restriction that the Sakhalin authorities imposed on Chekhov upon his arrival was that he stay away from those few. But, as Letter 49 shows, even this condition was not always met. Otherwise, Chekhov traveled to Sakhalin with the full approval of the authorities, both those in St. Petersburg and those on the island. He went as an accredited correspondent of Suvorin's pro-government newspaper, and he paid for the journey by writing his six- part cycle of travel pieces for New Times, "Across Siberia." The authorities on Sakhalin, for all the mismanagement and blunders which Chekhov points out in his book, had hoped that publicizing the wretched conditions in the penal settlements would move the central government to do something to improve them. They therefore gave Chekhov a free hand, delegating some of the convict-settlers to assist him with the medical-statistical census that was the main purpose of his trip to the island.
The notion that there was some unfathomable ulterior motive that caused Chekhov to undertake the journey has been devised by people who see him solely as a short-story writer and playwright and who refuse to allow for the equally important part played by medicine and biology in his life. He had not done any work on his dissertation on "The History of Medicine in Russia" since 1887, and it bothered him that the requirements for his doctoral degree were still incomplete. He had hoped to do a medical- statistical survey of the Sakhalin settlements that would be acceptable for his degree requirements in lieu of a dissertation. Chekhov's physician friends who later wrote memoirs about him, such men as Grigory Rosso- limo and Isaak Altschuller, were never in any doubt that research for a thesis was one of the primary reasons for his Sakhalin journey. But this reason is too dull for popular biographies and so we get legends about political protest or even an unfortunate love affair that caused Chekhov to flee to Sakhalin.
Of course there was also a humanitarian motive involved, as the impassioned letter to Suvorin, defending the importance of Sakhalin as a research topic, makes abundantly evident (Letter 41). But, even here, the nature of Chekhov's concern and its objectives are all too often distorted or misunderstood. Most of the educated Russians of his day knew about the grim physical conditions under which the convict-settlers on Sakhalin lived—Korolenko's "Escapee from Sakhalin" and numerous other publications that were available had already informed the public on that score. What Chekhov discovered and later described in the book which took him several years to write added completely new dimensions to the previously known picture: the neglect of the orphaned children of the settlers, the widespread teen-age prostitution, the forcing of women convicts into concubinage, and the wanton and stupid mismanagement of the few available natural resources of the island. But the most harrowing passages of his book on Sakhalin do not deal with convicts or settlers at all. They describe instead the genocidal policies of both the Sakhalin authorities and the convict-settlers toward the indigenous populations, the Gilyaks and the Ainus. The heartless colonial policies that were leading to the extermination of these peoples are reflected in pages that were written in Chekhov's heart's blood; like so many other things that he tried to tell his countrymen and the world, these pages have remained mostly unread and unnoticcd to this day.
39. To Mikhail Galkin-Vrasky1
Your Excellency
Mikhail Nikolayevich,
Planning as I am to leave for Eastern Siberia in the spring of this year on a journey with scientific and literary goals and desiring as part of this journey to visit the island of Sakhalin, both its central and southern areas, I am taking the liberty of most humbly asking Your Excellency to extend to me all possible assistance in achieving the goals stated above.2
With sincere respect and devotion I have the honor to remain Your Excellency's most humble servant,
Anton Chekhov
20 January, 1890
Malaya Italyanskaya 18, c/o A. S. Suvorin
The chief administrator of all the prisons and penal institutions of the Russian Empire. This letter is the first written record of Chekhov's intention to go to Sakhalin.
Chekhov personally took this letter to the office of the Central Prison Administration in St. Petersburg and was at that time received by Galkin- Vrasky, who promised him every kind of assistance in carrying out his project. But that promise proved illusory and it was only because of the cooperation of the two highest officials on the local level, Baron Korf and General Kononovich, that Chekhov was able to accomplish what he did on the island.
The "secret order" that Galkin-Vrasky dispatched to Sakhalin, instructing the authorities there to bar Chekhov from contact "with certain categories of political prisoners and exiles," discovered in the archives after the October Revolution, of which so much is made in the commentary to the 1944-51 edition of the letters (a part of that commentary is quoted in a footnote to this letter in the Lillian Hellman volume in English), was not in the least secret, since Chekhov was informed upon his arrival on Sakhalin that he had to stay away from all categories of political prisoners there.
40. To Alexei Pleshcheyev1
Moscow, February 15, 1890
I just received your letter, dear Alexei Nikolayevich, and I am answering it at once. So you've had a name day, have you? And I forgot!! Please forgive me and accept my belated best wishes.2
Do you mean you really don't care for The Kreutzer Sonata?3 I won't say it's an immortal work or a work of genius—I'm no judge of that—but in my opinion, among the mass of what is presently being written here and abroad, you won't find anything to match it in importance of conception or beauty of execution. Even without mentioning its artistic achievements, which are in certain passages astounding, you must be grateful if only because the work is extremely thought-provoking. As you read it, you can barely keep from shouting, "That's true!" or "That's ridiculous!" True, it has some very irritating faults. Besides the ones you listed, there is one that I am unwilling to pardon the author, namely the audacity with which Tolstoy treats topics about which he knows nothing and which out of obstinacy he does not wish to understand. For example, his opinions on syphilis, foundling homes, women's revulsion for sexual intercourse and so on are not only debatable; they expose him as an ignorant man who has never at any point in his long life taken the trouble to read two or three books written by specialists. Nevertheless, these faults are as easily dispersed as feathers in the wind; the worth of the work is such that they simply pass unnoticed. And, if you do notice them, the only result is that you find yourself annoyed it has not escaped the fate of all human works, all of which are imperfect and tainted.
So my Petersburg friends and acquaintances are angry at me?4 What for? Because I annoyed them too little with my presence, which has long since become annoying to myself! Set their minds at rest. Tell them that while in Petersburg I had many dinners and many suppers, I didn't capture the heart of a single lady, that every day I was certain I'd be leaving on the evening express, that I was held back by friends and the Marine Almanac, which I had to go through page by page, beginning with 1852. While I was in Petersburg, I got more done in a month than my young friends could possibly do in a whole year. Well let them be angry.
Young Suvorin wired my family as a joke that Shcheglov and I had left for Moscow in a troika, and they believed it.5 As for the 35,000 couriers galloping after me from the ministries6 to invite me to become governor general of the Island of Sakhalin, it is simply nonsense. My brother Misha wrote the Lintvaryovs that I was going through the procedure necessary to get to Sakhalin, and they must have misunderstood him. If you see Galkin-Vrasky, tell him not to bother trying to get his report reviewed in the press. I will devote a great amount of space to his reports in my book and immortalize his name. The reports could have been better: the material is fine and rich, but its authors—civil service officials—were unable to do it justice.7
I've been sitting here all day reading and taking notes. I have nothing but Sakhalin in my head or on paper. Mental derangement. Mania Sachalinosa.8
I recently had dinner at Yermolova's. When a wildflower is placed in a bouquet of carnations, the good company adds to its fragrance. Two days after dining with a star, I can still feel the halo around my head.
I've just read Modest Tchaikovsky's Symphony.9 I liked it. Reading it leaves a very clear-cut impression. The play ought to be a success.
Good-bye for now. Come visit us. Regards to your family. My sister and mother send their best.
Yours, A. Chekhov
This letter is a detailed, point-by-point reply to Pleshcheyev's letter of February 13, 1890, which was first published in volume 68 of Literary Heritage in i960. To facilitate the readers comprehension of the letter's content, pertinent passages from Pleshcheyev's letter are cited, in quotation marks, at the beginning of some of the notes.
"Your letter came as a nice present for my name day, which was the day on which I received it."
"I've read The Kreutzer Sonata and I cannot say that it produced a particularly strong impression on me. [. . .] The first half of it, especially, contains much that is paradoxical, one-sided, extraordinary and possibly even false. Of course you dare not open your mouth about any of this in front of his admirers."
Because of its sexual content, this novel of Tolstoy's was banned by the censors. It was published clandestinely in an edition of three hundred copies, which were passed around from hand to hand. It was in this edition that both Chekhov and Pleshcheyev read it. Eventually, it took a personal visit by Countess Tolstoy to Emperor Alexander III to secure the authorization for a general publication of The Kreutzer Sonata.
. . had you lived here [i.e., in St. Petersburg] permanently, you would most likely write nothing, but only have dinners, suppers, and capture the hearts of ladies. [. . .] Some of your friends in St. Petersburg are displeased with you (I don't mean the ones associated with the New Times) and, I must say, not without reason. In a sense, I could include myself among them. None of us managed to have a proper conversation with you. You dropped in on everyone for only a moment, you were always in a hurry to leave, as if you had paid a call out of a sense of duty, and, finally, you bid everyone good-bye, saying to some you were departing on that very day and to others that it was on the next one. And then you remained in St. Petersburg for another two weeks. Translated into ordinary human speech this could only mean: will all of you please leave me alone."
Chekhov spent most of January of 1890 in St. Petersburg, arranging the authorization and financial backing for his trip and doing extensive research in various libraries on the history, geography, geology and fauna of Sakhalin. At first, he found it difficult to convince even such good friends as Suvorin and Pleshcheyev of the seriousness of his intentions and the depth of his commitment to the project. Hence the complaints about his supposed aloofness and unsociability.
"Georges Lintvaryov told me that your brother Mikhail wrote to the
Lintvaryov family that you and Shcheglov departed from St. Petersburg for Moscow not by train but by troika and that you are being sent to Sakhalin by the Ministry of the Interior to inspect something or other. Why this mystification ?"
Reference to Khlestakov's drunken bragging in Gogol's The Inspector General
"Last Sunday Galkin-Vrasky paid me a visit, although he usually comes to see me very rarely. I was not in and he left his calling card. Apparently there was something he needed from me. I have not gotten around to repaying his call; this might incur his wrath, which, however, is no concern of mine. I will have to tell him that you took the copy of the Report on Prisons from the editorial office, otherwise he might expect us [i.e., Northern Herald] to review it."
During his research in St. Petersburg, Chekhov compiled a basic bibliography on Sakhalin, comprising sixty-five titles. Works on penology (which is always assumed to have been his sole concern during his trip to Sakhalin) are only a small portion of this total. He was equally interested in a large number of additional topics: the island's native inhabitants, the history of its colonization, the memoirs of travelers who had been there (he found a large number of these unreliable), and he paid considerable attention to the island's wildlife and natural resources.
When he returned to Moscow early in February, his sister Maria and a group of her fellow students at the teachers' college for women she was attending were organized into a voluntary corps of research assistants. They looked up the various items he needed in old periodicals and translated for him references published in languages he could not read. In addition, Mikhail Chekhov, who was at law school, had to supply his brother with materials pertaining to criminal law, and Alexander Chekhov in St. Petersburg kept getting requests for library materials not available in Moscow. By the time Chekhov left for Sakhalin late in April of the same year, he had amassed enough research material on the subject for a whole thick volume.
A play by Modest Tchaikovsky, set in a musicians' milieu, which had a considerable success in Russian theaters during the next few years.
41. To Alexei Suvorin
Moscow, March 9, 1890 Forty Martyrs and 10,000 larks1 We are both mistaken about Sakhalin, but you are probably more mistaken than I am. I am going there absolutely secure in the thought that my journey will not make any valuable contributions to literature or science: I have neither the knowledge, time nor pretensions for that. My plans are neither Humboldtian nor even Kennanian.2 I
want to write at least one or two hundred pages to pay off some of my debt to medicine, toward which, as you know, I've behaved like a pig.3 I may not be able to write anything at all, but the journey still retains its charm for me. By reading, looking around and listening, I'll discover and learn a great deal. I haven't even left yet, but thanks to the books I've had to read, I've learned about things that everyone should know on pain of forty lashes and that I had the ignorance not to know before. Besides, the journey as I see it means six months' continuous physical and mental labor, something I absolutely need, because I'm a Southerner and have already begun to grow lazy. I've got to discipline myself. Granted, my journey may be trifling, hardheaded, capricious, but think a while and tell me what I stand to lose by going. Time? Money? Will I suffer hardships? My time is worth nothing and I never have any money anyway. As for hardships, the horse-drawn part of the trip won't last more than twenty-five or thirty days; the rest of the time I'll be sitting on the deck of a steamer or in my room and constantly bombarding you with letters. Granted, I may get nothing out of it, but there are sure to be two or three days out of the whole trip that I'll remember all my life with rapture or bitterness. And so on and so forth. There you have it, kind sir. All this may be unconvincing, but what you write is just as unconvincing. You write, for instance, that Sakhalin is of no use or interest to anyone. Is that really so? Sakhalin could be of no use or interest only to a society that doesn't deport thousands of people to it and doesn't spend millions on it. Except for Australia in the past and Cayenne, Sakhalin is the only place where the use of convicts for colonization can be studied. All Europe is interested in it, and we don't find it of any use? Not more than twenty-five to thirty years ago our own Russians performed astounding feats in the exploration of Sakhalin, feats that are enough to make you want to deify man, but we have no use for it, we don't even know who those people were,4 and all we do is sit within our four walls and complain what a mess God has made of creating man. Sakhalin is a place of unbearable suffering, the sort of suffering only man, whether free or subjugated, is capable of. The people who work near it or on it have been trying to solve problems involving frightening responsibility; they are still trying. I'm sorry I'm not sentimental or I'd say that we ought to make pilgrimages to places like Sakhalin the way the Turks go to Mecca. Moreover, sailors and penologists ought to regard Sakhalin the way the military regards Sevastopol. From the books I've read and am now reading, it is evident that we have let millions of people rot in jails, we have let them rot to no purpose, unthinkingly and barbarously. We have driven people through the cold, in chains, across tens of thousands of versts, we have infected them with syphilis, debauched them, bred criminals and blamed it all on red-nosed prison wardens. Now all educated Europe knows that all of us, not the wardens, are to blame, but it's still none of our business; it's of no interest to us. The much-glorified sixties5 did nothing for the sick and the people in prison and thereby violated the chief commandment of Christian civilization. In our time a few things are being done for the sick, but nothing at all for the prisoners; prison management holds absolutely no interest for our jurists. No, I assure you, Sakhalin is of great use and interest, and the only sad part of it all is that I'm the one who's going and not someone more conversant with the problems and capable of arousing public interest. I myself am going there on a trivial pretext.
Concerning my letter about Pleshcheyev, I wrote you that my young friends had become dissatisfied with my idleness and to justify myself I wrote you that, my idleness notwithstanding, I still accomplished more than my friends who never do anything at all. At least I read Marine Almanac and went to see Galkin, whereas they didn't do a thing.6 That's all there is to it, I guess.
We've been having some grandiose student disorders. It all began with the Academy of Peter the Great when the administration prohibited students from taking girls to official dormitory rooms, suspecting the girls not only of prostitution, but of politics as well. From the Academy it spread to the University, where students, surrounded by heavily armed Hectors and Achilleses, mounted and bearing lances, are now demanding the following:
Complete autonomy for universities.
Complete academic freedom.
Free admission to the university without regard to religion, nationality, sex or social status.
Admission of Jews to the university without any restrictions, in addition to granting them rights equal to those of other students.
Freedom of assembly and recognition of student associations.
Establishment of a university and student tribunal.
Abolition of school inspectors' police functions.
Lowering of tuition.
I copied this with a few abridgments from a leaflet. I think the flames are being fanned most vehemently by a bunch of young Jews and by the sex that is dying to get into the university, though five times worse prepared than the men, while even the men are miserably prepared and with rare exceptions make abominable students.7
I've sent you Krasheninnikov, Khvostov and Davydov, Russian Archives (III, 1879) and Proceedings of the Archeological Society (1 and 2, 1875).
Please send the sequel to Khvostov and Davydov if there is one, and I need volume five of the 1879 Russian Archives, not volume three. I'll mail out the rest of the books either tomorrow or the day after.8
I deeply sympathize with Gey,9 but he is torturing himself without cause. There are excellent treatments for syphilis these days; it can be cured beyond any doubt.
Send me my farce The Wedding along with the books. Nothing else. Come and see Maslov's play.10
Keep well and content. I am as willing to believe in your old age as in the fourth dimension. In the first place, you're not an old man yet; you think and work enough for ten people and the way you use your mind is far from senile. In the second place, you have no illnesses besides migraine headaches; I will swear to it. In the third place, old age is bad only for bad old people and difficult only for the difficult, and you're a good person who is not difficult. And in the fourth place, the difference between youth and age is quite relative and dependent on convention. And with this, out of respect for you, allow me to fling myself into a deep gorge and smash my skull to smithereens.
Yours, A. Chekhov
A while ago I wrote you about Ostrovsky.[52] He's paid me another visit. What shall I say to him?
You ought to go to Feodosia! The weather is marvelous.
letter—but apparently not clear enough for the partisans of the "secret, undiscoverable motive" theory.
Chekhov had in mind the explorations of Sakhalin described in Gennady Nevelskoy's book The Exploits of Russian Naval Officers in the Russian Far East 1849-55, which he read in the course of his preparatory research and which he cites in his book on Sakhalin.
I.e., the period of the reforms of the 1860s.
Reference to the widespread complaints by Chekhov's St. Petersburg friends about his unavailability to them during his Sakhalin research.
Free admission of women and Jews provided the main issue for the student disturbances on this occasion as it did on so many others at the end of the nineteenth century. There is a striking difference in Chekhov's tone and attitude toward the student disturbances in this letter and in the letters he was to write to Suvorin on the same subject in 1899, with their understanding and sympathy for the students' demands and position.
Books and scholarly journals that Suvorin lent Chekhov for his research out of his own personal library and from the library of New Times. Stepan Krasheninnikov's book was a compilation of Russian scientific explorations of the early nineteenth century. Khvostov and Davydov were two Russian naval officers who sailed to America and published a book about their voyage in 1810.
Gey was the pen name of Bogdan Heymann, who wrote for New Times on foreign affairs.
Maslov's The Seducer of Seville was, despite Chekhov's intercession, turned down by Korsh's company. It was, however, accepted by the Maly Theater, where it had its premiere on April 9, 1890. It did not last beyond the end of its first season there and was quickly forgotten.
Pyotr Ostrovsky was apparently still pestering Chekhov to get Suvorin to publish his sister's stories.
42. To Ivan Leontyev (Schcheglov)
Moscow, March 22, 1890
Greetings, dear Jeanchik,1
Thank you for your long letter and the good will that fills it from top to bottom. I'll be glad to read your military story. Will it come out in the Easter issue? It's been a long time since I've read anything of yours or anything of my own.
You write that you feel like giving me a harsh scolding, "particularly for my views on moral and artistic problems," you talk vaguely of some crimes of mine as deserving of friendly reproach, and even threaten me with "influential newspaper critics/' If we cross out the word "artistic," the entire phrase in quotation marks becomes clearer, but takes on a meaning which I must say disturbs me quite a bit. What's going on, Jean? How shall I take it? Can my ideas of morality differ so greatly from the ideas of people like you that I am deserving of reproach and the special attention of influential critics? I can't accept the possibility that you have some complex, lofty morality in mind, because there is no such thing as low, high or medium morality; there is only one, the one which in days of old gave us Jesus Christ2 and which now prevents you, me and Barantsevich from stealing, calling names, lying, etc. As for me, if I can trust my clear conscience, never in my life have I ever in word, deed or thought, in my stories or farces coveted my neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his ox, nor any of his cattle,3 nor have I ever stolen, or played the hypocrite, or flattered the strong, or sought any advantage from them, or engaged in blackmail, or lived at another's expense. True, I have wasted my life in idleness, laughed mindlessly, made a glutton of myself and indulged in drunkenness and fornication,4 but all that is my own personal affair and doesn't deprive me of the right to think that as far as morality is concerned I am distinguished from the ranks by neither pluses nor minuses, neither feats nor infamies: I am just like the majority. I have committed many sins, but I am quits with morality: I more than pay for my sins with the discomforts they entail. And if you want to give me a harsh scolding for not being a hero, you'd do better to throw your harshness out the window and substitute your charming tragic laugh for the scolding.
As to the word "artistic," it frightens me the way brimstone frightens merchants' wives. When people speak to me of what is artistic and what anti-artistic, of what is dramatically effective, of tendentious- ness and realism and the like, I am at an utter loss, I nod to everything uncertainly, and answer in banal half truths that aren't worth a brass farthing. I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don't. I have no other criterion. And if you were to ask me why I like Shakespeare and do not like Zlatovratsky,51 would be unable to answer. Maybe with time, when I grow wiser, I'll acquire a criterion, but in the meanwhile all discussions on what is and is not artistic wear me out. I see them as a continuation of the same scholastic discourses that people used in the Middle Ages for purposes of wearing themselves out.
If the critics to whose authority you refer know something you and I do not know, then why have they kept it to themselves for so long? Why don't they reveal their truths and immutable laws to us? If they did know some such thing, then believe me they would have long since showed us the way and we would know what to do, Fofanov wouldn't be locked up in an insane asylum, Garshin would still be alive,
Barantsevich would not be in the doldrums, and we wouldn't be as absolutely and utterly bored as we are now, and you wouldn't feel drawn to the theater, nor I to Sakhalin.6 But the critics maintain a dignified silence or talk their way out with idle blather. If they seem influential to you, it is only because they are nothing more than an empty barrel you can't help hearing.7
But let's drop all that and change the subject. Please don't place great literary hopes on my Sakhalin trip. I'm not going for observations or impressions; all I want to do is live six months differently from the way I've lived so far. Don't get your hopes up, old boy. If I have the time and ability to get something done, so much the better, if not, accept my humble apologies. I'll be setting out after Easter Week. I'll send you my Sakhalin address and detailed instructions as soon as I can. My family sends their regards, and I send mine to your wife.
Dear mustachioed junior captain,8 stay well and happy.
Yours, A. Chekhov
The Russian diminutive suffix -chik is added to the French version of Shcheglov's first name.
The meaning of the Russian is quite unequivocal here. Nevertheless, both Constance Garnett and the translator of the Lillian Hellman edition have disregarded the Russian syntax, the active participle and case governance, and translated this phrase as "only one which Jesus Christ gave us" and "only one, namely, that given us in his day by Jesus Christ," respectively. In terms of determining Chekhov's attitude to both morality and religion, it is surely important to know that he says morality gave Christ to the world and not vice versa.
Paraphrase of either Exodus 20:17 or Deuteronomy 5:21.
The elevated Church Slavic grammar and vocabulary of the original quotes and paraphrases a passage from an Orthodox Lenten prayer.
Nikolai Zlatovratsky, author of Populist novels that were for several generations the favorite reading of Russian radical university students.
An eloquent expression of Chekhov's disgust with literary circles and literary politics at the time of his departure for Sakhalin. This passage is a reply to the following statement in Shcheglov's letter to Chekhov of March 20: "Fofanov is in a mental institution. Gleb Uspensky is suffering from hallucinations. Albov recently buried his wife, to whom he had been married for only eight months, while Barantsevich is yearning to challenge some scoundrel to a duel and to die the death of Lermontov." On Mikhail Albov, see Letter 63.
Reference to Krylov's "The Two Barrels" which Chekhov already referred to in Letter 6.
Shcheglov's army rank.
43. To Vukol Lavrov1
Moscow, April 10, 1890
Vukol Mikhailovich,2
In the March issue of Russian Thought, on page 147 of the book review section I happened to read the following sentence: "Only yesterday the high priests of unprincipled writing, like Messrs. Yasinsky3 and Chekhov, whose names" etc. Criticism usually goes unanswered, but in this instance, it seems to be a question not of criticism, but of libel, plain and simple. I might have let even libel go by, except that in a few days I will be leaving Russia for an extended period, perhaps never to return,4 and I lack the strength to refrain from responding.
I have never been an unprincipled writer or, what amounts to the same thing, a scoundrel.
True, my literary career has consisted of an uninterrupted series of errors, sometimes flagrant errors, but that can be explained by the dimensions of my talent, not by whether I am a good or bad person. I have never gone in for blackmail, I have never written lampoons or denunciations, I have never toadied, nor lied, nor insulted. In short, I have written many stories and editorials that I would be only too glad to throw out because of their worthlessness, but I have never written a single line I am ashamed of today. If we assume that what you mean by a lack of principles is the sad situation that I, an educated man whose work frequently sees print, have done nothing for those I love and that my writing career has left no trace on, say, the zemstvo, the new courts, freedom of the press, freedom in general and so on, then in this respect Russian Thought should in all fairness think of me as a comrade instead of leveling accusations against me, because so far it has gone no farther than I in this direction—but you and I are not the ones to blame for this situation.
Even when judged externally as a writer, I certainly do not deserve to be publicly accused of a lack of principles. To date I have led a secluded life, shut up within four walls. You and I meet once every two years, and I have never even seen Mr. Machtet,5 for instance, and you can judge by that how often I get out of the house. I have always made a point of avoiding literary soirees, parties, conferences, etc. I never show my face in editorial offices without an invitation, I've always tried to have my friends think of me more as a doctor than a writer—in short, I was a modest writer, and the letter I am writing you now is my first immodest act in the ten years of my career as a writer. I am on excellent terms with my colleagues; I have never taken it upon myself to judge them or the journals and newspapers they work for, considering it beyond my competence and realizing that, given the present dependent state of the press, every word against a journal or a writer is not only merciless and tactless, but nothing less than criminal. Until now I have made a policy of refusing my services only to journals and newspapers whose shoddy quality was obvious and well proven, but when forced to choose among them, I gave preference to those who needed my services most of all, whether for material or other reasons. That is why I have worked for the Northern Herald and not for you or for the Herald of Europe, and that is why I have earned half as much as I could have earned if I had had a different view of my duties.
Your accusation is a libel. I cannot ask you to take it back, since the damage has already been done and cannot be chopped out with an ax. Nor can I explain it as an imprudence or an act of thoughtlessness or something else along those lines, since I am aware that the people who work in your editorial office are unquestionably decent and well brought up and, I hope, do not merely read and write articles, but exercise a feeling of responsibility for their every word. The only thing left for me to do is point out your error to you and ask you to believe in the sincerity of the oppressive feeling that led me to write you this letter. It goes without saying that after your accusation all business relations between us and even conventional social relations have become impossible.6
A. Chekhov
Ieronim Yasinsky was a very minor writer who in the course of his long life (1850-1930) indeed changed his convictions and positions numerous times. A sort of radical in his youth (the exiled Chernyshevsky hailed the young Yasinsky as the finest Russian writer since Turgenev and Tolstoy), he moved toward the positions of extreme reaction in the 1890s and was the first Russian writer to align himself with Lenin after the October takeover. Ostensibly a personal friend of Chekhov's, Yasinsky also led the critical pack at the time of the initial failure of The Seagull, penning a poisonous, but unfortunately untranslatable epigram about the play, which is his only utterance that is still remembered.
A unique instance in which Chekhov's emotion has led him to tell an outright lie.
Grigory Machtet was a revolutionary writer and journalist who spent several years in the United States in the early 1870s (and wrote voluminously about his experiences there) and also a number of years in exile in Siberia. He was a valued contributor to Russian Thought.
This letter occasioned a two-year break in relations between Lavrov and Chekhov, after which they made up and became rather close friends (Lavrov eventually came to be one of Chekhov's very few literary friends with whom he was on a first-name basis).
44. To Alexei Suvorin
Blagoveshchensk,[53]June 27, 1890
Greetings, dearest friend. The Amur is a very fine river; it has given me much more than I ever expected. I've been meaning to share my raptures with you for a long time now, but the damn boat vibrated seven days straight and kept me from writing. Besides, I lack the skill to describe anything as beautiful as the banks of the Amur; I am at a loss and concede my impoverishment. How can it be described? Think of the Suram Pass forced into being a river bank—and there you have the Amur. Cliffs, crags, forests, thousands of ducks, herons and all sorts of long-beaked rascals, and utter wilderness. The Russian bank is on the left, the Chinese on the right. If I feel like it, I can look at Russia, and if I feel like it, I can look at China. China is just as barren and savage as Russia: villages and sentinel huts are few and far between. Everything in my head has jumbled up and turned to dust. And no wonder, Your Excellency! I've sailed more than a thousand versts down the Amur and seen millions of landscapes. And before the Amur, mind you, there was Lake Baikal and the Transbaikal region. I can truly state that after seeing such riches and experiencing so many delights I am now not afraid of dying. People on the Amur are out of the ordinary; the life is interesting and quite unlike ours. The only subject of conversation is gold. Gold, gold, and nothing but gold. I'm in a silly mood. I don't feel like writing. I'm writing much too little, and even that like a pig. Today I mailed you four pages about the Yenisey and the taiga, and I will be sending you material about Baikal, the Transbaikal region, and the Amur. Don't throw them away. I will collect them and use them as a sort of musical score to tell you about what I can't get down on paper. I've just changed boats and am now on the steamship Muravyov, which is said not to vibrate. Maybe I'll be able to write now.
I've fallen in love with the Amur. I'd be only too happy to live here a year or two. It's beautiful and spacious and free and warm. Switzerland and France have never known such freedom. The lowliest convict on the Amur breathes more freely than the highest-placed general in Russia. If you were to live here for a while, you'd write many good things and captivate the public, but as for me, I don't have the skill.
Once you get to Irkutsk, you start running across the Chinese and they're as thick as flies. They are a most good-natured people. If Nasty a and Borya got to know the Chinese, they'd stop playing with their donkeys and transfer their sympathies to the Chinese. They'd make delightful pets.2
Once you get to Blagoveshchensk, you start seeing the Japanese, or to be more exact, Japanese women, petite brunettes with large, complicated hairdos, beautiful torsos, and, as I had occasion to observe, low- slung hips. They dress beautifully. Their language is dominated by the sound "ts" [. . .]. The Japanese girl's room was neat, asiatically sentimental, and cluttered with bric-a-brac. [. . .].3
When I invited a Chinese to have a vodka with me at the buffet, he kept offering his glass to me, the bartender, and the waiters and saying, "Taste, taste," before taking a drink himself. It's the Chinese ceremonial. Instead of drinking it all down at once the way we do, he took little gulps, had a bite of something to eat after each gulp, and then, to express his gratitude, gave me a few Chinese coins. They're an awfully polite people. They dress austerely, but beautifully. They eat delicious food with great ceremony.4
The Chinese will take the Amur away from us, of that there is no doubt. They won't take it themselves; others will hand it to them, the English, for example, who are acting like provincial governors in China and building a fortress. The people living along the Amur are great scoffers. They all laugh about how Russia is fretting and fuming over Bulgaria, which isn't worth a brass farthing, and has completely forgotten about the Amur. This is neither far-sighted nor clever. But I'll save the politics for when we get together.
I got your wire suggesting I return via America. I've thought of that myself. But people have been scaring me with tales of how expensive it will be. Money can be transferred to Vladivostok, not only to New York. It goes via Irkutsk, the Bank of Siberia, where I was received with extreme kindness. I still haven't run out of money, though I'm spending it shamelessly. I sustained more than a hundred-sixty-ruble loss on the carriage,5 and the officers who have been traveling with me have taken more than a hundred from me. But even so it's hardly likely a transfer of funds will be needed. But should the need arise I'll contact you well ahead of time. I am in perfect health. How could it be otherwise when for more than two months I've been out in the open, day and night. And what a lot of exercise!
I'm writing in a hurry because the Yermak is leaving with mail for Russia in an hour. You should get this letter in August. I kiss Anna Ivanovna's hand and pray to the heavens for her health and well-being. Has Ivan Pavlovich Kazansky,6 the young student whose well-ironed trousers are so depressing, been to see you?
I've been keeping up my medical practice along the way. In the village of Reynovo on the Amur, inhabited entirely by gold prospectors, a man asked me to take a look at his pregnant wife. As I was leaving, he slipped a wad of bills into my hand. I was embarrassed and tried to refuse, assuring the patient's husband I was very wealthy and in no need of money. He then took to assuring me that he too was very wealthy. It finally ended by my slipping him back part of the wad, though fifteen rubles stayed behind in my hand.
Yesterday I treated a boy and declined the six rubles his mommy tried to slip me. Now I'm sorry I declined.
Keep well and happy. Forgive me for writing so poorly and with so few details. Have you written me a letter addressed to Sakhalin yet?
I've been going swimming in the Amur. Swimming in the Amur and chatting and dining with gold smugglers—what could be more interesting? I'm off for the Yermak. Good-bye! Thanks for the news about my family.
Yours, A. Chekhov
edition. But the maidenly modesty of Chekhov's sister is wildly permissive when compared to the more delicate sensibilities of the Soviet censors, both Stalinist and post-Stalinist. They were so shocked by the idea that Chekhov actually went into the room of the Japanese girl with the low-slung hips that they cut the passage off after the sound "ts" in both editions. This was apparently one of Chekhov's exotic conquests during his Sakhalin trip of which he was later to brag, rather uncharacteristically, to such friends as Grigorovich and Shcheglov.
Chekhov's amiable curiosity about members of other nationalities and his delight in getting to know them are a prominent feature of his entire journey. In Siberia, he had friendly encounters with some Polish exiles, banished for participation in the 1863 rebellion against the Russians. He treated a Jewish patient at one relay and accepted the family's invitation to stay for a Sabbath supper of gefilte fish, which he pronounced the best meal of his entire trip. On Sakhalin he spent almost as much time studying the Gilyaks and the Ainus as he did the convict-settlers. This is all very much at variance with the chauvinistic, anti-foreign attitude common to many nineteenth-century Russian writers.
Instead of depending on the postal relay coaches, Chekhov purchased a carriage in the course of his trip. This proved an ill-advised move, for the carriage kept breaking down, involving Chekhov in frequent delays and costly repairs.
This unfortunate student struck up a conversation with Suvorin and Chekhov during Chekhov's visit to Feodosia in 1888 and bored them both to such an unbelievable extent that he became the epitome of everything dull and boring in their subsequent correspondence.
45. To Alexei Suvorin
Tatar Strait, S.S, Baikal[54]September 11, 1890
Greetings! I'm sailing through the Tatar Strait from North to South Sakhalin. I write this letter without knowing when it will reach you. Im well, though cholera has set a trap for me and its green eyes are staring at me from all sides. Cholera is everywhere: in Vladivostok, Japan, Shanghai, Chefoo, Suez and apparently even on the moon. Quarantines and fear are everywhere. They're expecting cholera on Sakhalin too and are holding all vessels in quarantine. In short, things are out of kilter. Europeans have been dying in Vladivostok, a general's wife among them.
I spent exactly two months on North Sakhalin. I was received extremely cordially by the local administration, though Galkin never wrote a word about me. Neither Galkin, nor Baroness Uxklill,[55] nor any of the other genii I was silly enough to turn to for help gave me any help whatsoever. I've had to act entirely on my own.
Kononovich,3 the commanding general of Sakhalin, is an intelligent and decent person. We hit it off well together, and everything went smoothly. I'll be bringing back some documents that will show you that the conditions I worked under were from the outset as favorable as could be. I saw everything, so the problem now is not what I saw, but how I saw it.
I don't know what I'll end up with, but I've gotten a good deal accomplished. I have enough for three dissertations.4 I got up every day at five in the morning, went to bed late, and spent all my days worrying about how much I had yet to do. Now that I'm done with the penal colony, I have the feeling I've seen it all, but missed the elephant.5 By the way, I had the patience to take a census of the entire population of Sakhalin. I went around to each of the settlements, stopped at each hut and talked with each person. I used a filing-card system for purposes of the census, and have records of about ten thousand convicts and settlers by now.6 In other words, there's not a single convict or settler on Sakhalin who hasn't talked with me. I was particularly successful in the children's census and I place great hopes in it.
I've had dinner at Landsberg's and sat in the kitchen of the former Baroness Heimbruck.7 I've visited all the celebrities. I attended a flogging session, and for three or four nights thereafter dreamed of the hangman and the repulsive flogging bench. I had conversations with convicts handcuffed to wheelbarrows. Once when I was having tea in a mine, Borodavkin, the former Petersburg merchant who was sent here for arson, took a teaspoon out of his pocket and offered it to me, and as a result of all this my nerves took such a beating that I resolved never to return to Sakhalin.
I'd write you more, but there's a lady in the cabin who is constantly chattering and laughing. I don't have the strength to write. She has been laughing and jabbering since last night.8
This letter will go via America, but it looks as if I won't. Everyone says the American route is more expensive and more boring.
Tomorrow I'll be seeing Japan—the Island of Matsmai—in the distance. It's past eleven at night. It's dark out on the sea and the wind is blowing. I can't understand how this ship can move on and keep its bearings in the pitch darkness and in such savage, little-known waters as the Tatar Strait to boot.
When I stop and think that I am separated from the world by ten thousand versts, I am overcome with apathy. I get the feeling it will take me a hundred years to get home.
My most humble respects and cordial greetings to Anna Ivanovna and your entire family. God grant you happiness and all the best.
Yours, A. Chekhov
I'm bored.
Having completed his medical census in the settlements of North Sakhalin, Chekhov was traveling by ship to the southern part of the island to continue his census-taking activities there.
Baroness Varvara Uxkiill (1850-1929) was a member of a noted Baltic family and a widely known philanthropist, equally at home at the imperial court, with Tolstoy and Chekhov and, in the early twentieth century, with some of the best Symbolist and Acmeist poets, whose friend she was. Zinaida Gippius described her as a woman everyone instantly loved upon first meeting her. The poet Vladislav Khodasevich encountered her after the Revolution, when she lived in penury, relying on the kindness of writers whom she had once so generously helped. Chekhov was in contact with her before his depaiture for Sakhalin because her son, a naval officer, was stationed there.
In his book on Sakhalin, Chekhov wrote of General Vladimir Kononovich with tremendous warmth and respect.
The trip to Sakhalin was to result not only in the book about it, but also in two extremely important stories, "In Exile" and "Gusev."
Quotation from Krylov's fable "The Inquisitive Man," in which a visitor to a museum gets so absorbed in examining tiny insects mounted in display cases that he fails to notice that there is a stuffed elephant in the room.
The census data were recorded on questionnaires printed to Chekhov's specifications by the Sakhalin administration. Chekhov and his assistants filled these questionnaires with personal and medical information on every man, woman and child who lived in the penal settlements on the island at the time of his visit.
Karl Landsberg and Baroness Olga Heimbruck were the two best-known convicts on Sakhalin. Each had been banished there after a widely publicized criminal trial. Landsberg induced a wealthy moneylender to name him his heir and then murdered him. Olga Heimbruck was convicted of arson, which she had committed at her lovers instigation. The invitation to dinner that Landsberg sent Chekhov has been preserved in the writers archive.
In The Island of Sakhalin this lady was described somewhat more charitably. There, her laughter was said to have been so infectious that it could make a passing whale burst out laughing. She was the wife of a naval officer stationed in Vladivostok, who left her husband behind and went to Sakhalin to escape from the cholera epidemic on the mainland.
46. To Alexei Suvorin
Moscow, December 9, 1890 Viergang House, Malaya Dmitrovka Street Greetings, dearest friend! Hurrah! Well, here I am at last, sitting at my desk, praying to my slightly faded penates, and writing to you. I feel good inside, almost as if I had never left home. I am well and content to the marrow of my bones. Here is a very brief report, I spent three months plus two days on Sakhalin, not two months as was reported in your paper. My work was strenuous; I took a complete and detailed census of the entire Sakhalin population and saw everything except an execution. When we get together, I'll show you a trunkful of odds and ends pertaining to convict life that are extremely valuable as raw material. I now know a great deal, but have brought back unpleasant feelings. While I was living on Sakhalin, I felt nothing more than a certain bitterness in my innards, the sort that comes from rancid butter, but now, when I think back on it, Sakhalin seems to me like hell itself. For two months I worked strenuously, giving myself no rest, and during the third the bitterness I've just spoken of became more than I could stand, the bitterness and boredom and the thought that cholera was on its way to Sakhalin from Vladivostok and that I might therefore risk spending the winter quarantined in the penal colony. But thank heavens the cholera epidemic ended, and on October 13th the steamer bore me away from Sakhalin. I stopped in Vladivostok. Of the Maritime Region and of our eastern coast in general with its fleets, problems, and dreams of the Pacific all I can say is: what crying poverty! The poverty, ignorance and pettiness are enough to drive you to despair. For every honest man there are ninety-nine thieves who are a disgrace to the Russian people. We bypassed Japan because of the cholera there; as a result I didn't get to buy you anything Japanese, spending the five hundred rubles you gave me for purchases on my own needs, which gives you the legal right to have me deported to a Siberian settlement. The first foreign port on our route was Hong Kong. The bay is marvelous, and the activity on the water was like nothing I'd ever seen before, even in pictures. They have excellent roads, horse-drawn streetcars, a funicular railway, museums, botanical gardens; wherever you turn you see how solicitous the English are for their employees; there is even a sailors' club. I rode in a jinrickshaw, that is, on people, bought all sorts of baubles from the Chinese, and became outraged when I heard my fellow travelers, Russians, vilifying the English for exploiting the natives. Yes, the Englishman exploits the Chinese, the Sepoys and the Hindus, I thought, but in return he gives them roads, water mains, museums, Christianity. You do your own exploiting, but what do you give in return?1
Once we left Hong Kong, the ship started to roll. It was empty and made thirty-eight-degree dips, and we were afraid it would capsize. The discovery that I am not susceptible to sea sickness was a pleasant surprise. On the way to Singapore we threw overboard two men who had died. When you see a dead man wrapped in sailcloth flying head over heels into the water and when you think that there are several versts down to the bottom, you grow frightened and somehow start thinking that you are going to die too and that you too will be thrown into the sea.2 Our horned cattle fell ill, and they were slaughtered and thrown overboard in accordance with the sentence passed by Dr. Shcherbak and yours truly.
I don't remember Singapore any too well because while driving around it I was for some reason depressed, almost in tears. Then came Ceylon, the place where I found paradise. Here in paradise I traveled more than a hundred versts by train and had my fill of palm groves and bronze women. When I have children, I'll say to them, not without pride: "Why, you sons of bitches, I've had relations in my day with a black- eyed Hindu girl, and guess where? In a coconut grove, on a moonlit night!"3 From Ceylon we sailed thirteen days without a stop and nearly went out of our minds with boredom. I can take extreme heat quite well. The Red Sea looks dismal. Seeing Mount Sinai was a moving experience.
God's world is good. Only one thing in it is bad: we ourselves. How little justice and humility there is in us, and how poorly we understand patriotism! A drunken, frazzled, dissolute husband may love his wife and children, but what good is his love? The newspapers tell us we love our great homeland, but how do we express our love? Instead of knowledge we have insolence and arrogance beyond measure, instead of work—indolence and swinishness; we have no sense of justice, our conception of honor goes no farther than honor for one's uniform, a uniform that usually adorns the prisoner's dock in court. What is needed is work, and the hell with everything else. We must above all be just, and all the rest will be added unto us.4
I have a passionate desire to have a talk with you. I'm seething inside. You're the only one I want because you're the only one I can talk to. The hell with Pleshcheyev. The hell with the actors too.
Your telegrams arrived in an unbelievable state. Everything was garbled.
I traveled from Vladivostok to Moscow with the son of Baroness Uxkiill (the desman5 I wrote you about) who is a naval officer. His mother is staying at the Slavic Bazaar Hotel. I'm on my way to see her now; she's called for me for some reason. She's a good woman. At any rate her son goes into raptures over her, and he is a pure and honest boy.
How happy I am to have done without Galkin-Vrasky! He didn't write a single line about me, and when I made my appearance on Sakhalin, I was a total stranger.
When will I see you and Anna Ivanovna? How is Anna Ivanovna? Write me about everything in detail, because it's not likely that I'll get to see you before the holidays. Regards to Nastya and Borya. To prove I've been to the penal colony I'll pounce on them with a knife and scream in a savage voice when I visit you, set Anna Ivanovna's room on fire, and preach subversive ideas to poor Kostya, the public prosecutor.6
I embrace you all and your entire household with the exception of the Resident and Burenin,7 to whom I ask you merely to send my regards and who should long ago have been sent off to Sakhalin.
I had many opportunities to speak about Maslov with Shcher- bak.8 I find Maslov very likable.
May the heavens keep you.
Yours, A. Chekhov
After witnessing the abject misery to which Russian genocidal policies were reducing the Ainus and the Gilyaks on Sakhalin, Chekhov could hardly be expected to wax indignant over British colonial exploitation. This unfavorable comparison of Russian colonialism to its British variety was more than the nationalistic hearts of Soviet censors could take. They deleted the entire text after the words "like nothing I've ever seen before, even in pictures" from the 1944—51 edition. Of all their deletions this particular cut was the one most widely noticed by Western scholars, and because of the wide publicity it was given, the passage was reinstated in the 1963-64 edition.
This burial at sea was later depicted by Chekhov in the magnificently poetic closing passages of "Gusev." The provenance of the shark and the pilot fish which appear in the same portion of that story has been described by Mikhail Chekhov on the basis of his brother's account: "In the Indian Ocean, while the ship was moving full speed ahead, he would jump into the water from the prow and grab a towline thrown to him from the stern. This was his way of taking a swim. During one such swim he saw not far from him a shark and a school of pilot fish which he later described in his story 'Gusev.'"
Deleted by censors in both 1944-51 and 1963-64 editions. Ivan Shcheglov's journal records that at Chekhov's name-day dinner, which was celebrated at an elegant St. Petersburg restaurant on January 17, 1891, Chekhov told the all-male group of guests (consisting of Shcheglov, Pleshcheyev and his son, the actor Svobodin and the writers Barantsevich and Modest Tchaikovsky) that "he had [. . .] a bronze woman under a palm tree" in Ceylon. He also advised Shcheglov to get himself a dusky-skinned mistress, as it would be most stimulating for his writing.
A formulation from the Russian version of Luke 12:31 is quoted here (the English equivalent is: "But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you").
Baroness UxkiilTs Baltic name reminded Chekhov of the Russian word vykhukhol, which means a desman, an aquatic insectivore, valued for its fur. Lucette in Nabokov's Ada wears a desman fur, identified as such in both English and Russian, when she attempts to seduce her half-brother Van.
Konstantin Vinogradov, the deputy chief prosecutor of the Russian navy, was a St. Petersburg friend of Suvorin's who had offered Chekhov the use of his extensive private library for preliminary research on Sakhalin.
The Resident (Alexander Dyakov) and Burenin were the most scurrilous and overtly reactionary members of the New Times staff. Shortly after Chekhov's return from Sakhalin, Burenin published a few nasty innuendoes about his trip in Suvorin's paper.
Dr. Alexei Shcherbak, mentioned earlier in this letter in connection with the slaughtering of sick cattle, was a naval physician who regularly traveled to Sakhalin as a part of his duties. He later published some articles about his Sakhalin experiences.
47. To Alexei Suvorin
Moscow, December 24, 1890
We wish you and your esteemed family a happy holiday season and we wish your home many happy returns in good health and well- being.1
I believe in both Koch and spermine, and I praise the Lord. Kochines, spermines, etc. all appear to the public to be some sort of miracle that has sprung unexpectedly from someone's head like Pallas Athene, but people on the inside see it as nothing more than the natural result of everything that has been done for the last twenty years. Much has been done, my dear friend. Surgery alone has done so much it's dumfounding. The situation twenty years ago appears simply pitiful to today's medical student. Dear Alexei Sergeyevich, if I were offered a choice between the "ideals" of the celebrated sixties and today's poorest zemstvo hospital, I'd take the latter without the least hesitation.
Does the kochine cure syphilis? Possibly. But as far as cancer is concerned, you'll have to permit me to have my doubts. Cancer is not a microbe; it is a tissue that grows in the wrong place and like a weed overgrows all the neighboring tissues. If Gey's uncle has experienced some relief, it only means that erysipelatous fungus,2 that is, the elements that produce erysipelas, is an integral part of the kochine. It has long been observed that the growth of malignant tumors is temporarily halted during erysipelas.
I hate your Tresor. I've brought some highly interesting animals back from India with me. They are mongooses, and are known for waging war on rattlesnakes. They are very inquisitive, love humans and break dishes. If it weren't for Tresor, I'd take one for a stay in Petersburg. He'd sniff out all your books and inspect the pockets of everyone who came to call. During the day he roams all over the room and follows people around, and at night he sleeps on someone's bed and purrs like a cat. He might well tear out Tresor's throat or Tresor his. He can't stand other animals.3
Send me stories to be polished the way you used to. I enjoy doing
it.
It's really strange. On my way to Sakhalin and back, I felt perfectly healthy, and now that I'm home I don't know what the hell is going on inside me. I have a constant headache, my whole body feels lethargic, I tire quickly, I'm indifferent to everything, and most important—my heartbeat is irregular. Every minute my heart stops a few seconds and refuses to beat.
Misha has had a Rank Six uniform made and is going to make a round of official visits in it tomorrow.4 Mother and Father look at him with tender emotion. "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace" is written on both their faces as it was on the face of Simeon who received Our Lord at the Temple.5
The Baroness Uxkiill (the desman) is publishing books for the peasants. The motto "Truth" adorns each book; truth costs between three and five kopecks a copy. She publishes Uspensky and Korolenko and Potapenko, and other greats. She asked me for advice on what to publish. I was unable to give her any, but recommended in passing that she rummage around in old journals, yearly miscellanies and the like. I've also advised her to read Grebenka.6 When she complained of having trouble getting books, I promised to intercede with you on her behalf. If she does make a request, don't turn her down. The Baroness is an honest lady and won't swipe any books. Besides returning them, she'll reward you with a bewitching smile.
Alexei Alexeyevich has sent me some splendid wine.7 Everyone who has tasted it agrees the wine is so good that you have every right to be proud of your son. He also sent me a letter in Latin. Splendid.
Yesterday I mailed you a story.8 I'm afraid I missed the deadline. The story is on the short side, but what the hell.
In Moscow medical circles Koch is regarded with extreme caution and nine-tenths of the doctors don't believe in him.
Well, God grant you all the best and, most important of all, good health.
Yours, A. Chekhov
In Russian, this sentence imitates the diction of a semiliterate person trying to sound cultured and elegant.
Apparently a slip of the pen for "erysipelatous organism" or "bacillus."
Tresor was Suvorin's dog. The mongooses Chekhov brought from India are frequently mentioned in his correspondence during the next year; decades later his sister Maria and his brother Mikhail were to recollect these animals with great fondness in their respective memoirs. The two male mongooses adjusted nicely to life in Chekhov's household. In the summer they were taken to the country, where they killed snakes and where one of them became lost in the woods and was recovered by a searching party many days later. During the winter, one of the males fell ill and was nursed back to health by Chekhov with great solicitude. The female mongoose, which was smaller and looked somewhat different from the males, was a surly little animal that spent her time hiding under the furniture, from where she would dash out now and then to sink her teeth into people's ankles. After one year it was no longer convenient to keep the mongooses about the house and Chekhov decided to donate his pets to the Moscow Zoo. It was only when Maria took them there that it was discovered that the animal sold to Chekhov in India as a female mongoose was actually a palm civet, a fierce little Asian carnivore, totally unsuited to be a domestic pet.
Chekhov's involvement with the mongooses (and his subsequent involvements with dachshunds and with his pet crane) point to a basic trait in his psychological makeup that sets him off once more from other great nineteenth-century Russian writers. To ask a possibly unfair question, could anyone ever imagine Gogol or Dostoyevsky noticing that such a thing as a mongoose existed in this world?
As for the rattlesnakes (gremuchie zmei), which are actually restricted to the American continent, where mongooses are not likely to get at them, this might be a slip of the pen for ochkovye zmei (cobras). However, all Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century dictionaries, from Dahl to the present-day Academy of Sciences dictionary, state that rattlesnakes live "in the tropics" and do not restrict them to any particular continent. As Letter 36 suggests, Chekhov believed that rattlesnakes could be found on the banks of the Nile.
After finishing law school, Mikhail Chekhov, lacking confidence in his ability to become a practicing lawyer, accepted a civil service job with the Ministry of Finance and was appointed a tax inspector.
Quotation of Luke 2:29 and reference to the surrounding context of that verse.
Yevgeny Grebenka (1812-48), a Ukrainian writer who wrote both in
Ukrainian and in Russian. Chekhov recommended his folksy stories and fables to Baroness Uxkiill as being of possible interest for the peasant and factory-worker readers for whom her publications were intended.
Suvorin's eldest son Alexei sent the wine to Chekhov in payment for reprinting his story "Champagne" in the yearbook published by Suvorin (cf. the end of Letter 38).
"Gusev."
48. To Anatoly Koni1
Petersburg, January 26, 1891
Dear Anatoly Fyodorovich,
I have taken my time answering your letter because I won't be leaving Petersburg before Saturday.
I am sorry I didn't go to see Madame Naryshkina,2 but I think it best to postpone a visit to her until my book comes out and until I am more at home in my material. My brief Sakhalin past seems so enormously long to me that when I wish to speak about it I don't know where to begin, and I always seem to be saying the wrong thing.
I will try to describe the situation of Sakhalin's children and adolescents in great detail. It is quite extraordinary. I saw starving children, I saw thirteen-year-old kept women, and pregnant fifteen-year- olds. Girls start practicing prostitution at the age of twelve, sometimes before the onset of menstruation. Churches and schools exist only on paper; children are educated by their milieu and the penal colony environment. I have a record, by the way, of a conversation between a ten-year-old boy and myself during my census taking in the settlement of Upper Armudan. The settlers are uniformly destitute and have a reputation for being passionate stuss players. I entered one of the huts. No one was at home but a towheaded, stoop-shouldered barefoot little boy sitting on a bench and lost in thought. We started up a conversation.
I: What is your father's patronymic?
He: I don't know.
I: You live with your father and you don't know his name?
Shame on you.
He: He's not my real father.
I: What do you mean, "not real"?
He: He's just living with ma.
I: Is your mother married or widowed?
He: She's a widow. She came here for her husband.
I: What is "for her husband" supposed to mean?
He: For killing him.
I: Do you remember your father?
He: No, I don't. I'm a bastard. Ma gave birth to me on the Kara.
On the Amur steamer with me there was a prisoner in foot shackles who was going to Sakhalin for having murdered his wife. He had his six-year-old daughter with him. I noticed that whenever the father went below to the lavatory from the upper deck, his escort and his daughter followed him, and while he sat in the lavatory, his daughter and a soldier with a gun stood outside the door. When he made his way back up the ladder, his daughter clambered up behind him holding onto the shackles. At night the girl slept in a pile with the prisoners and soldiers. I remember once attending a funeral on Sakhalin. The wife of a settler who was away in Nikolayevsk was being buried. Four ex officio convict pallbearers; the paymaster and I, in the capacity of Hamlet and Horatio wandering around the cemetery; a Circassian, who had been a boarder of the deceased and who came out of idle curiosity; and a woman convict who came out of pity were all standing around the newly dug grave. The woman had brought along the two children of the deceased, an infant and a four-year-old boy named Alyoshka who was wearing a woman's jacket and blue pants with bright patches on the knees. It was cold and damp, the grave had water in it, and the convicts were laughing. We were in sight of the ocean. Alyoshka peered into the grave with curiosity. He tried to wipe his chilled nose, but the jacket's long sleeves got in the way. While the grave was being filled in, I asked him, "Alyoshka, where's your mother?" He made the gesture of a landowner who has been wiped out at cards, laughed, and said, "Buried!" The convicts laughed. The Circassian turned to us and asked what he was supposed to do with the children, since he's not obliged to feed them.
I met with no infectious diseases on Sakhalin, and there is very little congenital syphilis, but I did see blind children, children who were filthy and covered with rashes, the sorts of diseases that give evidence of neglect.
Of course I can't solve the child question. I don't know what needs to be done. But it seems to me that charity and the surplus left from prison and various other funds will never get anything done; to my mind, it is harmful to leave the solution up to private charity—which in Russia is very much a matter of chance—and surpluses that don't exist. I would prefer it if governmental funds were involved.3
My Moscow address is:
Viergang House Malaya Dmitrovka
Allow me to thank you for your hospitality and your promise to come visit me and remain your sincerely respectful and devoted
A. Chekhov
Anatoly Koni (1844-1927) was one of the most prominent Russian jurists of the period, and at various times held some of the highest positions in the Russian judiciary. A great connoisseur of literature, he was a friend or associate of almost all the important Russian writers of the second half of the nineteenth century and he wrote about all of them in his fascinating memoirs, which were reissued in the Soviet Union in 1965. His memoir on Chekhov, in particular, contains one of the most sober and factual appraisals of the impact of The Island of Sakhalin on Russian penology and on Russian society.
Yelizaveta Naryshkina was a lady in waiting to the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the wife of Alexander III. On January 18, 1891, Chekhov wrote to his sister: "I went to see Koni yesterday and we discussed Sakhalin; we've agreed to go to see Naryshkina next week to ask her to bring the Sakhalin children to the attention of the Empress and to suggest arranging an orphanage for them." In addition to her position at the court, Madame Naryshkina was also the president of two important charitable organizations concerned with aiding the families of convicts and deportees. Koni's memoirs describe her as a highly energetic, resourceful and efficient person. After Koni showed her the present letter, she started a campaign to get the authorities interested in the plight of Sakhalin children, as a result of which three children's homes were built and operated on the island by the organization she headed, with the authorities' full support.
Portions of this letter were later incorporated by Chekhov into the text of The Island of Sakhalin.
49. To David Manucharov1
Lopasnya, March 21, 1896
Most Honored David Lvovich,
Let me answer your questions:
1. Baron Korf, former governor-general of the Amur region, granted me permission to visit the prisons and settlements on the condition that I avoid all contact with political prisoners—I was obliged to give him my word. I had very little occasion to speak with political prisoners, and then only in the presence of witnesses—officials (several of whom were meant to spy on me), and I know very little about their lives. Political prisoners on Sakhalin dress as they like and do not live in prisons. They serve as clerks, overseers (in the kitchen and the like), weather station observers. While I was there, one was a church elder, another an assistant prison warder (unofficially), and yet another ran the police department library, and so on.2 While I was there, none of them were subjected to corporal punishment. It was rumored that their morale was very low. It was also rumored that there had been cases of suicide.
2. If you have technical training, you can occupy the post of senior overseer in the local workshop, where in my time there was an extremely great need for experienced managers. Senior overseers receive fifty to sixty3 rubles a month and even more. The way to go about securing a position is to apply to the commander of the island or visit the Main Prison Department in Petersburg. It seems to me that if you take your case to the head of the department, show him your documents, explain to him that you wish to live and work on Sakhalin for family reasons, he will deal with your request most favorably.
I wish you the best of luck and remain at your service.
A. Chekhov
David Manucharov was a railroad mechanic, whose younger brother had been earlier sentenced to ten years of solitary confinement at the Schliis- selburg Fortress on political charges. The sentence was later commuted to deportation to Sakhalin, and David Manucharov wrote to Chekhov, asking whether political prisoners on Sakhalin were subject to corporal punishment and whether it would be possible for him to move voluntarily to Sakhalin so as to be near his brother. Chekhov's reply, first published in i960, is placed here in violation of the chronological sequence, since it obviously belongs with the Sakhalin letters.
The custom of allowing the better-educated political prisoners to occupy the more comfortable jobs in the tsarist penal colonies is the very opposite of the current practice in Soviet labor camps (as illustrated in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Love Girl and the Innocent), where the common criminals are given the privileged jobs and the political offenders are restricted to menial work.
The amount Alexander Chekhov was paid for his editorial job on the staff of New Times in St. Petersburg. High salaries, used as an enticement to get a free labor force to move voluntarily to the inhospitable regions of the Far East, remain a part of Russian reality today, eighty years after Chekhov's Sakhalin trip.
WESTERN EUROPE
*cGusev" was published in New Times a few weeks after Chekhov's return to Russia from Sakhalin. This story of an encounter between a dying peasant soldier and a dying radical intellectual in the sick bay of a military transport passing through the Indian Ocean was an instant and durable success. The inability of the two principal characters to communicate because of the cultural gap that separates them epitomizes the great Chekhovian theme of mutual incomprehension; the device of subtly intermingling the soldier's speech patterns and his stream of consciousness with the authorial voice, which Chekhov utilized in this story, was later to be developed to striking effect by Solzlienitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Early in January of 1891, Chekhov went to St. Petersburg for a reunion with Suvorin and other friends. It did not turn out well. "I am surrounded by a dense atmosphere of unwarranted, undefinable ill will," Chekhov wrote to his sister on January 14.
They feed me dinners and praise me in trite eulogies, but at the same time they'd like to eat mc alive. Why is that? The devil alone knows. Were I to shoot myself, it would afford great pleasure to nine-tenths of my friends and admirers. And in what petty ways they express their petty feelings! Burenin berated me in his article, even though berating your own contributors is simply not done; Maslov (Bezhetsky) keeps turning down Suvorin's invitation to come to dinner; Shcheglov collects and repeats all the gossip that circulates about me and so on. All this is horribly stupid and dreary. They are not people, they're some kind of walking mildew.
lie returned to Moscow, collected and shipped several crates of books for Sakhalin schools and libraries and resumed work on "The Duel." But somehow Chekhov just could not get settled and early in March, when Suvorin suggested that he accompany him on a tour of Italy and France, he jumped at the chance. The tour lasted for a little over a month and had to be cut short because of persistent rainy weather. But, for all its brevity, Chekhov's first personal contact with the Western world resulted in a crop of highly significant letters, important for our understanding of his views and his character.
Ever since Denis Fonvizin, the finest Russian playwright of the eighteenth century, toured Western Europe on the eve of the French Revolution and declared upon his return, "We are beginning, but they are finished," the traditional outlook of Russian literary travelers in the West had been set. Ilya Ehrenburg unwittingly summed up this outlook when he explained during a visit to the United States in the late 1940s that he was not interested in seeing American theaters, universities or health clinics —all he wished to see was the slums. No matter how critical a Russian writer might be of the institutions of his own country, no matter how flawed or grim Russian reality might appear in his writings, he inevitably becomes a superpatriot once he sets foot outside Russia, ever on the lookout for proof that things are worse abroad than at home, drawing sweeping generalizations from incidental or trivial occurrences and vociferously yearning for the comforts of the familiar Russian reality he has left behind. Fonvizin on his grand tour in the eighteenth century, Dostoyevsky in Paris and London in the middle of the nineteenth, Maxim Gorky in New York at the beginning of the twentieth, Boris Pilnyak in Hollywood in the 1920s all conform to this pattern with remarkable consistency and with almost no variations.
Chekhov's independence from this chauvinist tradition is quite astounding. It does not even occur to him that unbiased observations and independent thinking might be incompatible with patriotism. He loves freedom and he loves culture and in his letters he is happy when he sees that people abroad can enjoy them. When he is jostled by a policeman during the dispersal of a demonstration in Paris, he does not see in this one incident the key to Western culture and political systems. If some aspect of foreign life is superior to something in Russia, he sees no reason for not saying so. And he does notice the things that really matter: the freedom to publish and read books on any subject in Vienna, the free and open discussion in the French Parliament of the mistreatment of striking workers by the police.
During Chekhov's subsequent visits to Western Europe, the glowing enthusiasm expressed in some of the letters in this section came to be tempered by his closer acquaintance with Western realities. But the obvious pleasure of his first encounter with European countries is a source of acute embarrassment for his Soviet biographers and annotators. The attitude he expresses is clearly the one that in Stalin's time was branded as "cosmopolitan" (this word meant the same thing in Russian that it means in other European languages until some time after World War II, when its meaning was arbitrarily changed and it came to indicate the opposite of "patriotic"). Maria Chekhova, dictating her memoirs shortly after one of the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns, when she was past ninety, made a desperate attempt to prove that her brother had liked Italy so much only because of its art and that he yearned to return to Russia every moment of his stay abroad. The 1963-64 State Publishing House edition of Chekhov's collected works solved this problem in a simpler way. Except for letters 52 and 54, all the other letters included in this section were omitted from the two thick volumes of Chekhov's letters in that edition.
50. To Maria Chekhova
Petersburg, March 16, 18911
I've just seen Duse,2 the Italian actress, in Shakespeare's Cleopatra. I don't understand Italian, but she played so beautifully that I had the feeling I understood every word. A remarkable actress. I've never seen anything like it.3 Watching Duse, I was overcome by depression from the thought that we have to form our reactions and taste on such wooden actresses as X4 and those like her whom we call great only because we've never seen better. Looking at Duse, I realized why the Russian theater is such a bore.
I sent you a money order for three hundred rubles today. Have you received it?
After Duse it was amusing to read the enclosed address.5 Good God, what a decline in taste and justice! And these are supposed to be students, damn their hides! It does not matter to them whether it's Solovtsov or Salvini:6 both enjoy the same "fervid popularity in the hearts of the younger generation." Hearts of this kind aren't worth a brass farthing.
We're leaving for Warsaw tomorrow at one-thirty. Stay alive and well, all of you. I send my regards to all of you, to everyone, even the lady mongoose, who doesn't deserve regards.
I'll be keeping in touch.
With all my heart,
A. Chekhov
The original is dated March 16, but the annotators to the 1944-51 edition maintain that it had to have been written on the seventeenth, apparently because Chekhov wrote it after returning past midnight from the theater, where he had witnessed Duse's performance on the sixteenth.
It is fitting to have Chekhov's homage to the acting genius of Eleonora Duse serve as a prelude to his Italian journey. His unreserved delight at her performance in Anthony and Cleopatra makes an interesting contrast to his reactions to the acting of the other most celebrated actress of the period, Sarah Bernhardt, whose Moscow appearances he covered ten years earlier for several humor magazines. While Russian critics and audiences went delirious with admiration, the twenty-one-year-old Chekhov denied that the Divine Sarah had any true acting ability at all, praising her instead for her hard work. Her performance of La Dame aux Camelias was for Chekhov a triumph of meticulously and intelligently planned stage effects, lacking in any true depth or meaning.
The rest of the paragraph from this point on was deleted by the censors in the 1944-51 edition. The entire letter was omitted in the 1963-64 one.
Only three Russian actresses could be called "great" when this letter was written: Maria Savina, Maria Yermolova and Glykeria Fedotova. All three were alive when Maria Chekhova published her edition of the letters, the only one in which this passage appears, and since all three were on friendly terms with Chekhov, the replacement of the name with an X seems understandable. Chekhov venerated Yermolova both as an actress and as a person and he described Fedotova as a "genuine, authentic actress." His opinion of the celebrated Savina, however, is known to have deteriorated after she played Sasha in his Ivanov. Ivan Bunin remembered Chekhov's saying to him: "No matter how much people might admire her, Savina is to acting what Viktor Krylov is to writing drama" (Krylov was a hack of a playwright whose work Chekhov held in contempt). It seems plausible, therefore, that the name replaced by the X is that of Maria Savina.
A newspaper clipping was enclosed in this letter, which cited the address sent to Nikolai Solovtsov by the students of the Kharkov Technological Institute on the occasion of his guest appearance in that city. Chekhov was revolted by the trite and platitudinous wording of the address.
The Italian tragedian Tommaso Salvini, who made a tour of Russia and was greeted by similarly worded addresses.
51. To Maria Chekhova1
Vienna, March 20, 1891
Dear Czech2 friends,
I'm writing you from Vienna. I arrived yesterday at four in the afternoon. The trip went very well. From Warsaw to Vienna I traveled like a railroad Nana in a luxurious car of the "International Society of Sleeping Cars": beds, mirrors, gigantic windows, carpets and so on.
my Tungus3 friends! If you only knew how lovely Vienna is! It is not to be compared with any city I have seen in my entire life. The streets are broad and elegantly paved, there are a lot of boulevards and public gardens, six- and seven-story houses, and stores—stores that are sheer vertigo, sheer mirage! The store windows have billions of neckties alone! And what amazing bronze, china and leather objects! The churches are gigantic, but their size is not oppressive; it caresses the eyes because it seems as though they are spun of lace. St. Stefan's Cathedral and the Votiv-Kirche are especially lovely. They are more like pastries than buildings. The parliament, the town hall, the university are all magnificent. Everything is magnificent, and it wasn't until yesterday and today that I fully realized that architecture is indeed an art. And here that art is not scattered in bits and pieces as it is in our country; it extends for verst after verst. There are many monuments. No side street is without its own bookshop. Some of the bookshops even display Russian books, but alas, they are the works of all sorts of anonymous writers who write and publish abroad, not of Albov, Barantsevich or Chekhov. I've seen Renan, Secrets of the Winter Palace,4 etc. It's odd that here you may read anything you like and say whatever you please.
Harken, О ye nations, unto what the goddamn cabbies here are like.5 Instead of droshkies they have stunning, brand-new carriages with one, or more often, two horses. The horses are excellent. The driver's seats are occupied by dandies in jackets and top hats, reading newspapers. They are courteous and obliging.
The dinners are fine. There's no vodka; they drink beer and fairly good wine instead. There's only one bad point: they charge for bread. When they bring you the check, they ask you, "Wieviel Brotchen?" that is, how many rolls did you polish off? And they charge you for each roll.
The women are beautiful and elegant. When you get down to it, everything is pretty damn elegant.
haven't completely forgotten my German. I understand them, and they understand me.
It was snowing as we crossed the border, and though there's no snow in Vienna, it's cold all the same.
I'm homesick and miss you all, and besides I feel guilty for having abandoned you again. It's no great tragedy, though. When I get back, I won't set foot out of the house for a year. My regards to everybody, everyone. Papa, do me a favor and buy me a copy of the folk
print of St. Varlaam riding in a sleigh with the bishop standing on a balcony in the distance and the text of the life of St. Varlaam written out underneath. You can get it at Sytin's or wherever you like- Leave it on my desk when you get it.
We probably won't be going to Spain. We'll visit Bukhara.6
Semashko, have you written Ivanenko?7 Have you spoken with Lika8 about the city-hall job?
I wish you all the best. Don't forget me, sinner that I am, I send you all my most humble respects, I embrace you, bless you, and remain
Your loving
A- Chekhov
Everyone we meet recognizes us as Russians. No one looks me in the face; they all stare at my grizzled cap. Looking at my cap probably makes them think I'm a very rich Russian count.
Have I written you about Alexander's children? They are both well and making an excellent impression.
My regards to handsome Levitan.
The letter is actually addressed to the entire Chekhov family and to some of their friends as well.
The name Chekhov is a possessive form of the Russian word for "Czech." There is a theory that the original form of the name was Chokhov, in which case it would refer to charms and magic spells.
Chekhov jokingly addressed his family by the name of this Siberian tribe in the letters he wrote them from Siberia.
Ernest Renan's books on the history of Christianity, written from the position of scientific positivism, were banned in Russia by ecclesiastic censorship as sacrilegious. Paul Grimm's lurid German novel Secrets of the Winter Palace, a sensationalist expose of the Romanov dynasty, was frequently smuggled into Russia by returning tourists.
An amusing mixture of biblical and vulgar diction in the original.
Obviously, a joke.
The Polish cellist Marian Semashko and the flutist Alexander Ivanenko had been close and faithful friends of the entire Chekhov family since Chekhov's student days.
Lydia (Lika) Mizinova was a colleague of Maria Chekhova's at the school where the latter taught after finishing teachers' college. Chekhov carried on a humorous correspondence with her, but, as her published letters to him show, rejected her attempts to establish a serious emotional relationship. But because of her rather tenuous connection with the character of Nina in The Seagull (always denied by Chekhov himself), because she saved and published all the letters Chekhov wrote her and because she was a great favorite of Maria Chekhova, who in subsequent years was likely to exaggerate the importance of her brother's involvement with Lika, this rather casual friend was given a position of quite unwarranted prominence in Chekhov's popular biographies and in his legend. It is odd indeed that Lika, whom Chekhov rejected, whom he tried to hand over to Levitan and did succeed in passing on to Ignaty Potapenko, should be considered as one of his major loves, while women with whom he had deep and meaningful involvements, such as Dunya Efros, Olga Kundasova and Lydia Yavorskaya, remain mere footnotes in his biography only because they did not choose to publish the letters he wrote them or to publicize their affairs with him.
52. To Ivan Chekhov1
Venice, March 24, 1891
I am now in Venice. I arrived from Vienna the day before yesterday. All I can say is never in my life have I seen a city more remarkable than Venice. Such fascination, such glitter, such exuberance. For streets and alleyways it has canals, for cabs, gondolas, the architecture is amazing, and there's not the least corner anywhere that is unworthy of historical or artistic interest. Gliding along in a gondola, you see palaces of the doges, the house where Desdemona lived, the homes of famous artists, churches. And the churches have paintings and sculpture that surpass our wildest dreams. In a word, it's enchanting.
All day from morning till night I sit in my gondola and glide from street to street. Or else I wander all over famous St. Mark's Square. The square is as smooth and clean as parquet flooring. This is where St. Mark's Cathedral is—something that eludes description. And the Palace of the Doges and all the other buildings made me feel the way I do when I hear part singing: I feel overwhelming beauty, and revel in it.
And the evenings! Good Lord in Heaven! I could die from the novelty of it all. There you are gliding along in your gondola. It's warm, it's quiet, the stars are out. There are no horses in Venice, so it's as quiet here as in the fields. Gondolas are darting about on all sides. Then up floats a gondola strung with lanterns carrying a double bass, some violins, a guitar, a mandolin, a cornet-a-pistons, two or three ladies, several men—and you hear singing and music, operatic music. What voices! You move on a bit, and there's another boat with singers, and still another. Until midnight the air is filled with a mixture of tenors, violins and all sorts of sounds that tear at your heartstrings.
Merezhkovsky, whom I met here, has gone wild with ecstasy.2 A Russian, poor and humbled, can very easily go out of his mind in this world of beauty, wealth and freedom. You feel like staying here forever, and when you stand in church listening to the organ, you feel like converting to Catholicism.
The burial chambers of Canova and Titian are magnificent. Great artists here are buried in church like kings. Art is not looked down upon as in our country. Churches give refuge to statues and paintings, no matter how naked they are.
There's a painting in the Palace of the Doges showing about ten thousand human figures.
Today is Sunday. There will be a band playing in St. Mark's
Square.
Keep well, now. I send you all my best wishes. If you ever happen to spend a few days in Venice, they will be the best of your life. If you could only see the local glass production! Compared with local bottles, your bottles are so ugly that they make my stomach turn.3
Г11 be keeping in touch, but good-bye for now.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Chekhov's brother Ivan (1861-1922) was the only member of the family devoid of writing talent or any other artistic gift. He lived out his life as a modest schoolmaster in Moscow and in the provinces.
Merezhkovsky's wife, Zinaida Gippius, has described her and her husband's encounter with Chekhov and Suvorin "in the varicolored twilight of Piazza San Marco" on two occasions: in her memoir Living Portraits (1924) and in the biography of her husband that she wrote in Paris in 1943 shortly before her own death. Chekhov's presence made it possible for the Merezhkovskys to meet the dreaded, awesome Suvorin, whom under other circumstances this liberal-minded young couple would have refused to meet. Merezhkovsky was actually charmed by Suvorin's personality and culture and his work began appearing in Suvorin's publications as a result of this encounter.
Zinaida Gippius (more correctly, Hippius, 1869-1945) was, as we can now see, a far more talented and important writer than her more famous husband. A religious and metaphysical poet of depth and brilliance, she was a very able playwright as well. (Her play about the younger generation's revolt against the materialism of their parents, The Green Ring, directed by Meyerhold, and with Maria Savina, who came out of retirement to play one of the lesser roles, was a memorable success of the 1916 season.) Gippius was also a prolific but remarkably insensitive literary critic. Of her numerous critical blind spots the biggest one was Chekhov. Considered from the vantage point of her subtle mysticism, Chekhov appeared as a dull, normal, prematurely aged doctor, incapable of perceiving the deeper spiritual realities and devoid of all understanding of women (Gippius was a spectacular early advocate and practitioner of psychological unisex and of abandoning the traditional sexual roles). This provincial dullard was somehow granted a magnificent writing talent, but was prevented by his essential shallowness from writing anything of lasting importance. This is the view of Chekhov that Gippius developed in her numerous critical articles and this is the Chekhov who appears in her memoirs. She lived long enough to read the Russian novels of Vladimir Nabokov and to dismiss him on rather similar grounds as a writer who "has nothing to say."
According to her recollections, Chekhov became so accustomed to census taking on Sakhalin that he could not resist carrying out a sort of census in Venice, asking all the streetwalkers he met "Quanto?" in order to establish the going rate. Because of Zinaida Gippius's obvious animosity toward Chekhov, this anecdote should be taken with a grain of salt.
3. Ivan Chekhov's hobby was glass blowing.
53. To Maria Chekhova
Florence, March 29 or 30, 1891
I'm in Florence. I'm worn out with racing through museums and churches. After seeing the Venus dei Medici I can only say that if she were dressed in modern clothes she would look hideous, especially around the waist. I'm well. The sky is overcast, and Italy without the sun is like a face hidden under a mask. Keep well.
Yours, Antonio
The Dante monument is beautiful.
54. To Maria Kiselyova
Rome, April 1, 1891
The Pope has commissioned me to congratulate you on your saint's day and wish you as much money as he has rooms. And he has eleven thousand rooms! Sauntering around the Vatican, I wilted from exhaustion, and when I got home, my legs felt as if they were made out of cotton.
I take my meals at the common table. Can you imagine? There are two sweet little Dutch girls sitting opposite me, one of whom makes me think of Pushkin's Tatyana and the other of her sister Olga.1 I look at both of them all through the meal, and picture a neat little white turreted house, excellent butter, superb Dutch cheese, Dutch herring, a dignified pastor, a staid schoolmaster . . . and it makes me want to marry a sweet little Dutch girl and have her and me and our neat little house become a picture on a tray.
I've seen everything and dragged myself everywhere I was ordered. When I was offered something to sniff, I sniffed. But all I feel is exhaustion and a craving for a bowl of cabbage soup and buckwheat kasha. Venice fascinated me and drove me wild, but ever since I left, Baedecker and bad weather have set in.
Good-bye, Maria Vladimirovna. May the good Lord keep you. The Pope and I send our most humble respects to His Excellency, Vasi- lisa and Yelizaveta Alexandrovna.2
Neckties are amazingly cheap here, so terribly cheap that I may even take to eating them. A franc a pair.
Tomorrow I'm going to Naples. Pray that I meet a beautiful Russian lady there, a widow or divorcee if possible.
The guidebooks say that a love affair is a must for any tour of Italy. Well, what the hell, I'm game for anything. An affair would be fine with me.
Don't forget the miserable sinner who regards you highly and is devoted to you.
A. Chekhov
P.S. My respects to the starlings.
In Eugene Onegin.
"His Excellency" is Kiselyova's husband Alexei, who was a land captain; "Vasilisa" is Chekhov's private nickname for her daughter Sasha; the last- named lady is the governess of the Kiselyov children. Chekhov spent a week with the Kiselyovs at Babkino shortly before his departure for Italy.
55. To Maria Chekhova
Rome, April i, 1891
When I arrived in Rome, I went to the post office and didn't find a single letter. The Suvorins got several letters apiece. I decided to pay you back in kind, that is, to stop writing, but then, why bother? I'm not especially fond of letters, but there's nothing worse than a lack of news when you're on a trip. Where did you decide to stay for the summer? Is the mongoose still alive? And so on and so forth.
I've been to St. Peter's, the Capitol, the Colosseum and the Forum, I've even been to a cafe chantant, but I haven't enjoyed it the way
I thought I would. The weather has been getting in the way. It's raining. I'm hot in my fall coat and cold in my summer one.
Traveling is very cheap. You can take a trip to Italy on only four hundred rubles and return home with souvenirs. If I had gone on my own or, say, with Ivan, I would have come home with the conviction that it's much cheaper to take a trip to Italy than to the Caucasus. But, alas, I'm with Suvorin. In Venice we stayed at the best hotel and lived like doges; here in Rome we are living like cardinals because we're occupying a suite in the former palace of Cardinal Conti, presently the Hotel Minerva. We have two large drawing rooms, chandeliers, carpets, fireplaces and all kinds of other needless nonsense, and it costs us forty francs a day.
My back is aching and the soles of my feet are burning from doing so much walking. The amount of walking we do is unbelievable.
I can't understand why Levitan didn't like Italy. It's a fascinating country. If I were an artist entirely on my own and had the money, I would spend my winters here. After all, even apart from its natural beauty and warm clime, Italy is the only country where you realize that art indeed reigns over everything, and this conviction is very encouraging.
I am well. You keep well too. My regards to everybody.
Yours, A. Chekhov
56. To Maria Chekhova
Naples, April 4, 1891
When I arrived in Naples, I went to the post office and found five letters from you. I'm very grateful to you for them. My, what nice relatives I have! Even Vesuvius was so moved it stopped erupting.
Vesuvius hides its summit in the clouds and is clearly visible only in the evening. By day the sky is overcast. Our hotel is on the waterfront, and we have a view of everything: the sea, Vesuvius, Capri, Sorrento. During the day we drove up to the monastery of St. Martini. I have never seen a view like the view from up there. The panorama is remarkable, something like what I saw in Hong Kong riding up the mountain on the funicular railway.
Naples has a magnificent shopping gallery. And the stores!! The stores make me dizzy. What glitter! You, Masha, and you, Lika, would have gone wild with delight.
Tell Semashko I wasn't able to get him the catalogue. Every store carries its own catalogue only, and for a great maestro like Semashko I assume that's not sufficient.1
There is an amazing aquarium in Naples that even has sharks and octopi. It's disgusting to watch an octopus devouring some animal.
I went to a barbershop and watched a young man having his beard trimmed for a whole hour. He must have been either a bridegroom or a card shark. The ceiling and all four walls of the barbershop are lined with mirrors, so you're reminded more of the Vatican, where they have eleven thousand rooms, than of a barbershop. They give an amazing haircut.
I'm not going to bring you any souvenirs, because you refuse to write me about your summer plans and the mongoose. I almost bought you a watch, Masha, but decided the hell with it. But then again, God will pardon you. Keep well. Regards to all, and to Aunt Fedosya and Alyosha.2
Yours, A. Chekhov
I'll be back by Easter. Come and meet me at the station.
i. Semashko had requested a general catalogue of all music available in Italy.
i. Chekhov's maternal aunt Fedosya Dolzhenko and her son Alexei.
57. To Maria Chekhova
Naples, April 7, 1891
Yesterday I went to have a look around Pompeii. As you know, it's a Roman city buried by the lava and ashes of Vesuvius in 79 a.d. I walked through the streets of the city and saw its houses, temples, theaters and squares. I saw and marveled at the Romans' ability to combine simplicity with convenience and beauty.
After having a look around Pompeii, I had lunch in a restaurant and decided to move on to Vesuvius. This decision was strongly influenced by the excellent red wine I had drunk. I had to ride horseback to the foot of Vesuvius. Today, as a result of that ride, several parts of my earthly frame feel as if I'd been to the Third Department and gotten flogged. What a torture it is to climb Vesuvius! Ashes, mountains of lava, congealed waves of molten minerals, mounds and all sorts of nasty things. You take one step forward and fall a half step back.
The soles of your feet hurt; you have trouble breathing. You keep going and going and going, and the summit is still far off. You start thinking you ought to turn back, but you're ashamed to for fear of ridicule. The ascent began at two-thirty and ended at six. Vesuvius's crater is several sazhens in diameter. I stood at its edge and looked down into it as if I were looking into a teacup. The earth surrounding it is covered with a thin coating of sulphur and gives off a dense vapor. A noxious white smoke pours out of the crater, sparks and red-hot rocks fly everywhere, while Satan lies snoring beneath the smoke. There is quite a mixture of sounds: you hear breakers beating, thunder clapping, railroad trains pounding, boards falling. It is all quite terrifying, and at the same time makes you want to jump right down into the maw. I now believe in Hell. The lava is of such high temperature that a copper coin will melt in it.
Coming down is just as bad as going up. You sink into ashes up to your knees. I was terribly tired. I returned on horseback through tiny villages and past summer villas; the fragrance was magnificent, and the moon was shining. I breathed in the fragrance, gazed at the moon, and thought of her, that is, Lika Lenskaya.1
All of us, dear noblemen, will have no money this summer, and the mere thought of it ruins my appetite. For a trip I could have done solo for three hundred rubles I've contracted a thousand-ruble debt. My only hope is those fool amateurs who will be putting on my Bear.
Have you decided where we're going for the summer, signori? You're behaving like pigs by not writing. I don't know what's going on at home at all.
My humble regards to everyone. Take care of yourselves and don't completely forget your
Antoine
1. The wife of the actor Alexander Lensky. This is a teasing jab intended for Lika Mizinova.
58. To Mikhail Chekhov
Nice, April 15, 1891 The Monday of Easter Week Papa's postcard was forwarded to me from Rome yesterday. It told me that you've rented a place for the summer. Well, thank God. I'm very happy for you and for myself. Take your time moving. Subscribe to Russian News and News of the Day and notify New Times and
Fragments of our change of address. I'll write to the Historical Herald and the Northern Herald myself.
We are staying on the waterfront in Nice. The sun is shining, the weather is warm, everything is green and fragrant, but it's windy. Famous Monaco is about an hour's ride from Nice. That's where Monte Carlo is, the town where they play roulette. Picture the rooms of the Hall of Nobles1—as beautiful and high-ceilinged, but broader. The rooms are furnished with large tables, and the tables have roulette wheels on them, which I'll describe to you when I get home. The day before yesterday I went there and lost. It's a terribly absorbing game. When I lost, Suvorin-fils2 and I set to thinking, and I thought up a system that couldn't lose. We went back yesterday with five hundred francs apiece. On my first bet I won a few gold pieces, then more and more. My vest pockets bulged with gold. The money passing through my hands included French coins from as far back as 1808, as well as Belgian, Italian, Greek and Austrian coins. Never before had I seen so much gold and silver. I started playing at five, and by ten I didn't have a single franc left in my pocket. All I did have left was the satisfaction of knowing that I had already bought my ticket back to Nice. How do you like that, ladies and gentlemen! Of course you'll say, "What baseness! We're living in poverty and he plays roulette." That's perfectly just, and I give you my permission to slit my throat. But personally I'm quite pleased with myself. At least I can now tell my grandchildren that I played roulette and experienced the sensation the game arouses.
Next to the casino with the roulette wheels there is another sort of roulette—the restaurants. They fleece you terribly and feed you magnificently. Every serving is a complex production that you should venerate on bended knee rather than dare to eat it. Every morsel is garnished abundantly with artichokes, truffles and all sorts of nightingale tongues. And yet, good Lord in Heaven, how contemptible and loathsome that life is—with all its artichokes, palms and orange-blossom fragrance! I love luxury and opulence, but this sort of roulette luxury gives me the impression of a luxurious lavatory.3 There's something in the air that offends one's sense of decency and cheapens nature, the sound of the waves, the moon.
Yesterday, Sunday, I went to the local Russian church. Peculiarities: palm branches instead of willow; ladies singing in the choir instead of boys, which gives the music an operatic tinge; foreign money on the plate; French-speaking church elders. The choir did a magnificent job with Bortnyansky's4 "Cherubimic Hymn No. 7" and the plain version of the Lord's Prayer.
Of all the places I've been so far, Venice has left me with the brightest memories- Rome is more or less like Kharkov, and Naples is filthy. The sea has no hold over me; I tired of it back in November and December. Now that I think about it, damn it all, it turns out I've been traveling around all year. No sooner did I get back from Sakhalin than I went off to Petersburg. Then I went back to Petersburg and on to Italy.
If I don't get back in time for Easter, remember me in your prayers when you break the fast, accept my best wishes in absentia and rest assured that 111 miss you all terribly on Easter night.
Are you saving newspapers for me?
My regards to everyone: Alexei and Aunt Fedosya, Semashko, handsome Levitan, Lika the golden-tressed, the old lady,5 and everyone else. Stay well. May the heavens keep you. I beg permission to take your leave and to remain your homesick
Antonio
Regards to Olga Petrovna.6
A concert hall and ballroom in Moscow, often mentioned in Russian literature.
Suvorin's eldest son, Alexei, joined his father and Chekhov in Nice.
In her memoirs dictated in 1954 (she was no longer physically capable of writing), Maria Chekhova singled out these last two sentences and quoted them as her brother's typical reaction to everything foreign and Western. It was obviously a desperate effort to create for Chekhov posthumously the kind of nationalistic pride that the Soviet government demands from any writer it honors.
Dmitry Bortnyansky, a Russian composer of the end of the eighteenth century, who wrote some charmingly rococo operas and instrumental pieces, but who is mainly remembered today for his church music.
The family cook.
Olga Kundasova. For a number of years, the women in Chekhov's life were almost inevitably chosen from among his sisters fellow students and colleagues. Among them, he had light flirtations with Darya Musina-Push- kina, Lika Mizinova and Alexandra Khotyaintseva; the more serious involvements were those with Dunya Efros and Olga Kundasova. Olga Kundasova held a degree in mathematics and was at one time employed at an astronomical observatory and therefore Chekhov often referred to her as "the astronomer." Thoroughly unconventional in dress, radical in her politics, given to fits of uproarious laughter, Olga Kundasova was a true eccentric and a real intellectual. It is impossible to say now if her involvement with Chekhov was a close friendship only or had more intimate aspects.
Their period of greatest closeness seems to have been just prior to his departure for Sakhalin. It was actually arranged that she accompany him for the earlier stages of the journey. Chekhov sent a humorous letter to his sister expressing surprise that Olga had come with him and pleading igno- ranee of her destination which seems to have been a ruse aimed at placating the family's sensibilities. Chekhov was not the man to allow any woman to force herself on him against his will, and his letter to Maria made it clear that he was most happy to have Olga along.
But he eventually grew tired of her, as he inevitably did of all his involvements with women up to the time of his marriage. For several years she remained on friendly terms with Chekhov and his family, visiting them at Melikhovo, seeing Chekhov in Moscow on occasion. Then, in 1895, came the publication of 'Three Years," in which Olga and all of her friends easily recognized her portrait in the character of the hero's former mistress, the radicalized bluestocking music teacher Polina Rassudina. It was not a very flattering portrait—an intellectual, not too attractive woman hysterically refusing to understand why her lover leaves her for a young girl who cannot share his interests, but is physically more desirable. It is highly tempting to see in Polina's reactions a faithful reflection of Chekhov's break with Olga Kundasova, but there is not enough factual basis for it at the present time (her letters to Chekhov, known to be in the Soviet archives, have not been published and are seldom cited in the annotations to his correspondence).
Whatever the facts may have been, Olga refused to allow Maria Chekhova to publish Chekhov's letters to her, refused even to show them to her and later had them destroyed. She chose not to appear in Chekhov's biography and was so successful that today no one knows where, when and how she died. A careful reading of all the available Chekhov correspondence, of Suvorin's journal (he and Kundasova became good friends in the 1890s) and of the more reliable memoirs leaves one with the impression that Chekhov's relationship with this woman was something significant and lasting.
59. To Maria Chekhova
Paris, April 21, 1891
Today is Easter. Very well, then, Christ is risen! This is the first Easter I've ever spent away from home.
I arrived in Paris on Friday morning and went straight to the Exposition.1 Yes, the Eiffel Tower is very, very high. The rest of the Exposition buildings I saw from the outside only, because the cavalry was stationed inside in case of disturbances. Riots were expected for Friday.2 Crowds of highly agitated people walked up and down the streets yelling and whistling, and the police kept dispersing them. About ten policemen are enough here to break up a big crowd. The police all attack together, and the crowd runs like crazy. I was deemed worthy of being caught in one of the attacks: a policeman grabbed me by the shoulder and began shoving me in front of him.
The city is very crowded. The streets swarm and seethe with
people. Every street is like a turbulent Terek.3 The noise and hubbub are constant. The sidewalks are filled with tables; at every table there sit Frenchmen who feel completely at home on the street. They're a wonderful people. But Paris is indescribable, so I'll put off describing it until I get home.
I went to midnight mass at the Embassy Church.
We've been joined by a retired diplomat by the name of Tatishchev. Paris correspondent Ivan Yakovlev-Pavlovsky4 follows us everywhere in the capacity of aide. He lived in the Moiseyev House5 at the same time we did; he lived with the Fronshteyns. Pleshcheyev and his daughters and son are here too.6 In brief, there are many people I know here, a whole Russian colony.
Tomorrow or the day after we leave for Russia. I'll be in Moscow on Friday or Saturday. I'll be arriving via Smolensk, so if you should have a desire to meet me, come to Smolensk Station.
If they don't let me go on Tuesday or even Wednesday, I'll still return to Moscow no later than Monday, so ask Ivan to put off his departure and wait for me.
I fear that you may be out of money.
Misha, get my pince-nez fixed and God will repay you. Put in the same lenses that you have. It's a torture for me to be without glasses. I didn't see half the pictures at the picture exhibition (Le Salon) thanks to my nearsightedness. By the way, Russian painters are far more solid than French ones. Compared to the French landscape painters I saw yesterday, Levitan is a king.7
This is my last letter. Good-bye. I left with an empty suitcase and I'm returning with a full one. Each of you will receive his just deserts.
I wish you all good health.
Yours, A. Chekhov
The site of the Paris World Exposition of 1889, for which the Eiffel Tower was built.
On May 1, 1891 (Gregorian calendar), there were major workers' demonstrations throughout France. In the city of Fourmies, the clash between the demonstrators and the police led to a number of casualties (see next letter).
A turbulent stream in the Caucasus, described by numerous Russian poets ranging from Pushkin to Mayakovsky.
The Paris correspondent of New Tivies turned out to be Chekhov's former neighbor from Taganrog.
A small apartment house in Taganrog, where Chekhov's parents lived before they moved into their own house in 1873.
The formerly impoverished Pleshcheyev suddenly received an inheritance of two million rubles from a distant relative and was taking his family on a tour of Europe in grand style.
7. Soviet commentators and Maria Chekhova in her memoirs cite this passage as proof of Chekhov's outstanding Russian patriotism. It is not clear from the letter which of the three Salons that were open at the time of his visit Chekhov attended. Sophie Laffitte in her book Chekhov par lui-meme assumed that it was the Salon des Independants and that Chekhov is therefore preferring Levitan to Degas, Renoir, Monet and Pissarro in their prime. Given the parochial and provincial state to which Russian tastes in painting at the end of the nineteenth century were reduced by dogmatic utilitarianism and demands for didactic storytelling art (it was some eight years later that Sergei Diaghilev's journal The World of Art and other similar publications initiated the dazzling revival of taste and creativity in Russian visual arts that distinguish the first two decades of our century), such an attitude on Chekhov's part is a distinct possibility. However, it would seem more likely that Suvorin took him to the far more prestigious (at the time) and better- known Salon des Artistes Frangais, which by 1891 was a refuge of the safely traditionalist nineteenth-century art, untouched by the winds of Impressionism. If this is the case, then Chekhov merely compares Russian academic painting to its French equivalent and finds the French variety inferior.
60. To Maria Chekhova
Paris, April 24, 1891
Another change has come up. One of the Russian sculptors living in Paris has agreed to make a bust of Suvorin, and it will keep us here until Saturday. Well definitely leave on Saturday, and on Wednesday I'll be in Moscow.
How are you getting along without money? Hold on until Thursday.
Imagine how pleased I was to visit the Chamber of Deputies during the very session at which the Minister of Internal Affairs was being called to account for the violence the government resorted to while putting down the workers in revolt at Fourmies (many people were killed and wounded). It was a stormy and highly interesting session.
Anthropi girdling themselves with boa constrictors, ladies kicking their legs up to the ceiUng, flying people, lions, cafes chantants, dinners and lunches are beginning to disgust me. It's time to go home. I feel like working.
My regards to everyone, everybody. Keep well.
Yours, Antoine
THE BUSY YEARS
Indeed, it was in a queer world of silvery twilight and dark shadows that the gentle soul of Chekhov took refuge in a desperate fear of life.
—Princess Nina Andronikova Toumanova, Anton Chekhov, The Voice of Twilight Russia
The tenuous line that divides a long short story from a short novel makes the classification of Chekhov's fiction difficult in English (in Russian, the term povest', meaning a genre halfway between the story and the novel, does the job nicely). By the complexity of the ideas it treats, by its large number of clearly delineated important characters, by the author's deep penetration into the dialectic of their interaction, if not by its actual length, "The Duel" should certainly qualify as an important novel. The weak- willed hero Layevsky (a younger version of Ivanov, but far better realized); his opponent von Koren, a dedicated zoologist who tries to transfer Darwinism into the social and moral sphere and ends up preaching genocidal theories that foreshadow Hitler; Layevsky's pathetic mistress Nadezhda who sought freedom and found promiscuity; the virtuous matron Maria Konstantinovna, outwardly sympathetic but inwardly bitchy; the gruff and yet compassionate military doctor Samoilenko; the giggly, lovable young deacon Pobedov—all these fully realized complex human beings and the problems their lives and actions raise shatter the framework of the conventional short story and raise "The Duel" to the level of a complex novel of ideas. At least three of Chekhov's subsequent works of fiction—"Three Years," "My Life" and "In the Ravine"—could by the same token also be considered novels, certainly with far greater justification than his earlier Useless Victory or The Shooting Party, which on the basis of length alone are true and undoubted novels.
After traveling almost continuously for more than a year, Chekhov
plunged into writing with renewed energy. Throughout the summer of 1891 he worked on The Island of Sakhalin three days a week, and 011 "The Duel" another three and devoted his Sundays to what he called "the lesser stories." In the midst of it all, he found time to write "Peasant Women" (also called "Peasant Wives" in some English translations), a somewhat Lcskovian tale of a peasant lecher and hypocrite who finds in the Christian religion and its moral teachings the perfect justification for his cruelty and self-indulgence. The stories written in the next eighteen months are among Chekhov's most serious and profound: "The Wife"; "The Grasshopper"; "In Exile," with its evenly balanced debate on the value of involvement and noninvolvement carried on by deportees on the shore of an icy Siberian river; "An Unknown Man's Story," in which Chekhov confronts the issue of revolutionary violence; and the most grimly prophetic story he ever wrote, "Ward Number Six," which casts doubts on the conventional division between madness and sanity, advances the notion that doing nothing at all and looking the other way can on occasion be criminal, and predicts the post-Stalinist Russian practice of incarcerating in psychiatric clinics those who question the political system.
But the habit of humanitarian involvement which Chekhov acquired on Sakhalin remained with him after he returned. Because of the disastrous harvest of the previous summer, much of Russia was famine-stricken in the winter of 1891-92. Inspired by the example of his friend Yevgraf Yegorov, Chekhov devoted much of that winter to famine relief work, concentrating, with characteristic practicality, not on charity handouts, but on an organized campaign to prevent the peasants from slaughtering their horses for food, a practice that perpetuated the famine cycle, since it left no horses for next year's spring plowing.
In the spring of 1892, the Chekhov family realized their long-standing dream of acquiring their own permanent home when Chekhov purchased the rural estate of Melikhovo, near the city of Serpukhov, a few hours by train from Moscow. Chekhov, his parents and his sister, occasionally aided by Mikhail, plunged into the work of renovating the house, planting vegetable gardens and tending livestock. But the famine was followed by a cholera epidemic, which by summer was threatening the area where Melikhovo was located. For several months in the summer and fall of 1892, Chekhov gave up writing and took the unpaid job of local medical inspector in charge of containing the cholera epidemic. To follow a day-by- day account of Chekhov's activities during this period in Л Chronicle of Chekhov's Life and Writings (compiled by Nina Gitovich and published in Moscow in 1955) marvel at the energy and endurance of this man, who risked his life and health (as seriously as at any point on his trip to Sakhalin), getting lost in the frozen fields in the winter, trudging on foot through muddy fields in the spring, giving free medical treatment to over a thousand peasants at his Melikhovo clinic, building a comfortable home for himself and his family, planting a park and an orchard, and writing some of the greatest masterpieces of Russian prose ever written —all in the span of some sixteen months.
61. To Alexei Suvorin
Moscow, September 8, 1891
I've already moved back to Moscow and haven't set foot outside the house. The family has been looking around for a new apartment, but I don't say a word because I'm too lazy to budge. They want to move to somewhere near Devichie Pole for economy's sake.
"The Lie," the title you recommended for my story, won't do.1 It would be suitable only if a conscious lie were involved. An unconscious lie is an error rather than a lie. Tolstoy calls our having money and eating meat a lie; that's going too far.
I was informed yesterday that Kurepin2 is hopelessly iU. He has cancer of the neck. By the time he dies, the cancer will devour half his head and torment him with neuralgic pains. I have heard that Kurepin's wife has written you.
Death plucks off people one by one. It knows its business. Write a play about an old chemist who has invented an elixir of immortality (you take fifteen drops and live forever) but has broken the phial with the elixir for fear that scum like himself and his wife would live forever. Tolstoy denies mankind immortality, but good God, how much personal animosity there is in his attitude! I was reading his "Afterword"3 the day before yesterday, and I'll be damned if it isn't sillier and more stultifying than "The Letters to a Governor's Wife,"4 which I despise. To hell with the philosophy of the great men of this world! All great wise men are as despotic as generals and as impolite and insensitive as generals because they are confident of their impunity. Diogenes spat in people's beards knowing that he would not be called to account; Tolstoy calls doctors scoundrels and flaunts his ignorance of important issues because he is another Diogenes whom no one will report to the police or denounce in the papers. So to hell with the philosophy of the great men of this world. With all its half-wit afterwords and letters to governors' wives, it's worth less than the filly in "Kholstomer."5
Send my regards to my schoolfellow Alexei Petrovich6 and wish
him good health, a playful disposition and seductive dreams. May he dream of a naked Spanish girl with a guitar.
My most humble respects to Anna Ivanovna and Alexei Alexeye- vich and his progeny.
Keep well and don't forget me, sinner that I am. I'm very bored.
Yours, A. Chekhov
After accepting "The Duel" for serialization in New Times, Suvorin suggested that Chekhov change its title to "The Lie."
Alexander Kurepin was the editor of the humor magazine The Alarm Clock in the early eighties, when Chekhov was a regular contributor. At the time of this letter he was employed by Suvorin. He died before the end of 1891.
Chekhov read Tolstoy's anti-sex novel The Kreutzer Sonata prior to his departure for Sakhalin and, despite certain reservations, found it highly impressive as a work of literature (see Letter 40). After returning from his journey he wrote to Suvorin: "Before my trip, The Kreutzer Sonata seemed a major event, but now I find it ridiculous and confused. Either the trip has matured me or I've taken leave of my senses—the devil alone knows which" (Letter of December 17, 1890).
For the 1890 edition of his collected works, Tolstoy wrote an "Afterword" to The Kreutzer Sonata, in which, in response to many anxious inquiries from his readers, he spelled out in full the puritanical message he wished to express in the novel. Not only was illicit sex sinful, but sex within marriage, except for the specific purpose of procreation, was unchristian. The whole notion of romantic love between men and women was now seen as wasteful and useless by Tolstoy, since it made them expend effort on looking attractive, rather than concentrating on their relationship with God and on the welfare of their fellow man.
The scholarly-looking footnote appended to this passage in the Lillian Hellman edition of Chekhov's letters identifies this work as Gogol's Letters to a Governor s Wife. There is, of course, no such work by Gogol. Chekhov is referring to the section entitled "What Is a Governor's Wife?" in Gogol's book Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, a volume of social and moral sermons intermingled with passages of literary criticism. After the critics and the readers of his time saw in The Inspector General and Dead Souls an indictment of the social system, Gogol decided to produce a work that would embody his positive and constructive program for Russian society. As outlined in Selected Passages that program turned out to be simplicity itself: the existing social order is divinely ordained and to change it in any way or to aspire to a position higher than your own in the social hierarchy is an offense against God and religion. "What Is a Governor's Wife?," in particular, advises the addressee (she was Pushkin's one-time friend, the beautiful Alexandra Rossetti, whom Gogol knew and who was married to the governor of Kaluga) on how to support the status quo by discreet spying, collecting useful gossip and forming alliances with local clergymen. Gogol's program of ostentatious display of modesty and frugality ("Do not miss a single reception or ball, go especially so that you can be seen wearing the very same dress. Appear in the same dress three, four, five, six times. Praise the attire of others only when it is cheap and simple") finds its echo in the passages of Tolstoy's "Afterword" which condemn all interest in attractive and becoming clothes as sinful and frivolous.
"Kholstomer" (sometimes translated into English as "Strider. The Story of a Horse") is Tolstoy's somewhat Swiftian story in which human institutions and customs are exposed in all their absurdity and cruelty when shown through the eyes of an intelligent horse. Chekhov's choice of the filly from that story as a contrast to both Tolstoy's "Afterword" and Gogol's "What Is a Governor's Wife?" is by no means accidental, since that filly is the embodiment of healthy and normal female sexuality.
Alexei Kolomnin, Suvorin's brother-in-law, who in his childhood attended the same school in Taganrog that Chekhov went to some years later.
62. To Yelena Shavrova1
Moscow, September 16, 1891
So we old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? Maybe so, but allow me to take exception to your statement that doctors specializing in female complaints are skirt chasers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with the sort of violent prose you've never dreamed of; if you were acquainted with it, the ferocity peculiar to your imagination might lead you to attribute to it a smell worse than that of dogs. Anyone who constantly sails the seas loves dry land; anyone who is forever submerged in prose passionately longs for poetry. All gynecologists are idealists. Your doctor reads verse; here your instinct proved true. I would have added that he's a great liberal, something of a mystic, and that he dreams of a wife along the lines of Nekrasov's Russian woman.2 The well-known Professor Snegiryov can't talk about the "Russian woman" without a quiver in his voice. Another gynecologist I know is in love with a veiled mystery woman whom he has only seen from a distance. A third attends every opening night, and then goes into loud tirades in the cloakroom about how authors ought to portray only ideal women, etc. You disregard the fact that a stupid or mediocre person can't be a good gynecologist. Intelligence, even seminary-trained intelligence, shines brighter than a bald pate, but what you've done is to observe and accentuate the pate and throw intelligence overboard. You have also observed and accentuated the fact that a fat man—ugh!—exudes a kind of grease, but you've completely disregarded the fact that he's a professor, that for some years he thought and did things that placed him above millions of people, above all the Verochkas and Greek girls of Taganrog, above all dinners and wines. Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and— was it Aphet?3 All Ham could see was that his father was a drunkard; he completely disregarded the fact that Noah was a genius, that he had built the Ark and saved the world. Writers must avoid imitating Ham. Mull that one over for a while. I don't dare ask you to love the gynecologist and the professor, but I do dare remind you of justice, which is more precious for an objective writer than air.
The girl of merchant background is excellently done. The part of the doctor's speech where he talks about his lack of faith in medicine is also good, but there's no reason to have him take a drink after every sentence. The fondness for corpses you attribute to doctors comes from your irritation with your own captive thinking. You've never so much as seen a corpse.
Next, from the particular to the general. Here I'm duty bound to sound a general alarm. What you have written is not a story or a novel or a work of art; it is a long row of gloomy, oppressive barracks.
Where is the architecture that so fascinated yours truly at first? Where is the lightness, the freshness, the grace? Read your story through: a description of a dinner, followed by a description of a series of ladies and girls walking by, then a description of the people at the dinner table, then the description of the dinner, and so on without end. Descriptions, descriptions, descriptions . . . and not a bit of action. You've got to start right off with the merchant's daughter and then concentrate entirely on her. Throw out Verochka, throw out the Greek girls, throw them all out except the doctor and the merchant's offspring.
We need to have a talk. So you're not moving to Petersburg. I was counting on seeing you in Petersburg; Misha assured me you were going to move there. Anyway, keep well. May the heavenly hosts protect you. Your imagination is becoming interesting.
Forgive the long letter.
Yours, A. Chekhov
i. Chekhov met Yelena Shavrova (1874-1937) at a picnic in the Crimea when she was fifteen. She handed him a story she had written, and after editing it, he submitted it to New Times, where it was accepted and published. In subsequent years, she became his literary protegee, sending her work to him for approval and publishing it after obtaining his advice. By the early nineties, she was a member of a whole horde of young literary hopefuls who constantly sent Chekhov their efforts for advice and approval. Another such beginner was Ivan Bunin, who in 1891 wrote Chekhov asking him to read a manuscript. Chekhov read astounding quantities of these manuscripts, edited many, and managed to get a number of them placed with various publications. But not all of the applicants were Bunins or even Yelena Shavrovas (who with Chekhov's consistent aid managed to have a minor literary career). More typical were the two would-be writers Chekhov described in his letter to Suvorin of December 3, 1891:
Yesterday an apparently very young man from Voronezh sent me a manuscript of some 640 pp. in minuscule handwriting. A novel. The title is quite new: The Poor in Spirit. The youthful author implores me to read it and to write him my opinion. Can you imagine my horror? Late last night, I started leafing through the novel and it was all about how honest the past was, about serving the people, about the community of interests, the setting sun . . . Another, not so young writer, actually a retired colonel, brought me two manuscripts: The Unbidden Civilizers, or the Fruits of Ignorance and The Famous Cabby. The second manuscript describes an ideological young man whom need has forced to become a cabby (a reproach addressed to the indifferent society which reduces its finest representatives to such a horrible situation). Well, then, the cabby sits in his driver's seat and discusses Marx, Buckle and the logic of [John Stuart] Mill with his fares.
Reference to Nikolai Nekrasov's narrative poem "Russian Women," which is about the wives of the aristocratic participants in the Decembrist uprising of 1825, who voluntarily followed their husbands into Siberian exile.
Chekhov's misspelling retained.
63. To Mikhail Albov1
Moscow, September 30, 1891
Dear Mikhail Nilovich,
I have a short novel for you that is almost ready. It's sketched out, but not finished, nor has a clean copy been made. It needs another week or two of work, not more. It is called "The Story of My Patient."2 But I am possessed by very grave doubts as to whether the censor will pass it. After all, the Northern Herald is one of the publications subject to censorship, and although it is true that my story doesn't preach any harmful doctrines, its cast of characters might not please the censors.
The narrator is a former socialist, while the son of a Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs plays the role of protagonist number one. Both my socialist and the son of the deputy minister are peaceful fellows who indulge in no political action in the story, but I still have my fears about announcing the story to the public, or at least I consider it premature. Let me send you the story, and once you've read it, you can decide what to do. If you feel the censors will pass it, have it set and announce its publication, but if when you've read it you find my doubts well founded, please return it to me without having it set or read by the censors, because if the censors reject it, it will be awkward for me to send it to a censorship-free publication: once a publisher finds out the story has already failed to pass, he'll be afraid to publish it.
Send my regards to Kazimir Stanislavovich3 and tell him I wish him all the best.
Stay well.
Sincerely and respectfully yours,
A. Chekhov
Mikhail Albov (1851—1911), considered a highly promising writer in the 1880s, described at great length, as D. S. Mirsky put it, the morbid states of mind experienced by priests and clerics. Among Chekhov's and Korolenko's lesser contemporaries, Albov was almost the only one on whom the work of Dostoyevsky made a discernible impact (it was not until Russian Symbolism that Dostoyevsky became a major literary influence). Albov replaced Pleshcheyev as the literary editor of Northern Herald when the latter inherited his huge fortune and retired. It is in his editorial capacity that Chekhov is writing to Albov here.
As early as 1887 Chekhov first sketched out a story about a revolutionary who engages in conspiratorial work and gradually realizes that the moral and ethical implications of his activities are more important to him than the ideological ones. At that time he had no hopes of publishing anywhere a work containing an objective, unprejudiced portrayal of revolutionary violence. In the fall of 1891 he returned to this story, which he now called "The Story of My Patient" and in the present letter he is offering it to Albov for publication in Northern Herald. A few weeks after this letter was written, Chekhov read the story to Suvorin, who after listening to its first twenty lines declared that he would never dare publish it in New Times and that he doubted the advisability of publishing it anywhere. Chekhov thereupon informed Albov that the story was not available. In the fall of 1892, he revised the manuscript again and submitted it to Vukol Lavrov's Russian Thought. It passed the censorship without a single change and was published in Russian Thought in February of 1893 as "An Unknown Man's Story."
Barantsevich.
64. To Yevgraf Yegorov1
Moscow, December n, 1891
Dear Yevgraf Petrovich,
Here is the story of why my trip to see you did not materialize. It was not as a newspaper correspondent that I planned to visit you; it was on behalf of or rather by agreement with a small group of people who wished to do something for the famine victims. The problem is that because the public has no confidence in the administration it is holding back its contributions. A thousand fantastic tales and fables about embezzlement, brazen thievery, etc. are making the rounds. People keep their distance from the governmental Department of Church Affairs and are indignant with the Red Cross. The owner of unforgettable Babkino, a land captain,2 snapped plainly and categorically at me: "There's thievery afoot at the Moscow Red Cross." With this as the prevailing mood the administration can scarcely expect to receive earnest assistance from society. And yet the populace does want to help, and its conscience is uneasy. In September the Moscow intelligentsia and plutocracy got together in groups, thought, talked, puttered around and invited experts in for consultation. Everybody discussed how to bypass the administration and go about organizing aid independently. They decided to send their own agents to the famine-stricken provinces to acquaint themselves with the situation at first hand, set up relief kitchens, and so on. Several of the group leaders, highly influential people, went to see Durnovo3 for permission, but Durnovo refused, declaring that the right to organize aid belonged exclusively to the Department of Church Affairs and the Red Cross. In short, private initiative was nipped in the bud. Everyone fell into the doldrums and lost heart; some became incensed, others simply washed their hands of the whole affair. It takes the courage and authority of a Tolstoy4 to act in defiance of all prohibitions and prevailing moods and do what duty commands.
Now a few words about myself. I was in complete sympathy with private initiative, because everyone is free to do good as he sees fit. But all the discussion about the administration, the Red Cross and so on seemed inopportune and impractical to me. I felt that with a modicum of composure and a kind disposition we could bypass everything fearful and ticklish and that to do so there was no need to go see the Cabinet minister. I went to Sakhalin without a single letter of recommendation, yet I accomplished everything I needed to do. Why then can't I go to the famine-stricken provinces? I also thought of administrators like yourself, Kiselyov and all the land captains and tax inspectors I know— people who are eminently decent and deserving of the utmost confidence. And I decided to try to coordinate the efforts of both the administration and private initiative, if only over a small area. I wanted to see you as quickly as possible and ask your advice. The public has confidence in me and would have confidence in you too, so I was sure I could count on success. If you'll recall, I sent you a letter. Then Suvorin came to Moscow; I complained to him of not knowing your address. He sent Baranov5 a telegram and Baranov was kind enough to send me your address. Suvorin had influenza. Whenever he comes to Moscow we are inseparable for days on end; we discuss literature, which he knows so well. It happened this time too, with the result that I caught influenza from him, took to bed, and went into a frenzy of coughing. Korolenko came to Moscow and found me stricken. Lung complications dragged it out for an entire month; I lay around the house doing absolutely nothing. I've begun to get over it now, but I'm still coughing and losing weight. There's the whole story for you. If it hadn't been for the influenza, the two of us might have been able to wrench two to three thousand more from the public, depending on the circumstances.
Your exasperation with the press is fully comprehensible. You, who are familiar with the actual situation, are as exasperated by the disquisitions of newsmen as I, a doctor, am exasperated by an ignoramus's disquisitions on diphtheria. But what are we supposed to do? You tell me. Russia is neither England nor France. Our newspapers are not wealthy and have very few people at their disposal. It costs money for them to send an Engelhardt6 or a professor from the Academy of Peter the Great to the Volga; nor can they send a knowledgeable, talented reporter: they need him at home. The Times would have organized a census of the famine-stricken provinces at its own expense; it would have placed a Kennan7 in each district, paid him forty rubles a day, and gotten results. But what can Russian News or New Times do when a hundred thousand seems like Croesus's fortune to them? As for the correspondents themselves, you must keep in mind that they're city- bred and all they know about the countryside comes from Gleb Uspensky. They are in an extremely false position. They rush into a district, sniff around, write a few lines, and off they go. They lack material resources, freedom and authority. For two hundred rubles a month they are continually on the run, and their only prayer is that no one will get angry at them for their involuntary and unavoidable lies. They feel guilty, but it is Russian benightedness, not they, that is guilty. In the West, a correspondent has excellent maps, encyclopedias and statistical studies at his disposal. In the West you can write your reports in your own home. And here in Russia? Our correspondent has only conversations and hearsay to draw upon. Why, in all Russia only three districts have as yet been investigated: Cherepov, Tambov and one more. And that's all, out of the whole country! The papers lie, the correspondents are young whippersnappers, but what can be done about it? You can't just stop writing. If the press were to remain silent, you must admit that the situation would be even worse.
Your letter and your project of buying up cattle from the peasants have set me in motion. I am willing to follow you and do whatever you say with all my heart and everything in my power. I've given the problem much thought, and here is my opinion. We can't count on the rich. It's too late. The rich have all forked out whatever thousands they were predestined to fork out. Now everything depends on the average citizen, the man who gives by the ruble and half ruble. The people who were discoursing about private initiative in September have found shelter in various sorts of commissions and committees and are already at work. It follows that only the average citizen is left. Let's set up a donation list. You write a letter to the editor, and I'll have it published in Russian News and New Times. To combine the two elements mentioned above, we might both sign the letter. If your official position makes this inconvenient for you, we can write a report signed by some third person, saying that in the fifth constituency of the province of Nizhny Novgorod such and such has been organized and is fortunately having great success, and that contributions may be sent to Land Captain Y. P. Yegorov, followed by your address, or A. P. Chekhov, or the editor's offices. The main thing is that the letter be comprehensive. Write it up in great detail, I'll add a thing or two, and it's in the bag. We must ask for contributions, not loans. No one is going to come up with a loan: it'll scare them off. Giving is hard enough; taking back is even harder.
I have only one rich friend in Moscow—Varvara Morozova, the well-known philanthropist, and I went to see her yesterday with your letter. I talked and had dinner with her. At the moment she is involved in the Committee for Literacy, which sets up relief kitchens for schoolchildren, and she is giving her all to it. Since literacy and horses are incommensurable values, Morozova promised me the assistance of her committee if you wish to set up relief kitchens for schoolchildren and send her detailed information. I felt uneasy about asking her for money right away because people never stop taking her money and pouncing on her like a fox at bay. All I did was ask her not to forget about us if she has any contact with commissions or committees, and she promised me she wouldn't. Sobolevsky,8 the editor of Russian Bulletin, has been informed of your letter and your idea—just in case. Everywhere I go, I've been shouting from the rooftops that the project is already organized.
If any rubles and half rubles do come in, Г11 send them on to you without delay. And please dispose of me as you see fit. You can rest assured I will be truly happy to do what little I can, because to date I have done absolutely nothing for the famine victims or the people who are helping them.
All of us are well except for Nikolai, who died of consumption in 1889 and Aunt Fedosya Yakovlevna (remember, she came to visit Ivan at school), who died last October, also of consumption. Ivan is teaching in Moscow. Misha is working as a tax inspector.
Keep well.
Yours, A. Chekhov
In 1883-84, Yevgraf Yegorov was an army lieutenant stationed in the city of Voskresensk, where Ivan Chekhov was the schoolmaster and Anton Chekhov began his medical practice at the zemstvo hospital. The group of officers to which Yegorov belonged became friendly with the entire Chekhov family, and some of them eventually served as prototypes for the characters in Chekhov's stories "The Kiss" and "The Teacher of Literature" and in his play Three Sisters. Yegorov fell in love with Chekhov's sister, who was eighteen at the time, and wrote her asking her to marry him. The proposal frightened Maria and she asked Chekhov to convey her refusal, which he must have done with tact, since Yegorov remained on good terms with the Chekhovs. By 1891, Yegorov was out of the army. After settling on his estate in the Nizhny Novgorod Province, he was appointed as the local land captain (see next note). Chekhov learned from the newspapers of Yegorov's project to salvage the peasants' horses. He wrote to him, offering his help.
Alexei Kiselyov. The office of land captain (zemsky nachalnik) was established in 1889 by the imperial government in an obvious effort to curb the liberalizing effects of the zemstvo system and to undo some of the results of the emancipation of the serfs. A local landowner was appointed to this office by the Ministry of the Interior and given considerable administrative and even judicial powers over peasant affairs. The reactionary motivation for establishing this office was unmistakable, and land captains quickly became a target for the satirical literature of the period. As Chekhov's correspondence documents again and again, however, humane and enlightened members of the Russian intelligentsia, such as Kiselyov and Yegorov, were on occasion appointed land captains and were able in such cases to do a great deal of good both for the peasants and for the local zemstvo they were supposed to curb and counteract.
Ivan Durnovo, the Minister of Interior.
Disregarding government interference, Tolstoy and his followers sponsored a network of relief kitchens for famine victims in Samara Province.
The governor of Nizhny Novgorod Province.
Nikolai Engelhardt, a crack reporter for New Times.
George Kennan (see Letter 41, note 2). The word Times is in English in the original to indicate the Times of London.
The editor Vasily Sobolevsky was married to the wealthy philanthropist Varvara Morozova, mentioned in this paragraph.
65. To Alexander Smagin1
Moscow, December 11, 1891
Greetings again, Your Excellency,
Thanks for the telegram. We are anxiously awaiting an answer because the twentieth is almost upon us. The day I get the telegram from Masha I'll arrange for the power of attorney to be issued and the money sent.2
And now, a few words about something else, kind sir. While I am still confined to Moscow, my Nizhny Novgorod project is in full swing! A friend of mine and I—he's the most wonderful person, a land captain in the most backwoods constituency of Nizhny Novgorod Province, where there are no landowners or doctors or even educated young ladies, of whom even hell has a great many nowadays—have undertaken a little venture that we figure will bring in somewhere around a hundred thousand for each of us. In addition to various famine problems, we are mainly interested in saving next year's harvest. Because peasants are selling their horses for practically nothing, for a pittance, there is grave danger that the fields won't get plowed in the spring and that the whole famine cycle will therefore be repeated. So what we're going to do is buy up the horses, feed them and return them to their owners in the spring. By now the project is firmly on its feet, and in January I'm going there to behold its fruits. Here is why I'm writing you all this. Just in case you or anyone else should happen during some raucous feast3 or other to scrape up so much as a half ruble for the benefit of the famine victims or if some Korobochka4 should bequeath a ruble toward the same cause or if you yourself win a hundred rubles at cards, then please remember us sinners in your orisons and share a fraction of the bounties with us! It doesn't have to be right away, but it should not be later than spring. In the spring the horses will no longer be ours. All contributors will receive a most detailed account of how each kopeck was spent, in verse if they like, which I will commission
Gilyarovsky to write. Well advertise in the papers in January. Address your bounty either to me or straight to the field of battle:
Land Captain Yevgraf Petrovich Yegorov,
Bogoyavlennoe Station,
Nizhny Novgorod Province.
Where did you get the idea we had grown cool toward Sumbatov? It's not true. We are as ecstatic about his talents as we ever were.
Will I really be living in Sorochintsy or nearby? I somehow can't believe it, but it would be fine if I could. I would fish for gudgeons in the summer and fall, and in the winter I'd whip off to Petersburg and Moscow. . . .
Write.
Devotedly yours,
A. Chekhov
It is an odd coincidence that our information about Chekhov's famine relief work should come from letters he wrote to two of his sister's suitors. Alexander Smagin's family owned an estate in the Ukraine and was related to the Lintvaryovs, through whom he met the Chekhovs. Maria Chekhova (1865-1957, although by now she needs no introduction) worked as a schoolteacher and studied art, but after her other brothers were married, her primary task in life was to be her work as a secretary and general factotum to Chekhov. There was something in their relationship akin to that of a father and a devoted daughter. She was attracted to Alexander Smagin, and when he followed her to Moscow after the Luka summers of 1888-89, she accepted his proposal. When she announced her decision to Anton, she heard (or thought she heard) a tinge of disappointment in his reply. This was enough to make her break off her engagement to Smagin. Forty years later, he wrote to her that he never married because she was the only love of his life.
Maria (Masha) was in the Ukraine, staying with Smagin's family and inspecting an estate which Chekhov hoped to buy as a permanent home for his family.
A burlesqued paraphrase of the first line of Tchaikovsky's song "At the Ball," Opus 38, No. 3, which is a setting of a poem by Alexei Tolstoy.
A parsimonious landowning widow in Gogol's Dead Souls.
66. To Alexei Suvorin
Moscow, January 22, 1892
Well, I'm back from Nizhny Novgorod Province. Since I hope well soon be seeing one another and since I'll be writing about the famine tomorrow or the day after, I'll keep it short: the famine is not being exaggerated by the newspapers. Things are in a bad way. The government is not behaving poorly, it is helping where it can; the zemstvo is either unable to do anything or is misrepresenting the situation, while private charity amounts to almost nothing. In my presence, fifty-four poods of dried bread arrived from Petersburg for twenty thousand people. The philanthropists would feed five thousand people with five loaves—as in the Gospel.
I had quite a trip. During a fierce snowstorm one evening, I lost my way and was nearly buried under the snow. It was a vile sensation. I went to see Baranov. I had lunch and dinner with him and was driven to the station by the governor's own horses.
Generally speaking, at least in Nizhny Novgorod Province, the administration is not putting any obstacles in the way of private initiative; in fact, the opposite is true. You can do whatever you like.1 When I got home, I found the proofs for "Kashtanka."2 Allah, what illustrations! Dear Alexei Sergeyevich, I'm willing to give the artist fifty rubles out of my own pocket to get rid of those illustrations. Good grief! Stools, a goose laying an egg, a bulldog instead of a dachshund . . .
If there were as much talk and action about the famine in Petersburg and Moscow as there is in Nizhny, there wouldn't be any famine.
What wonderful people they have in Nizhny Novgorod Province. The peasants are robust, vigorous, and one more handsome than the next. Each one could pose for a painting of the merchant Kalashnikov.3 And they're intelligent to boot.
Shelaputin, the Moscow magnate, has anthrax, I've just been
told.
Well, I'm waiting for your arrival, so that we can travel to Bobrov together.4 Write and let me know when you'll be in Moscow.
All my best.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Ask Alexei Alexeyevich to send me posthaste the article on petroleum by Batsevich, the mining engineer. While I was in Petersburg I forgot to read it.
This picture of governmental permissiveness must be the cause for the omission of this particular letter from the 1963-64 edition, which otherwise includes all the letters dealing with the famine.
Chekhov's most popular animal story, describing the adventures of a cobbler's dog which joins a circus. It is regularly reissued to this day in illustrated editions intended for children. The "goose laying an egg" was meant to depict the trained gander Ivan Ivanych, which appears in the story.
The athletic and dashing hero of Lermontov's narrative poem set in the period of Ivan the Terrible.
Chekhov invited Suvorin to accompany him on a famine relief field trip to Bobrov and other cities. Because of Suvorin's influential position as the most important publisher in the country, local authorities in the cities they visited found it necessary to entertain him, and instead of working for famine relief, Chekhov found himself involved in a series of dinners, receptions and amateur theatricals honoring Suvorin. Suvorin never got to see the actual famine victims, while Chekhov was highly irritated at being forced to waste his time and at all the conspicuous consumption amidst the surrounding misery (Letter to Maria Chekhova of February 9, 1892).
67. To Yevgraf Yegorov
Voronezh, February 6, 1892
My most kind Yevgraf Petrovich,
I am writing this from Voronezh Province. The same thing has happened as in Nizhny: the governor invited me to dinner, and I had to talk a lot and hear about the famine. Here is how the horse project is being handled in this area: following your method, Governor Kurovsky is buying up horses wherever he can. He has already bought up about four hundred. The prices are the same as in Nizhny. If you import horses from the Don area, each horse will cost fifty to sixty rubles, not counting feeding. Kurovsky doesn't keep the horses himself; he distributes them among the peasants as quickly as he buys them.
He sends for horseless peasants from famine-stricken districts and says to them, "Here's a horse. You will now transport grain." By transporting grain, the peasant earns his own and his horse's keep. In the spring he will be told, "You have earned so much; the horse cost so much. Therefore, you still owe so much (or you have so much coming to you)." In short, the horse constitutes a loan and the loan is already being paid off gradually.
Voronezh is seething with action. Famine relief here has been set up on a much more solid base than in Nizhny Novgorod Province. Besides grain they are handing out portable ovens and coal. They've organized workshops and many relief kitchens. Yesterday there was a benefit performance for the famine victims at a local theater, and the house was full. Kurovsky is an intelligent, sincere person; he works as hard as Baranov. He's not an army man, and for a governor that is a great convenience: he can act with greater freedom. But we'll talk about that when we get together.
I saw Sofya Alexandrovna Davydova1 and gave her your address. She's a kind, capable, modest woman. There are many things she can do.
My report on the Nizhny Novgorod and Voronezh provinces will be published in Russian News.2 Regards to your family. Keep well. Write. I'll be in Moscow sometime between the tenth and twelfth.
Yours,
A. Chekhov
i. A local Voronezh civic leader and philanthropist.
i. Chekhov's experiences with famine fighting were also reflected in "The Wife," a story of a failed marriage which is unexpectedly saved when the authoritarian, self-centered husband learns to value his wife as an individual after observing her efficient and imaginative work in helping the famine- stricken peasants. Published in February of 1892, "The Wife" incurred the wrath of most critics for using the famine as a background for the private marital drama of an upper-class couple instead of depicting the suffering of the peasants or indicting the system for allowing the famine to happen.
68. To Ivan Leontyev (Shcheglov)
Melikhovo,1 March 9, 1892
My dear Jean,
Your wish is going to come true: I'm sending a story to The Week.2 And I'm all the more willing to do so because I find the journal congenial. Tell the helmsman3 to reserve me a cabin on his ship for no later than April.
Yes, there are very few people in the world like Rachinsky.4 I can certainly understand your enthusiasm. After the stifling atmosphere one feels in the company of our Burenins and Averkievs5—and the world is full of them—the high-minded, humane and pure Rachinsky is like a spring breeze. I am willing to lay down my life for Rachinsky, but, dear friend . . . allow me this "but" without getting angry—I would never send my children to his school. Why? In my childhood, I received a religious education and the same sort of upbringing—choir singing, reading the epistles and psalms in church, regular attendance at matins, altar boy and bell-ringing duty. And the result? When I think back on my childhood it all seems quite gloomy to me. I have no religion now.
You know, when my two brothers and I would sing the "Let my prayer arise" trio or the "Archangel's voice,"6 everyone looked at us and was moved. They envied my parents, while we felt like little convicts. Yes, dear Jean. I understand Rachinsky, but I don't know the children who study with him. What they have in their hearts is a mystery to me. If there is joy in their hearts, they are more fortunate than my brothers and I; for us childhood was sheer suffering.7
Being lord of the manor is quite nice. There's lots of room, it's warm, and the doorbell is not in continual operation. But it is an easy fall from lordship to conciergeship or doormanship. The estate cost thirteen thousand, dear sir, and I've paid off only a third. The rest is a debt that will keep me on a chain for many years to come.
Here is my address: Melikhovo Village, Lopasnya Station, Moscow-Kursk Line. It will serve for ordinary letters and telegrams.
Come visit me along with Suvorin, Jean. Arrange it with him. What an orchard I have! What a naive barnyard! What geese!
Write more often.
Regards and greetings to your hospitable wife. Keep well and cheerful.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Send me a copy of your latest story.
Chekhov's own estate, to which he had moved a few days earlier. After the planned purchase of the estate in the Ukraine fell through in December of the previous year, Chekhov became particularly anxious to acquire a permanent home away from Moscow. He learned from a newspaper advertisement that Melikhovo was for sale and sent his brother Mikhail to inspect it. Mikhail visited Melikhovo when the grounds and the buildings were covered with a thick layer of snow. Nevertheless, he advised his brother to purchase it. Chekhov bought it sight unseen, and when the snow began melting in March any number of additional structures and features—hothouses, sheds, an avenue of lindens—suddenly became visible. The purchase turned out to be an excellent move, providing Chekhov with an almost ideal home. But making the estate livable did require a considerable amount of work on the part of the entire Chekhov family, as some of the following letters testify.
"The Neighbors."
Mikhail Menshikov, the editor of The Weeh, was at one time a sailor.
Sergei Rachinsky, a professor of Moscow University, devised a system of elementary education based on religious instruction.
Dmitry Averkiev, a popular playwright of the time, now quite forgotten.
Both are Orthodox Lenten prayers.
7. Chekhov repeated and developed this passage in his letter to Suvorin of March 17, adding: "The so-called religious education cannot do without a little screen, invisible to the eye of the outsider. Behind that screen is torture, but in front of it people smile and are moved. No wonder so many atheists graduate from seminaries and divinity schools. It seems to me that Rachinsky sees only the facade of his own school, and has no idea of what goes on there during choir practice and Old Church Slavic instruction."
69. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, March 11, 1892
A workingman's labor has been devalued to practically nothing, and this is why things are so easy for me. I'm beginning to understand the charms of capitalism. Demolishing the furnace in the servants' quarters and putting in a kitchen stove with all the trimmings, then demolishing the kitchen stove in the house and installing a tile stove costs only twenty rubles. Two shovels cost twenty-five kopecks. A day laborer gets thirty kopecks a day for keeping the ice cellar full. A young worker who knows how to read, neither drinks nor smokes, and whose duties include plowing the fields, shining boots and looking after seedbeds gets five rubles a month. Floors, partitions, wallpapering— everything is dirt cheap. And I have a feeling of utter freedom. But, if I had to pay for their work only a quarter of what I receive for my leisure, I'd go bankrupt within a month, because the number of stove setters, carpenters, and cabinetmakers, etc. that I need threatens to be as unending as a repeating decimal. The spacious life, unenclosed by four walls, requires a spacious pocketbook. I've already succeeded in boring you, I know, but let me say one more thing: clover seed costs a hundred rubles, and I need more than a hundred rubles' worth of oats for sowing. How am I to manage?1 A good harvest and great riches have been predicted for me, but what the hell am I going to do with it? Five kopecks in the hand is worth a ruble in the future. I'll have to stick with it and work. I'll need to earn at least five hundred or so for all the little necessities. I've already earned half that amount. In the meantime the snow is melting, it's warm, the birds are singing, the sky is clear and it's a spring sky.
I'm getting loads of reading done. I read Leskov's "Legendary Characters" in the January issue of the Russian Review. It is both devout and piquant, a combination of virtue, piety, and lechery, but very interesting. Read it if you haven't yet. I've reread Pisarev's criticism of Pushkin.2 It's terribly naive. The fellow tries to debunk
Onegin and Tatyana, yet Pushkin remains intact. Pisarev is the grandpa and papa of all our present-day critics, including Burenin: the same petty kind of debunking; the same cold, self-enamored wit; the same crude, indelicate approach to people. It's not Pisarev's ideas that turn people into brutes (he doesn't have any ideas), it's his crude tone. His attitude toward Tatyana—and especially toward her sweet letter I love so dearly—strikes me as no less than sickening. His criticism reeks of the malicious, captious public prosecutor.3 Anyway, the heck with him!
When are you going to pay me a visit? Before Annunciation by sleigh or after it by carriage? We're almost completely settled in; the only thing left is the shelves for my books. Once we take the winter windows off, we'll start painting everything all over again, and then the house will really start looking decent. In the summer were going to install a flush toilet.
In the orchard we have linden-lined pathways, apples, cherries, peaches and raspberries.
You once wrote me to give you an idea for a comedy. I am so anxious for you to write a comedy that I'm willing to give you every single idea I have in my head. Come and we'll talk it over in the fresh air.
In the meantime stay well and happy. Regards to your family. It's a good thing that Alexei Alexeyevich has gone off to the country.
Yours, A. Chekhov
The idiomatic phrase Chekhov uses (Vot tut i vertis'l) was given by him later to the schoolmaster Medvedenko in the first act of The Seagull, providing the translators of that play with a perennial stumbling block.
Constance Garnett for some reason decided that this was the title of the work in question and put "Criticism of Pushkin" in quotation marks. Chekhov is writing about "Pushkin and Belinsky," the famous 1865 essay by Dmitry Pisarev (1840-68), which is probably the wittiest and most honest piece of writing produced by the entire radical-utilitarian tradition of Russian criticism. Where Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and their present-day disciples in the Soviet Union read into Pushkin's work the didactic and subversive ideas their tradition requires, the young Pisarev sat down and read Eugene Onegin as it was actually written rather than as the inherited Belinskian tradition said it was. With admirable logic and with numerous parodistic citations of Pushkin's text (reminiscent in method of Tolstoy's subsequent parodistic debunking of Wagner's Der Ring des Nihelungen), Pisarev demonstrated that, viewed from Belinsky's own position, Pushkin himself was a frivolous, outmoded writer and the characters of his celebrated novel in verse were aristocratic drones and ninnies. Pushkin's reputation and Belinsky's distorted reading of Eugene One gin were too securely established to be debunked that easily; but Pisarev's position, persuasively argued in this article, that any writer, past or present, must possess demonstrable social relevance or be dismissed from any serious consideration casts its long shadow over Russian literature to this very day.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги