3. The critic as "public prosecutor" is not a polemical exaggeration, but a remarkably apt metaphor for the methods and style of literary criticism inherited by Russian literature from Pisarev's time and practiced in Chekhov's day with equal ruthlessness by both pro-government reactionaries such as Burenin and anti-government dissidents such as Mikhailovsky. In the twentieth century and especially after the 1930s, when literary critics demanded and obtained a labor-camp sentence for the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky because he used surrealistic imagery in a poem about collectivization, and in more recent times, when literary critics appeared as witnesses for the prosecution at the trials of Andrei Sinyavsky and Iosif Brodsky, and Mikhail Sholokhov complained in print that Sinyavsky's sentence was too light, Chekhov's metaphor of critic as prosecutor has become a hard reality.
70. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, April 8, 1892
111 be in Moscow on the Wednesday and Thursday of St. Thomas week1 for sure. When you're ready to set off for Moscow, send a wire to Ivans address: Chekhov, The Mius School, Tver Gate, Moscow. I'd have arrived even earlier, but the story is still not ready.2 Ever since Good Friday I've been having guests, guests and more guests . . . and I haven't gotten a single line written.3
If Shapiro4 were to present me with the gigantic photograph you wrote about, I wouldn't know what to do with it. It would be an unwieldy sort of gift. You say I was younger then. You're right, you know. Strange as it may seem, I turned thirty long ago and already feel close to forty. And I've aged in spirit as well as in body. In some silly way or other I've grown indifferent to everything around me, and for some reason the onset of this indifference coincided with my trip abroad. I get up and go to bed with the feeling that my interest in life has dried up. It's either the illness that newspapers call exhaustion or that hard-to- detect emotional process that novels call a fundamental emotional turning point. If it's the latter, then all's for the best.
Yesterday and today I've been plagued by a headache that began with an intermittent flashing in my eyes, a malady I've inherited from dear Mother.
Levitan the painter is staying with me. He and I went out to the
woodcock mating area yesterday evening. He fired at a woodcock and the latter, wounded in the wing, fell into a puddle. I picked it up. It had a long beak, large black eyes, and a magnificent costume. It looked at us in wonder. What could we do with it? Levitan knit his brow, closed his eyes, and begged me with a tremor in his voice, "Please smash its head against the butt of the rifle." I said I couldn't. He kept shrugging his shoulders nervously, twitching his head and begging me. And the woodcock kept looking on in wonder. I had to obey Levitan and kill it. And while two idiots went home and sat down to dinner, there was one beautiful, enamored creature less in the world.
Jean Shcheglov, with whom you spent a boring evening, is a great opponent of all sorts of heresies, including female intellect. And yet if you compare him with, say, Kundasova, he's like a blushing nun. By the way, if you happen to see Kundasova, give her my regards and tell her we're expecting her. She's usually quite interesting in the open air and much more intelligent than in the city.
Gilyarovsky was here for a visit. The things he did, good Lord! He rode all my jades to exhaustion, climbed trees, scared the dogs and smashed logs to show off his strength. And he never stopped talking.
Keep well and happy. See you in Moscow!
Yours, A. Chekhov
The week beginning with the first Sunday after Orthodox Easter, on which the story of Doubting Thomas is read in churches.
"Ward Number Six."
Chekhov's phenomenal hospitality could finally come into its own after the purchase of Melikhovo. Throughout his life on that estate house guests remained a constantly present feature. The first few pages of Kornei Chukov- sky's book On Chekhov are a set of clever variations on the theme of Chekhov's hospitality and of his friends' inconsiderate acceptance of it even at the cost of Chekhov's own discomfort.
A prominent St. Petersburg photographer.
71. To Pyotr Bykov1
Melikhovo, May 4, 1892
Dear Pyotr Vasilyevich,
Ieronim Ieronimovich2 has written me that you are on close terms with the editors of World-Wide Illustration. Please let them know if you have a chance that the advertisement which touts me as "highly talented" and prints the title of my story in letters that are big enough for a signboard—that this advertisement has made an extremely unpleasant impression on me. It is like an advertisement for a dentist or masseuse and is at any rate in poor taste. I realize the value of advertising and have nothing against it, but a writer's best and most valid publicity comes from being modest and remaining within the bounds of literature when dealing with his readers and colleagues. All in all, I've had bad luck with World-Wide Illustration: I asked for an advance and got an advertisement. All right, so they didn't send the advance, so be it, but they should have spared my reputation. Forgive me for having to bore you with a first letter that is so grumpy.
I earnestly beg you to forgive me and to believe that I turned to you with a complaint only because I sincerely respect you.
A. Chekhov
Bykov was not merely "on close terms with the editors of World-Wide Illustration," as Chekhov writes—he was the acting chief editor of this popular magazine. The first page of the magazine's April issue was taken up by an announcement that "a new work by our highly talented writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov," called "In Exile," was to appear in one of the magazine's next issues.
Ieronim Yasinsky.
72. To Alexei Kiselyov
Melikhovo, May ii, 1892
My family described your stay at Melikhovo with great delight, and I was irritated I wasn't at home. Make sure you keep your word now, dear land captain: we'll be expecting you in June. If you don't come, I'll satirize you in the Moscow Press. I'll have some delicious sturgeon bellies ready, together with a large number of anecdotes about our agricultural experiences. We've been witnessing the damnedest homespun miracles: geldings turn into stallions, and mares impregnated by geldings in the evening turn into stallions by morning. I give you my word I'm not joking. Belonozhka [Whitefoot], one of our mares, was impregnated by a gelding in the presence of witnesses, after which she turned out to be a stallion.1 Aren't you jealous? You never have miracles like that in Babkino.
We've planted ten dessiatines of oats and the same amount of clover and Timothy grass. We are planting three dessiatines of potatoes, which, if they yield a harvest, we'll sell to the monastery and to Serpukhov. We're planting lentils, peas and buckwheat, and we're continuing to sow the seeds of glory on Parnassus. We will of course take into account your advice on growing clover. I can't see any sense in raising rye and oats; it's so much trouble and the hopes of success are so pitifully small. Next year I'll plant ten more dessiatines of clover, etc., and when I put up a hut on the other plot, I'll plant about thirty dessiatines of clover there too.
You're right, life is hard without a river. But what can we do? Only comfort ourselves with the words of Voltaire, who said that Russia has nine months of winter and three months of bad weather. In the winter you can't see the river under the snow, and when the weather is bad its absence is a convenience. But don't despair, Your Excellency! When I set up a farm on my hundred fifty dessiatines of wooded land, we'll have spring water. I'll raise bees and two thousand chickens, I'll have a cherry orchard, and live like St. Serafim.2 And it is essential to build a farm, because if we leave the hundred fifty dessiatines of woods untended, then ten years from now instead of the riches we're expecting it will yield nothing but grief.3
Yesterday we had our first rain after a dry spell. It rained again today. Things became cheerful. There will be lots of good grass.
So you've given your noble word of honor that you, Vasilisa Pantelevna, and the much-esteemed Bosko,4 to wit Sergei, will be coming to see us in June. If Maria Vladimirovna were to consent to pay my wretched hut a visit, our joy would be ineffable. I could find a carriage with springs for her. In fact I ought to buy one, don't you think? I grew so tired of bouncing my sinful insides on tarantasses in Siberia that the drive from Melikhovo to Lopasnya feels like sheer torture each time.
It's raining.
My income exceeds my expenses, but wouldn't you know, I'm having as much trouble collecting my royalties as a beginning writer. First the notary-publisher5 absconded, then they lost my address, then they sent the money to Serpukhov. There was a day when I was left without a kopeck and I felt like absconding after the notary. Incidentally, life in Melikhovo is cheaper than life in Moscow, but all sorts of trivia have gotten the best of me: first a room needs papering, then the well needs cleaning, then benches have to be built, and all these trifles add up to hundreds of rubles.
In June we'll have ninepins and croquet. You'll find many changes.
I couldn't have bought the neighboring estate (thirty-eight dessiatines), since it was sold for more than a hundred rubles a dessiatine. But our neighbors don't bother us. On the contrary. He and she, winsome lovebirds, are joined in illicit love. She is ten years older than he.
They've bought a number of agricultural machines, unusual plows, and are endlessly building. They have nine workers and four house servants. They plant clover separately from spring and winter crops. And you know we can't live anywhere that doesn't have a target in the neighborhood for our satirical arrows. We can't help gossiping. When our neighbors' criminal love cools off, so will their agricultural ardor. And then we'll buy it (if our estate hasn't been sold first).
I send you regards by the thousands. God grant you all the best.
Yours,
A. Chekhov
Yegorov will soon be in Voskresensk.
According to Maria Chekhova's recollections, the mare Whitefoot was stolen during the night and replaced with a dead gelding that had exactly the same markings, which caused understandable perplexity.
St. Serafim of Sarov, a hermit and mystic of the early nineteenth century, who lived in the woods together with a tame bear. Revered as a saint in Chekhov's time, he was officially canonized in 1903.
This letter is selected from a large group of similar letters Chekhov wrote to various friends during the spring and summer of 1892 describing his agrarian life at Melikhovo. His horticultural interests and talents came to the fore, he took up animal husbandry seriously and he constructed a pond, which he stocked with a wide variety of fish. These interests were not a transient whim, for they continued throughout Chekhov's Melikhovo period and were taken up again later, though on a smaller scale, when he had to move to the Crimea.
Chekhov's nicknames for Alexei and Maria Kiselyov's two children.
The publisher of the journal Russian Review had formerly been a notary public.
73. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, May 28, 1892
Life is short, and Chekhov, whose answer you are awaiting, would like it to flash by with brilliance and verve. He would like to go to the Princes Islands and Constantinople and back to India and Sakhalin. But first, he's not free; he has a noble family that needs his protection. And second, he is endowed with a large dose of cowardice. Cowardice is the only word I can use to qualify my peeking into the future. I'm afraid of getting in over my head, and each trip considerably complicates my financial situation. No, tempt me not in vain.1 Write me not of the sea.
I wish you would return from abroad in August or September; then I could go to Feodosia with you. Otherwise I won't get to the sea at all this summer. I yearn terribly for a steamship. I yearn terribly for any kind of freedom. I've had enough of this ordered, pious life.
We're having a hot spell with warm rain, but the evenings are delightful. A verst away there are good swimming and picnic sites, but there's no time to go swimming or picnicking. Either I gnash my teeth and write, or work out picayune financial problems with the carpenters and workers. Misha was given a harsh reprimandus by his superiors for spending weeks and weeks here with me instead of at home, so that now I am left alone to take care of running a farm I don't believe in because it brings in so little and is closer to a gentlemanly hobby than real work. I bought three mouse traps and catch twenty-five mice a day and take them off to the woods. I feel wonderful in the woods. It's terribly stupid of landowners to live among parks and fruit orchards rather than in the woods. There's a feeling of divine presence in the woods, to say nothing of the practical advantages: no one can steal your timber and you're right there when it comes to looking after the trees. If I were in your shoes, I would buy two to three hundred dessiatines of high-quality wooded land, put in roads and paths, and build a castle on it. Paths cut out of the woods are more majestic than tree- lined paths in parks.
What shall I do with Monte Cristo?2 I've abridged him so much he looks like someone who's just gotten over typhus; he started out fat and ended up emaciated. The first part, while the count is still poor, is very interesting and well done, but the second part with very few exceptions is unbearable because everything Monte Cristo says and does in it is pompous and asinine. But in general the novel is striking. Shall I put it aside until fall?
Three young ladies have come for a visit all at once. One of them is a countess, and Misha is trying to faire la carriere with her. The second you know—Natasha Lintvaryova, who has brought along her gaiety and her fine laughter from the south.
Judging by the papers, life is dreary all over. They say that there's a cholera epidemic in the Transcaucasus and that Paris has had one too. Before you go to Constantinople, find out whether they are quarantining ships from Black Sea ports. Being quarantined is a surprise I wouldn't wish on anyone. It's worse than being arrested. It has now been tenderly dubbed "a three-day observation period."
Horses in central Russia are suffering and dying from influenza. If you believe there is a purpose for everything that happens in nature, it is obvious that nature is doing everything in her power to rid herself of all weaklings and organisms for which she has no use. Famines, cholera, influenza . . . Only the healthy and strong will be left. And it's impossible not to believe in purposefulness. One day our starUngs, young and old, suddenly flew off. It puzzled us, because they aren't due to migrate for some time yet. But then we suddenly heard that clouds of southern dragonflies, which were mistaken for locusts, had flown over Moscow the other day. The problem is how our starlings found out that on such and such a day at so many versts from Melikhovo those insects would be in flight. Who told them? Verily this is a great mystery.3 But it's a wise mystery too. I can only conclude that the same kind of wisdom underlies famines and epidemics. We and our horses are the dragonflies, and famine and cholera the starlings.
I bought a wonderful croquet set at your store. The merchandise is good and the price very reasonable.
Do write and tell me when you're leaving. God grant you win or inherit three hundred thousand so you can buy an estate near Lo- pasnya. Keep well.
Yours,
A. Chekhov
Citation of the first line from an art song by Mikhail Glinka, which is a setting of Yevgeny Baratynsky's poem "Disillusionment." There is a superb performance of it by Jennie Tourel in her album None but the Lonely Heart, where it is called "Vain Temptation."
Chekhov agreed to abridge The Count of Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas for a popular edition Suvorin was planning.
A partial and slightly altered quotation of the Church Slavic text of Ephesians 5:32 ("This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church").
74. To Nikolai Leykin
Melikhovo, June 8, 1892
I received your letter, my most kind Nikolai Alexandrovich. I can only assume that Mikhail Suvorin is presently at his estate in Pskov Province and that it is almost impossible to get the truth from him. I'll write to my brother Alexander today. If he were to pay me a visit, there couldn't be a better opportunity. If the dogs need leashes and collars, please buy them yourself and we'll settle it later. Alexander will know as little about what to buy as I do because neither of us has ever had occasion to transport dogs. But I'm hungering to have those dachshunds here.1
Yes, veterinary medicine is still in the most pitiful state in Russia. There are times when its prescriptions leave you open-mouthed.
People still prescribe belladonna, lead acetate, flowers of sulphur, and similar nonsense from old veterinary handbooks. The handbook published by Mediator for the peasants is of absolutely no use.2 It's all terribly backward.
We haven't had any rain, and it's hot. We're languishing. The rye is doing fine, but the spring crops are weeping. Irrigating the vegetable garden has worn out both my family and the servants. It's strange that your apple trees have not blossomed yet, while our cherries are already turning red, our apples have grown as large as three-kopeck pieces, and the strawberries and gooseberries are ripening. There will be a bumper crop of berries this year. We'll probably get several poods of strawberries alone. What are we going to do with them?
We have all the books you wrote me about. I familiarized myself with Schroeder3 back on Sakhalin while studying the local agriculture. The trouble is I don't have any time for gardening. I ought to be out examining every sprout, but I write instead. The workers are in the fields, my sister tends the vegetables, my mother does the housework. And, whenever I have a moment free, I'm needed either in the fields or by the carpenters or in the vegetable garden, or else all the shovels are in use and there's nothing I can dig around the trees with. I started pruning out the dead fruit-tree branches, but after puttering around for three days I gave up. The old trees are bending down to the ground, and before you know it they'll topple over. When the plum trees were in full bloom, they were literally lying on the ground. We had to axe them, since there was no way of saving them. We ought to prop up trees with prongs, but there's no one to go to the woods. By August things ought to be a little freer.
I've ordered a hundred lilac bushes and fifty Vladimir cherry trees for the fall. The area which I've now fenced in with a solid base trellis and which serves as a continuation of our orchard will have to be planted with no less than seven hundred trees. The result will be a superb orchard, and in eight or ten years my heirs will receive a good income from it. Next year I'm going to start an apiary.
I have excellent buckwheat, but no bees.
Did I ever thank you for the books? I received them long ago. Forgive me for being impolite enough not to send you my books. My one consolation is that I'll send them all together.
Alexander has astounded me. He's published a History of Fire Fighting. An excellent idea. He has appealed to me as well with the question about his little son. I promised to look into the matter, but there is such a mass of letters in my archives that I'm afraid to go near it.4
My humblest respects to your family. I wish you warm, dry weather.
Keep well and happy.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Despite some unkind things Chekhov had to say about Leykin in some of his letters to Suvorin, he remained on cordial terms with him in later years and contributed an occasional story to his humor magazine. Leykin was one of the earliest Russian breeders of dachshunds, which were considered a rare and exotic breed. He offered Chekhov two dachshund puppies and Suvorin's second son, Mikhail, volunteered to transport them from St. Petersburg to Melikhovo. But he later backed out of his promise and Chekhov is suggesting that Leykin entrust the dogs to Alexander Chekhov, who was planning to visit his family at Melikhovo.
When the dachshunds arrived, they were named Brom and Khina (Bromine and Quinine). They became general favorites and potbellied Quinine in particular was Chekhov's inseparable companion throughout his stay at Melikhovo.
Mediator was a Tolstoy an publishing house whose aim was to be of service to the impoverished peasants.
A popular gardening manual.
Alexander Chekhov's family life was disorganized to such a degree that when his eldest son had to be registered at school it turned out that the boy's father had no idea of the date or year of his birth. Alexander therefore asked his brother Anton and various acquaintances to look through their correspondence to see if he had perhaps mentioned the birth of his son in any of his old letters.
75. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, July 3, 1892
An important correction. I have been sent Fin de siecle.1 I received it yesterday evening, after three days' delay because Fin lay around for three days in Serpukhov. For the time being all I can say is that the format is very nice. The book looks appealing. I'll start reading it tonight, and in a few days I'll let fly my criticism and profound comments.
Cholera has been creeping higher and higher, but lethargically and indecisively. No city has as many as two hundred cases a day. Most have only seven or eight. It is only in Astrakhan and Baku that they are counted in the tens and add up to a hundred. The papers have been writing a lot of nonsense, but in general they do get a great deal accomplished. In matters of cholera New Times has behaved excellently. Dr. Galanin's2 articles are entirely satisfactory. The city population is alarmed, and even the countryside is beginning to talk despondently about the epidemic. The danger has been exaggerated; cholera is not as terrifying as it's made out to be, but there's something vile, depressing and fulsome about the word itself. If it had another name, people would be a lot less afraid of it.
Even so, it's upsetting. Last year famine, this year fear. Life has been taking so much from the people, but what has it been giving them? We are told to put up a fight, but is the game worth the candle?
I received plans for a new theater society that is being organized by Grigorovich, Vsevolozhsky, Savina and others. In my opinion, it's an utterly superfluous society. They'll get a hundred rubles from you, five from me, collect 2,137 rubles 42 kopecks altogether and wilt. The functions are very ill defined, the general tone of the constitution servile.
Let me know your address if you leave Franzensbad.
I have a piece of literary news. I've received a letter from Russian Thought proposing we forget our former misunderstanding. I responded with a touching letter and promised them a story.3
What else shall I write you? We have so many cherries we don't know what to do with them. There's no one to pick the gooseberries. I have never in my life been so rich. Standing under the cherry tree and eating cherries, I feel strange that no one boots me out. In my childhood I had my ears boxed daily for stealing berries.
A pre-cholera portent: birds are laying poorly and having trouble bringing up their young. Three geese hatched only three goslings, and the ducks had no luck at all. The hens have been leaving their nests. That's how it is everywhere. The flowers are coming up poorly, and everything is dwarflike. Zdekauer4 was right when he called influenza the harbinger of cholera, but his article in New Times is a bit naive. You'd think he was an old army doctor of the Bazarov-pere5 variety instead of a professor.
Misha keeps pushing me to write faster and faster because FrolG is about to drive to the station. So keep well. Come as soon as you can, and write and tell me where you're going to be living in the fall.
Yours, A. Chekhov
A novel by Suvorin.
Dr. Modest Galanin published a series of articles on the cholera epidemic in New Times.
On June 23, 1892, Vukol Lavrov wrote Chekhov, apologizing for the misunderstanding that caused Chekhov to write an angry letter (Letter 43) and assuring him that Russian Thought was anxious to publish his work. The result was the publication of "Ward Number Six" and "An Unknown Man's Story" in Lavrov's journal, followed in the next few years by "A Woman's Kingdom" and "Three Years."
Professor Nikolai Zdekauer, the court physician of the imperial family, also published a few brief pieces on the cholera epidemic in New Times.
The father of the hero in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.
The hired hand at Melikhovo.
76. To Nikolai Leykin
Melikhovo, July 13, 1892
Forgive me, my most kind Nikolai Alexandrovieh, for having waited so long to answer your letter. As a result of the cholera epidemic, which has not yet reached us, I've been invited to join the zemstvo force of sanitary inspectors and assigned my own region, and I am now traveling from village to village and from factory to factory gathering material for a conference of sanitary inspectors. I have no time even to think of literary work. My region was very heavily attacked by cholera in 1848, and we're expecting it won't be any weaker this time round, though, of course, it's all in God's hands. The regions are large, so most of the inspectors' time will be spent on exhausting field trips. There are no shelters, so the tragedies will take place in huts or out in the open. We have no assistants. We are promised unlimited quantities of disinfectants and medicine. The roads are foul, and my horses worse. As for my health, I begin feeling exhausted and wishing to collapse into bed by noontime. That's what it's like without cholera; we'll see what happens when cholera arrives.
There is an epidemic besides cholera that I am sure will visit my estate: penury. By cutting off my literary activities, I also cut off my income. Apart from the three rubles I received today for treating a case of the clap, my income is down to zero.
All fourteen dessiatines of rye are successful and are now being harvested. Thanks to the rains we've had lately the oats have recovered. The buckwheat is splendid. There are heaps of cherries.
It's now after seven in the evening. I have to go to the land captain's; he has called a meeting for me. This land captain, Prince Shakhovskoy, is my neighbor (three versts away). He is a young man of twenty-seven, gigantic build and stentorian voice. He and I both practice eloquence at the village meetings by trying to argue skeptics out of believing in the healing powers of pepper vodka, dill pickles, etc. Every single peasant child has diarrhea, often with blood.
Keep well, now. Send the fee to Serpukhov because Lopasnya has no post office. All you need is Melikhovo, Serpukhov District.
Once again, keep well. Send my regards to your family. Dr. Siro- tinin1 is living in a cottage nearby.
Yours, A. Chekhov
i. A one-time colleague of Chekhov's from his Voskresensk zemstvo hospital days.
77. To Yevgraf Yegorov
Melikhovo, July 15, 1892
My most kind Yevgraf Petrovich,
I can't give you any good news, because I don't know a single doctor who is free and I have no acquaintances among medical students. And even if I do encounter someone, my intervention has little chance of success, because no doctor is likely to be willing to go to your district for two hundred and fifty rubles.1
We too are working for all we're worth. There are so few doctors here in Serpukhov District that when cholera comes, the district will be practically without aid. They've even dragged up poor me, sinner that I am, and had me appointed a sanitary inspector. I've been traveling from village to village giving lectures. The day after tomorrow at the council of sanitary inspectors we are going to discuss how to find doctors and medical students. Most likely we won't come up with any solution.
So you're not getting a chance to rest after your famine efforts. It's a sad and irritating business.
I am now on my way to the monastery to ask them to put up a shelter. Stay well and under Heaven's protection. Regards to your family.
Yours, A. Chekhov
1. Yegorov had written to Chekhov asking him to recommend a doctor for the zemstvo in which he was the land captain.
78. To Natalia Lintvaryova1
Melikhovo, July 22, 1892
Dear Natalia Mikhailovna,
Tell Ivanenko I paid a ruble for his telegram. It was a waste of money, because Masha had been told that if Alexander Ignatyevich consented he should leave at once without going to the trouble of sending telegrams or scratching his head indecisively. He's been expected for a long time now. I myself am anxiously awaiting his arrival.2
Rumor has it that your sister Yelena Mikhailovna3 passed nearby on her way to Khotun. The day before yesterday I heard she had been appointed to a position in Belopesotsk Rural District. Could we have imagined three years ago that we'd be fighting cholera together in Serpukhov District? The Khotun Medical Region borders on my Melikhovo Region, which was set up on July 17th. So fate herself meant us to be "esteemed colleagues." Yelena Mikhailovna will now have to organize her region. It's going to be hard on her nerves because our zemstvo is noted for its procrastination and has loaded all the difficult organizational work onto the backs of the doctors. I'm as frustrated as a dog on a chain. I'm in charge of twenty-three villages, and so far I haven't received a single cot. I'll probably never get the medical orderly that the Council of Sanitary Inspectors promised me. I travel from factory to factory begging for room for my future patients as if I were begging for alms. I'm on the road from morning till night. I'm already exhausted, and the epidemic hasn't even arrived here yet. Last night I got drenched in a downpour and slept away from home, and in the morning I walked home through the mud, cursing all the way. My lazy side is deeply offended. And I don't suppose Yelena Mikhailovna will have an easier time of it. But that's only temporary. In a week or two everything will fall into place and we'll be settled. We are assuming that the epidemic won't be especially intense. But, even if it is, it won't be that bad, because the zemstvo has given the doctors extremely broad powers. That is, I haven't received a kopeck, but I can rent as many huts and hire as many people as I need. In extreme cases I can import a sanitary detachment from Moscow. The zemstvo people here are intelligent, my colleagues efficient and knowledgeable. What's more, the peasants are sufficiently accustomed to being treated medically so that we will almost certainly not have to start convincing them that we, the doctors, did not cause the epidemic. We're not likely to be physically attacked.
When is Masha coming back? The vegetable garden is getting terribly run down without her. The heifer and the geese have eaten up half of it, and the chicks are helping them along. I have no time to keep an eye on it, since I'm away from home for days on end.
I've read that there's some cholera in Kharkov Province. Where? Has there been any on the Sumy stretch of the railroad? It will be a pity if it starts making its way to the western provinces. It could build itself a good solid nest there and return to Russia in the spring.
A highly important note: if anyone on your estate should get cholera, give him naphthalene at the very beginning. If a person has a strong constitution, you can give it to him with calomel or castor oil. It dissolves in the latter. Give them up to ten grains. Here is the treatment we've decided on: first naphthalene, then apply the Cantani method, that is, tannin enemas and hypodermic injections of a solution of table salt. In addition I will be keeping the patients warm in every possible way (hot coffee with cognac, hot pads, hot baths and so on), and in the early stages I will supplement the naphthalene with santonin, which has a direct effect on intestinal parasites. The santonin was my own idea. If there is no cholera, I won't use any of it.
I hope the thrice-accursed cholera will pass us by and that we'll see each other another 283 times in our lives. Of course I can't visit you this summer. But if you come visit us in August or September, it will be very, very magnanimous of you. According to the historical data I have compiled, Melikhovo had no cholera at all in 1871—72 and only two cases in 1848, both of which came from outside. There is never any diphtheria or typhus here. . . . Why not move here? I'd build you a house on my second lot and forbid our maid Katerina to set foot there; she's turned out to be a terrible thief and imbecile. Darya is wreaking havoc.4
Keep well now and under God's protection. My sincere greetings to everyone. If Masha and Klara Ivanovna5 still haven't left, my regards to them too.
Yours with all my heart,
A. Chekhov
The third daughter of Chekhov's landlady at Luka, the loud-voiced Ukrainophile who once refused to meet Suvorin for ideological reasons. See Letters 21 and 22.
Maria Chekhova (Masha) and the flutist Alexander Ivanenko were both staying with the Lintvaryovs at Luka at the time this letter was written. Chekhov had arranged for Ivanenko a part-time job as a clerk on the estate of his neighbor the land captain Prince Sergei Shakhovskoy.
Dr. Yelena Lintvaryova, the second daughter of the Lintvaryov family, described in Letter 21 as infinitely kind, loving and homely. The eldest sister, Dr. Zinaida Lintvaryova, whose stoical endurance of her brain tumor Chekhov described in Letter 21, died in November of 1891. Chekhov published a brief but warm and sympathetic obituary of her in the medical journal The Physician.
The family cook at Melikhovo, given to bouts of drunkenness, at which times she would go around breaking the eggs under brooding hens and geese.
Countess Klara Mamuna, later temporarily Mikhail Chekhov's fiancee.
79. To Natalia Lintvaryova
Melikhovo, July 31, 1892
Dear Natalia Mikhailovna,
To begin with, many thanks for the zubrovka. I drank five shots of it one after the other and found it does wonders for cholera. Ivanenko is living with us and telling us stories about his uncle. Today he went off somewhere with his boss Prince Shakhovskoy, a young man who also likes to talk—but about his aunt. (His aunt, the Princess Shakhovskaya, works in General Baranov's medical shelter.) What a storm they'll talk up!
Masha was delighted with the Psyol and with all of you and your hospitality. If it weren't for my cholera duties and tight money situation, I would certainly have paid you a visit this year. Cholera will most likely occupy my entire autumn. It is presently in and around Moscow and is coming at us from the north and south and along the Oka from the east. It should be gracing us with its presence between the fifth and seventh of August and making hors d'oeuvres out of our local rustics. Each time there was an epidemic in my region between 1848 and 1872, it lasted about forty days, so I can expect the cholera epidemic to be over in September. Then we'll have the conference of sanitary inspectors and turn in our cholera equipment, so the whole rigmarole will drag on into October, and by October it will be too late to visit you. I'm up to my ears in work now and therefore won't be earning a kopeck until October; I don't have a thing to my name.1 So after the epidemic I'll have to stay at home and scrawl and try to skin each publisher twice over. Consequently, I won't be able to come in the fall either.
I haven't seen your sister yet. I'd like to see her and talk things over with her. Cholera will strike any day now, and the zemstvo is just beginning to send to Berlin for Cantani syringes and even Esmarch dishes. I have one dish for twenty-five villages, not a single thermometer, and only half a pound of carbolic acid. Your sister is probably no better off. Blessed are the doctors who live at their hospitals—we clinic organizers always feel impoverished and alone. I have shelters at two factories; one is excellent, the other poor; there are some smaller shelters in the villages. All this I've managed to obtain by begging from the local residents; I haven't as yet spent a kopeck of zemstvo money. None of this is of any importance, of course, and I can only suppose that in a week's time the domains of the King of the Medes will be ready to welcome the Indian commas.2 Our zemstvo is slow-moving, but intelligent and flexible, our neighbors good people, and in all likelihood the peasants will not resort to violence because they're accustomed to being treated medically and are afraid of cholera.
I just had some company in my study. The conversation was about you and your fall trip to Melikhovo. I've taken mental note of it. Please do come.
They're mowing the oats. A horse has fallen ill. Our neighbor has given us a small thoroughbred pig in gratitude for my having treated his wife. We have bought two Romanov sheep: an eligible bachelor and his young lady. The heifer has grown as potbellied as a zubrovka bottle from eating apples.
Keep well, now. God protect you from illnesses and fears. My sincere greetings to all your family and my thanks for looking after my sister. Come, so you can take another trip to the glove factory with
Your dashing soldier boy,
A. Chekhov
The glove manufacturer presented me with a half dozen pairs of gloves for Masha in payment for treating him.
An archaic Russian proverb is cited in medieval Russian in the original.
Natalia Lintvaryova liked to refer to Melikhovo as the domain of the King of the Medes. "Indian commas" is a euphemism for the cholera bacillus, Vibrio cholerae, which refers to its shape and to its supposed origin in India.
80. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, August i, 1892
My letters have been chasing you, but you are too elusive. I've written you often, to St. Moritz among other places. But, judging by your letters, you haven't received a thing from me. First of all, the cholera epidemic is in and around Moscow and will be in our area any day now. Second, I have been appointed a cholera doctor, and my district encompasses twenty-five villages, four factories and a monastery. I am organizing things, setting up shelters and so on, and I'm lonely, because everything that has to do with cholera is alien to me, and the work, which requires constant trips, talks and fuss and bustle, tires me out. There is no time to write. I abandoned literature long ago, and I'm poor and broke because I thought it desirable for myself and my independence to refuse the remuneration cholera doctors receive. I'm bored, although from a detached point of view cholera has its interesting sides. I'm sorry you're not in Russia. Material for your column is going to waste. There is more good than bad, and this makes the cholera epidemic strikingly different from the famine we observed last winter. Now everyone is working. Working fiercely. The wonders going on at the Nizhny Novgorod fair are enough to make even Tolstoy regard medicine with respect—medicine and the participation of the educated classes in the life of their country. It looks as if the cholera epidemic has been held at bay. Not only has the number of cases been lowered; the percentage of deaths has gone down as well. In all Moscow, immense as it is, the number of cases has been kept to fifty a week, while in the Don region it's polishing off a thousand people a day—an impressive difference. We district doctors are prepared; we have a definite plan of action, and there is every reason to believe that we will also decrease the percentage of cholera deaths in our regions. We are without assistants; we will have to be doctors and attendants at one and the same time. The peasants are crude, unsanitary and mistrustful, but the thought that our labors will not be in vain makes it all almost unnoticeable. Of all the Serpukhov doctors I am the most pitiful; my carriage and horses are mangy, I don't know the roads, I can't see anything at night, I have no money, I tire very quickly, and most of all—I can't forget that I ought to be writing. I have a great urge to drop this whole cholera thing and sit down and start to write. I also feel like having a talk with you. I am completely and utterly alone.
Our attempts at farming have been crowned with complete success. The harvest is quite respectable, and when we sell our grain Melikhovo will bring in more than a thousand rubles. The vegetable garden is dazzling. We have mountains of cucumbers, and the cabbage is amazing. If it weren't for the accursed cholera epidemic, I could say I've never spent as good a summer as this one.
I had a visit from the astronomer.[56] She is living at the hospital with the lady physician and is meddling in typical female fashion with cholera affairs. She exaggerates everything and sees intrigue everywhere. She's an odd sort of person. She accepts you and is fond of you, though she doesn't belong to the set that the censors would pass, as Chertkov[57] puts it. But Shcheglov[58] is definitely wrong. I don't like that kind of literature.
There's been no word yet about cholera uprisings, but there is talk of arrests, proclamations and so on. They say that Astyryov,[59] the writer, has been sentenced to fifteen years' hard labor. If our socialists do in fact exploit the epidemic for their own ends, I will feel utter contempt for them. Repulsive means for good ends make the ends themselves repulsive. Let them make dupes of the doctors and their assistants, but why lie to the people? Why assure them that they are right to be ignorant and that their crass prejudices are the holy truth? Can a beautiful future really expiate this base lie? If I were a politician, I'd resolve never to disgrace my present for the sake of my future even if I were promised tons of bliss for a pennyweight of base lies.[60]
Will we be seeing one another in the fall? Will we stay together in Feodosia? You after your trip abroad and I after the epidemic could have many interesting things to tell each other. Let's spend October in the Crimea. It won't be boring, honestly it won't. We'll write, talk, eat. . . . There's no more cholera in Feodosia.
In view of my exceptional situation please write me as often as you can. My present mood cannot possibly be good, and your letters distract me from my cholera interests and transport me temporarily to another world.
Keep well. Greetings to my school friend Alexei Petrovich.[61]
Yours, A. Chekhov
I'll be using the Cantani method to treat cholera: sizable tannin enemas at forty degrees and hypodermic injection of table-salt solution. The former works superbly: it warms the patient up and checks his diarrhea. As for the injections, they sometimes produce miracles, but sometimes result in paralysis of the heart.
misrepresented by the tsarist government as cholera rebellions, and that, furthermore, had there been any such rebellions, they were sure to have been instigated by the kulaks and other reactionary elements. But cholera rebellions in the Russian countryside were in fact a recurrent and well-documented phenomenon throughout the century, with peasants repeatedly refusing to be treated by government-appointed doctors, accusing doctors and other medical personnel of deliberately spreading the cholera and, in some instances, lynching them. See Roderick E. McGrew, Russia and the Cholera 1823-1832, Madison and Milwaukee, 1965, for a study of this phenomenon during a particular decade.
Both sets of Soviet annotators seem to miss the point that Chekhov is not really accusing the socialists of exploiting the cholera for their own political ends, but is merely raising a hypothetical but highly significant point about political morality.
6. Alexei Kolomnin.
81. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, August 16, 1892
Do whatever you like, I won't write another word. I've sent letters to Abbazia, to St. Moritz, I've written ten times at least. You haven't yet sent me one correct address, so not one of my letters has gotten to you, and my long descriptions of and lectures on cholera have gone to waste. What a shame. But even more shameful—after all the letters I sent you about my scrapes with cholera—was your letter from gay, turquoise-hued Biarritz, where you suddenly write that you envy my leisure. May Allah forgive you!
In any case, I'm alive and well. The summer was wonderful— dry, warm and abundant in the fruits of the earth. But starting in July all its charm was ruined by news of cholera. While your letters were inviting me to Vienna or Abbazia, I had become a district doctor for the Serpukhov zemstvo and was out chasing cholera by the tail and organizing a new district at top speed. My district consists of twenty-five villages, four factories and a monastery. I see patients in the morning and make the rounds for the rest of the day. I ride, lecture the local rustics, treat patients and fume, and since the zemstvo hasn't given me a penny for organizing clinics, I have to wheedle one thing after the other from the rich. I've turned out to be an excellent beggar, and thanks to my beggarly eloquence my district now has two excellent fully equipped shelters and about five that are not so excellent, in fact quite poor. I've even saved the zemstvo all expenses for disinfectants: I begged enough lime, vitriol and similar smelly junk from the factory owners for all my twenty-five villages. In short, Kolomnin should be proud to have studied at the same school as I did. My soul is weary. I'm bored. Not being your own master, thinking only of diarrhea, being startled at night by dogs barking and a knock at the gate (have they come for me?), riding abominable horses over uncharted roads, and reading only about cholera, and waiting only for cholera, and at the same time feeling perfect indifference to the disease and the people you're serving—let me tell you, those are the kind of cooks that could spoil any broth. The epidemic has already reached Moscow and the Moscow District. We must expect it any minute now. Judging by its progress in Moscow, we can reasonably believe that it has already passed its peak and that the comma is beginning to lose its virulence. We can also reasonably believe that the measures taken both in Moscow and here have considerably impeded its progress. The intelligentsia has been working hard, sparing neither effort nor money. I see them every day and I'm overcome with admiration, and when I think of how the Resident and Burenin poured their bilious acid over the heads of the intelligentsia, I start to gag. In Nizhny doctors and the entire educated sector of the population have done wonders. I was both horrified and delighted when I read about the epidemic. In the good old days when people fell ill and died by the thousands, no one would even have dreamed of the astounding victories taking place before our very eyes. It's a shame you're not a doctor and can't share my pleasure, that is, deeply sense and understand and appreciate everything that is happening. But I can't express it all in a few words.
Treating cholera requires first and foremost that the doctor take his time; that is, he must devote between five and ten hours to each patient, often more. Since I intend to use the Cantani method, tannin enemas and table-salt-solution injections, my position will be sillier than a fool's. While I'm fussing with one patient, ten others will fall ill and die. The thing is, I am all that those twenty-five villages have, except for my orderly, who calls me Your Excellency, is afraid to smoke in my presence and can't take a step without me. I'll be effective with single cases, but if even a five-case-a-day epidemic breaks out, all I'll do is get irritated and exhausted and feel guilty.
Of course I have no time to give even a thought to literature. I'm not writing a thing. I've refused all salary to retain a modicum of freedom of action. So I don't have a kopeck. Until the rye has been threshed and sold, I'll be living off The Bear and mushrooms, which grow everywhere you look. By the way, I've never lived as cheaply as now. Everything we have is our own; even our bread. I figure that two years from now my household expenses should not exceed a thousand rubles a year.
When you read in the papers that the epidemic is over, you'll know I've begun to write again. But as long as I'm working for the zemstvo, don't think of me as a writer. You can't run after two hares at once.
You write I've given up Sakhalin. No, I can't give up that particular brainchild. When fiction begins to bore or oppress me, I enjoy taking up something nonfictional. And I am not particularly concerned with when I'll finish Sakhalin or where I'll publish it. As long as Galkin- Vrasky sits on the prison throne, I don't really feel like releasing the book. Of course if I absolutely had to publish it or starve, that would be a different story.
In all my letters I kept importuning you with one question, though you don't have to answer it if you don't want to: where will you be living in the fall and wouldn't you like to spend a part of September and October with me in Feodosia and the Crimea? I am so unbearably looking forward to eating, drinking, sleeping and talking about literature, that is, doing nothing and at the same time feeling like a decent human being. Of course, if you find my idleness disgusting, I can promise to write a play or short novel with you or in your presence. How about it? You don't want to? Well, do as you like.
The astronomer has come by twice; I felt uneasy with her both times. Svobodin has also come. He's getting better and better. His grave illness has put him through a spiritual metamorphosis.1
Look at what a long letter I'm writing even though I'm unsure as to whether this letter is going to reach you. Picture my choleric boredom, my choleric loneliness and my forced literary idleness, and write me longer and more frequent letters. I share your squeamish feeling toward the French. The Germans stand high above them, though for some reason they're always called dullards. And I cherish Franco- Russian friendship about as much as I cherish Tatishchev.2 There's something dissolute in that friendship. On the other hand, I was tremendously pleased with Virchow's3 visit to Russia.
Our potato crop is delicious, our cabbage divine. How can you get along without cabbage soup? I don't envy you your sea or your freedom or the good mood you enjoy while you're abroad. Russian summer is better than anything. And incidentally, I don't particularly feel like going abroad. After Singapore, Ceylon and possibly our Amur, Italy and even the Vesuvius crater don't seem seductive. I've been to India and China, and I saw no great difference between foreign countries and Russia.
My neighbor Count Orlov-Davydov, owner of the famous Otrada,4 is in Biarritz now to escape the cholera epidemic. All he gave his doctor to fight the cholera epidemic was five hundred rubles. His sister the
Countess lives in my region, and when I visited her to discuss putting up a shelter for her workers, she treated me as if I had come to apply for a job. That hurt me, and I lied to her and told her I was rich. I told the same lie to the archimandrite, who refused to allot me room for the cases that are likely to occur at the monastery. When I asked him what he would do with those who were stricken in his hostel, he answered, "They are well-to-do. They will pay you themselves." Can you grasp that? And I flared up and said I was interested not in the fee, because I'm rich, but in the monastery's safety. Some situations are extraordinarily stupid and humiliating. Before Count Orlov-Davydov left, I went to see his wife. She had gigantic diamonds in her ears and was wearing a bustle. She has no idea of how to behave. A millionairess. With people like her, you feel that stupid seminary feeling of wanting to tell them off for no reason.
The local priest often comes and stays with me for hours. He's a wonderful fellow, a widower with illegitimate children.
Please write. Things are bad enough as it is.
Yours,
A. Chekhov
Chekhov's actor friend Pavel Svobodin was to die less than two months later in the midst of a performance.
Sergei Tatishchev, diplomat, historian and contributor to New Times.
Rudolf Virchow, the famous German pathologist and political leader, had paid a recent visit to Russia.
The estate of the Counts Orlov, the favorites of Catherine the Great, which was later inherited by the Orlov-Davydov branch of the family.
82. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, November 25, 1892
You're very easy to understand, and you're wrong to reproach yourself for not expressing yourself clearly. You're used to strong stuff, and I've offered you some sweet lemonade.1 Then, though you give the lemonade its due, you cogently note it contains no alcohol. But that's precisely what our works lack: the alcohol capable of intoxicating and enslaving, and you make that very clear. Why is that? Putting "Ward Number Six" and myself aside, let's talk in general terms; that's more interesting. Let's talk about general causes if it doesn't bore you, and let's embrace an entire era. Tell me truthfully now, who among my contemporaries, that is, authors between thirty and forty-five, has given the world a single drop of alcohol? Aren't Korolenko, Nadson and all of today's playwrights lemonade? Have the paintings of Repin and Shishkin[62] turned your head? They're nice, they're talented, you're delighted by them, but at the same time you can't forget your desire for a smoke. Science and technology are now going through a period of greatness, but for us this is a precarious, sour, dreary period, and we ourselves are sour and dreary. All we can give birth to is gutta-percha boys,3 and only Stasov, whom nature gave the rare talent of getting intoxicated on anything, even slops, cannot see this.4 The causes do not lie in our stupidity, our insolence or our lack of talent, as Burenin thinks, but in a malady that for an artist is worse than syphilis or sexual impotence. We truly lack a certain something: if you lift up the skirts of our muse, all you see is a flat area. Keep in mind that the writers we call eternal or simply good, the writers who intoxicate us, have one highly important trait in common: they're moving toward something definite and beckon you to follow, and you feel with your entire being, not only with your mind, that they have a certain goal, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, which had a motive for coming and stirring Hamlet's imagination. Depending on their caliber, some have immediate goals— the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of one's country, politics, beauty or simply vodka, as in the case of Denis Davydov5—while the goals of others are more remote—God, life after death, the happiness of mankind, etc. The best of them are realistic and describe life as it is, but because each line is saturated with the consciousness of its goal, you feel life as it should be in addition to life as it is, and you are captivated by it. But what about us? Us! We describe life as it is and stop dead right there. We wouldn't lift a hoof if you lit into us with a whip. We have neither immediate nor remote goals, and there is an emptiness in our souls. We have no politics, we don't believe in revolution, there is no God, we're not afraid of ghosts, and I personally am not even afraid of death or blindness. No one who wants nothing, hopes for nothing and fears nothing can be an artist. It may be a malady and it may not; what you call it is not what counts, but we must admit that we're in a real fix. I don't know what will become of us in ten or twenty years; maybe things will have changed by then, but for the time being it would be rash to expect anything worthwhile of us, irrespective of whether we're talented or not. We write mechanically, giving in to the long-established order whereby some serve in the military or civil service, others trade and still others write. You and Grigorovich find me intelligent. Yes, I am intelligent enough at least to refuse to hide my malady from myself and lie to myself and cover up my emptiness with other people's rags like the ideas of the sixties, etc. I won't throw myself down a flight of stairs the way Garshin did, but neither will I flatter myself with thoughts of a better future. I am not responsible for my malady and I am not the one to treat it, because I can only assume that it has goals that are good, yet hidden from us and that there is a motive behind its being sent. . . . There is a method to this madness.6
And now a few words about intelligence. Grigorovich thinks that intelligence can overpower talent. Byron was as intelligent as a hundred devils, but still his talent survived.7 If you tell me that X has taken to writing nonsense because his intelligence overpowered his talent or vice versa, then I would say that this means X had neither intelligence nor talent.
Amfiteatrov's8 articles are much better than his stories, which read like translations from the Swedish.
Yezhov writes he's collected or rather selected some stories for a book he is intending to ask you to publish.9 He's down with influenza and so is his daughter. The man's in a bad way.
I'm coming to Petersburg, and if you don't throw me out I'll stay about a month. I may make a jaunt to Finland. When will I be arriving? I don't know. It all depends on when I manage to write a seventy-page story in order not to have to apply for a loan in the spring.
May the heavens protect you.
How do you feel about going to Sweden and Denmark?
Yours, A. Chekhov
Vladimir Stasov (1824-1906) was an influential music critic, who also wrote on the visual arts. His writings supplied the official Soviet aesthetics with the one ingredient it did not get from Chernyshevsky and other radical utilitarians: its extreme and intolerant nationalism. Stasov did much to bring about a true appreciation of Russian composers, especially Glinka and the Mighty Five, but it is his ultra-nationalistic bias (praising a Russian opera or a Russian painting enhances the prestige of the Russian people and is therefore morally preferable to praising a foreign opera or painting) that makes him so popular with the present-day Soviet cultural establishment. Collections of his articles are regularly reissued in the Soviet Union, with official introductions that represent Stasov's academic and nationalistic attitudes as "democratic" and "revolutionary."
A poet and guerrilla leader during the Napoleonic wars, Davydov cultivated in his poetry the persona of a dashing, hard-drinking hussar.
Since Hamlet is mentioned in this letter, we have borrowed this formula to replace a Russian saying of similar import that Chekhov used in the original.
Several days earlier Chekhov had read a Russian prose translation of Byron's Don Juan and written to Suvorin: "Don Juan in prose is sheer magic. There's everything in that gigantic thing: Pushkin, Tolstoy and even Burenin, who's been stealing Byron's puns. Manfred is striking in its setting, but compared to Goethe's Faust it seems rather wishy-washy. I saw Manfred performed on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater when [Ernst] Possart was in Moscow and it produced a strong impression" (Letter of November 22, 1892).
Alexander Amfiteatrov, novelist and journalist.
The perfidious Yezhov not only used Chekhov to get this collection published, but put Chekhov in charge of approving the book's design and selecting the type face and the cover.
83. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, December 3, 1892
The fact that the work of the recent generation of writers and artists has no goals is a perfectly legitimate, consequent and interesting phenomenon, and if Sazonova1 suddenly chose to see fire and brimstone in it, that doesn't mean that I was being devious or insincere. You yourself didn't read any insincerity into the letter until after she'd written to you. If you had/you wouldn't have sent the letter to her in the first place. In my letters to you I'm often unfair and naive, but I never write anything I don't feel.
If it's insincerity you're after, there are tons of it in Sazonova's letter. "The greatest wonder of all is man himself, and we shall never tire of studying him . . or "The aim of life is life itself . . ." or "I believe in life, for whose bright moments we not only can, but should live. I believe in man, in the good side of his soul," etc. Can all that really be sincere and mean anything? That's no view of life; that's a lollipop. She stresses "can" and "should" because she's afraid to talk about what does exist and must be taken into account. If she first states what exists, I'll be willing to listen to what can be and what should be. She believes "in life," but that means that she doesn't believe in anything if she's intelligent or else, if she's uneducated, that she actually believes in the peasant God and crosses herself in the dark.
Under the influence of her letter you write me of "life for life's sake." My humble thanks. Why, her cheerful letter is a thousand times more like a tomb than mine. I write that there are no goals, and you assume that I consider those goals necessary and would be only too happy to set out in search of them, while Sazonova writes that it is wrong to tantalize men with advantages they will never know. "Value what already exists"; in her opinion all our troubles boil down to the fact that we all seek lofty, remote goals- If that's not female logic, it certainly must be a philosophy of despair. Anyone who sincerely thinks that man has no more need of lofty, remote goals than do cows and that those goals cause "all our troubles" can do nothing more than eat, drink and sleep, or when he's had his fill, take a flying leap and bash his head against the corner of a trunk.
I'm not berating Sazonova; I only want to say that she is far from being a cheerful individual. She seems to be a good person, but you were still wrong to show her my letter. She and I are strangers, and now I feel embarrassed.
People here are driving single file2 and eating meatless cabbage soup with smelts. We've had two bad snowstorms that played havoc with the roads, but now everything's quiet and it smells of Christmas.
Have you read Viktor Krylov's article on theaters abroad in Russian Thought? Krylov loves the theater, and I believe him, though I am not fond of his plays.
It seems I owe you an apology. I have tempted one of these little ones,3 Yezhov the well-known writer, to be exact. I once spoke to him about having a book of his published and then corresponded with him about it, in very indefinite terms, and today I suddenly get a letter from him informing me he has already sent you the stories to be typeset. The title of the book is Clouds and Other Stories. Clouds! It sounds like apples.4
Rumor has it that twelve Moscow writers have sent you a protest against Amfiteatrov.5 Is that true?
Keep well, and don't ever write me that you are more sincere than I am. I wish you all the best.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Suvorin had sent Chekhov's previous letter (Letter 82) to Sofya Smirnova, who wrote for New Times under the pen name Sazonova and whom Chekhov did not know personally. She sent Suvorin her rebuttal to Chekhov's letter, which Suvorin conveyed to Chekhov and which Chekhov is here answering.
An untranslatable pun on the two meanings of the Russian word gus\ which means both "goose" and "single file."
Chekhov is quoting the beginning of Matthew 18:6 (almost identical with Mark 9:42 and Luke 17:2), which in the English version reads "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones. . . ." In the Russian Church Slavic Bible, however, the verb rendered into English as "offend" is traditionally translated as "tempt."
Clouds is oblaka in Russian and apples is yabloki.
The protest was caused by Amfiteatrov's high-handed ridicule of a journalist who was a defendant in a murder trial that Amfiteatrov was covering for New Times.
SETTLED LIFE
A fter the cholera threat abated in the fall of 1892, Chekhov was again able to devote himself to his writing and to his personal life. But his involvement in the civic and zemstvo affairs of the Serpukhov District continued to occupy a considerable portion of his time for the rest of his stay at Melikhovo. He went on giving the local peasants free medical treatment at his private clinic. Urged by the local Melikhovo peasants, Chekhov took charge of planning and supervising the building of the local school and did it so successfully that he was asked to build two more schools in neighboring villages during the next three years. He persuaded the authorities to construct a needed local highway, which he helped plan and, not to forget the peasants' aesthetic sensibilities, he built them a beautiful bell tower for their church. There were numerous committees, jury duty at the local court, hospital matters, collecting books for libraries (including the library in Chekhov's native city of Taganrog, for which lie was constantly purchasing and donating books), referrals of mental eases and alcoholics to Moscow colleagues for treatment and hospitalization, and innumerable other activities.
As a creative writer, Chekhov kept expanding his range and trying to explore new varieties of fictional narrative during the next three years. I11 "The Black Monk," he rather unexpectedly turned to the Romantic tradition of Vladimir Odoyevsky, the first Russian writer to investigate the literary possibilities of the subconscious and the irrational, a friend and a contemporary of Pushkin and Gogol and an important precursor of Dostoyevsky. (Odoyevsky's work was anathematized by the radical utilitarians, and Suvorin was the only publisher of the second half of the nineteenth
century who dared reissue it.) Following the example of such typical Odo- yevsky stories as "The Sylph/' Chekhov's "The Black Monk" suggests that pathological conditions such as insanity or hallucination might provide us with valuable spiritual and psychological insights.
Some of Chekhov's most striking stories about women's response to the male-dominated environment in which they are caught were also written during this period: "Big Volodva and Little Volodya," "Ariadne," and "Anna on the Neck." Another theme that particularly preoccupied him at this time was that of social dislocation—the effect on a person of being brought up in one social stratum and then being transplanted to another. "A Woman's Kingdom" has a heroine brought up in poverty who ends up owning a large factory she inherits from a rich uncle. Not really able to function fully in either the proletarian world of her childhood or in the cultivated milieu into which her wealth and position have thrust her, the likable and appealing Anna Akimovna is trapped in a social no-man's land all her own, and the reader feels trapped with her. In terms of its elegantly organized narrative time span and its artful interplay of social and cultural contrasts, "A Woman's Kingdom" is probably the most carefully designed piece of fiction Chekhov ever wrote—a marvel of meticulously planned literary architecture. The almost novel-length "Three Years" deals with the similar predicament of an entire family of merchant-class origin and their difficulty in making the transition from the traditional patriarchal ways of Russian merchants to the Westernized culture of the educated intelligentsia.
Chekhov always pleaded that literary criticism was beyond his abilities. But the passages in his correspondence of this period dealing with Tur- genev, Pisemsky, Zola, Sienkiewicz and his own relationship to Tolstoy show that there was in Chekhov an able literary critic, as was the case with almost all other important Russian writers. Ilis letters dealing with Tolstoy are particularly significant. He disagreed repeatedly with Tolstoy's moral preachings and with his religious philosophy, but there was no literary artist, past or present, whom he admired as much and whom he considered as important. After several overtures on Tolstoy's part, Chekhov finally made a pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana in August of 1895 and met the great man in person. There were many things the two of them could have argued about, but their mutual respect and liking were so great that this did not even occur to them. His infrequent personal encounters with Tolstoy remained a source of pride and pleasure for Chekhov throughout the remaining years of his life.
Melikhovo was his permanent home now, but he loved to travel. He kept going to Moscow regularly—to see his friends, to attend plays, operas and art exhibits, to consort with lovely women such as Lydia Yavorskava and Lydia Avilova. There was also time for brief trips to St. Petersburg, to the Crimea and even to Italy. Not as hectic as 1890-92, the years 1893-95 were a busy and rewarding period in Chekhov's life.
84. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, February 24, 1893
I haven't seen Russian Thought yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I don't like Protopopov;1 he is a rationalist, cerebrally and oppressively boring, sometimes just, but dry and heartless. I am not personally acquainted with him and have never seen him; he has written many things about me, but never once have I read them. I am not a journalist; I am physically repelled by abuse no matter at whom it is aimed. I say "physically," because reading Protopopov, the Resident, Burenin and all those other judges of mankind always leaves a rusty taste in my mouth and ruins my whole day. They actually cause me pain. Stasov called the Resident a bedbug, but why, why did the Resident abuse Antokolsky?2 That's not criticism or a world view; it's hate, insatiable animal spite. Why is Skabichevsky so abusive? Why must they write in a tone fit for judging criminals rather than artists and writers? I just can't stand it, I simply can't.
Please don't reply to Protopopov. First, it's not worth it; second, Lavrov and Goltsev are as responsible for Protopopov's writings as you are for Burenin's; and third, the stand you have taken has been wrong from the very outset. You write indignantly about how your son is being abused, but no one is abusing your son; they are abusing A. A. Suvorin, the journalist who wrote Palestine, writes for New Times and himself once heaped abuse on Martens,3 spoke in Paris in the name of the Russian press, and printed an article about his trip above his own signature. He is an independent entity and can look after himself. Your letter gives the impression that Alexei Alexeyevich stands apart from New Times and is being penalized for its sins, while having nothing to do with the press. No, don't reply to him, or else your answers and his questions and then your new answers will take you so deep in the woods that you'll have ten headaches before you find your way out. Protopopov's slanderous, or to put it more mildly, unscrupulous article neither adds nor subtracts a thing; you will still have the same number of friends and enemies. Yet I understand your mood, I understand it very well. . . . Why don't you forget about them!
Speaking of Alexei Alexeyevich, tell him I still have the manuscript he sent me. I don't know what to do with it, but I guess I will do something with it eventually.4 Tell him not to be angry at the delay. May the heavens protect him.5 He'd do best not to take up smoking. I get bronchitis from nothing more than cigars.
My story will come to an end in the March issue. "To be continued" instead of "To be concluded" is my error; while reading the last proofs, I carelessly jotted down one instead of the other.6 You won't like the conclusion, I botched it. It should have been a bit longer, but writing something long would have been dangerous because there are so few protagonists, and when the same two characters keep coming back over a space of thirty to fifty pages, the whole thing becomes a bore and the two characters tend to blur. But what's the use of talking about experienced old hands like me? What about you? When are you going to send me your novel? I'm dying to get at it so I can write you a long critique.
Good Lord! How magnificent Fathers and Sons is!7 It makes you want to shout for joy. Bazarov's illness is so powerfully done that I went weak and had the feeling that I myself had caught the infection from him. And then Bazarov's end. And his old parents. And Kukshina. How did he ever do it? It's sheer genius. I dislike On the Eve in its entirety except for Yelena's father and the ending. The ending is full of tragic pathos. "The Dog" is very good; the language is amazing. Please read it if you've forgotten it. "Asya" is charming but "The Quiet Spot" is botched and unsatisfying. I don't like Smoke at all. A Nest of Gentlefolk is weaker than Fathers and Sons, but the ending also comes close to being a miracle. Not counting Bazarov's old mother and mothers in general— especially the society ladies, who incidentally are all one like the other (Liza's mother, Yelena's mother), and Lavretsky's mother, a former serf girl, and the peasant women too—all Turgenev's girls and women are unbearably affected and, forgive me, fake. Liza and Yelena are not Russian girls; they are Pythian priestesses8 who utter profundities and overflow with a pretentiousness beyond their station. Irina in Smoke, Odintsova in Fathers and Sons, and all those lionesses, the torrid, appetizing, insatiable seekers, they are all so much nonsense. One thought of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and all Turgenev's ladies and their seductive shoulders collapse and disintegrate. The negative female types whom Turgenev caricatures slightly (Kukshina) or pokes fun at (in his ballroom scenes) are remarkably well delineated and are so successful you've got to take your hat off to him, as the saying goes. His nature descriptions are fine, but ... I have the feeling that we're no longer accustomed to that type of description and need something different.
My sister is getting better. So is Father. We're expecting cholera, but were not afraid, because we're prepared—not to die, no, but to spend the zemstvo's money. If cholera does come it will take up a good deal of my time.
Keep alive and well, and don't worry. My special respects to Anna Ivanovna.
Entirely yours,
A. Chekhov
Weve been sent a large quantity of Ukrainian lard and sausage. What bliss!
Why haven't you described to me the writers' dinner? After all, it was I who thought up those dinners.
Mikhail Protopopov (1848-1915), a thoroughly unimaginative and insensitive literary critic, who was read and respected mainly because he was a self-proclaimed disciple of Chernyshevsky and an upholder of the ideals of the sixties. Chekhov later gave Protopopov's first and last name to Natasha's disagreeable offstage lover in Three Sisters (changing the patronymic for safety's sake).
This letter was written at the time of the Panama Canal scandal in France, as a result of which Ferdinand de Lesseps, the planner and builder of the Suez Canal, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. The New Times found his sentence too lenient and Chekhov wrote to Suvorin on February 5, 1893: "Your news story was cruel indeed. Five years' imprisonment, deprivation of all civil rights, etc.—this was the highest possible penalty, which satisfied even the prosecutor; and in your story: 'We consider this too lenient/ Ye heavenly hosts, what is needed then? And by whom is it needed?" There were also insinuations in the French press that Suvorin's New Times was involved in the shareholding fraud for which de Lesseps had been tried. Suvorin's eldest son Alexei traveled to Paris to try and exonerate his father's newspaper. In the interviews he gave in Paris, Suvorin junior represented the insinuations against New Times as an attempt to slander the entire Russian press.
Protopopov's literary criticism column in Vukol Lavrov's Russian Thought took issue with Suvorin junior's claim that New Times was representative of the entire Russian press, arguing that it was a major concern of ''every decent publication and every honest writer" in Russia not to have their names associated with this "conservative-liberal-progressive-reactionary newspaper."
Mark Antokolsky (1843-1902) was an academic sculptor whose work was hugely overrated in Russia and enjoyed a certain reputation in Western Europe as well. Chekhov was later instrumental in persuading Antokolsky to donate his equestrian statue of Peter the Great to the city of Taganrog. The exhibit of Antokolsky's work which opened early in February at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts was reviewed in New Times by the Resident (Alexander Dyakov) on the very day of its opening. The nasty, abusive tone of the review was obviously motivated not by the quality of Antokolsky's work but by his Jewish origins. Dyakov's review was answered by Vladimir Stasov, writing in, of all places, the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange Gazette. Exposing the anti-Semitic prejudice which motivated Dyakov's rejection of Antokolsky's sculptures, Stasov also proved that Dyakov could not have possibly seen the actual exhibit he was reviewing, since his article went to press at the tfme the public was first admitted to the premises of the exhibit. In abusiveness of tone, however, Stasov managed to outdo even Dyakov—the concluding sentence of his rebuttal, to which Chekhov is referring, read: "A bedbug's bite is not dangerous, but it leaves a revolting stench."
Professor Fyodor Martens, a specialist in international law.
Suvorin junior had sent Chekhov a story by Alexander Chekhov, asking him to abridge it.
After Suvorin followed Chekhov's advice not to reply to Protopopov's column, his son decided to take matters into his own hands. On March n, Chekhov wrote to his sister: "Alexei Alexeyevich Suvorin has slapped Lavrov's face. He came [to Moscow] especially for the purpose. This means it's all over between Suvorin and me, even though he keeps writing me sniveling letters. That son of a bitch who scolds people daily has now become famous because he struck a man who scolded him. Fine justice, this. It's disgusting."
On March 4, Chekhov had been a guest of honor at one of Lavrov's famous dinners. They had reconciled their former differences and Chekhov was now Russian Thought's most highly valued and highest-paid contributor. He was in the process of forming close and friendly relations with Lavrov and with his chief editor Goltsev. The action of Suvorin's son genuinely outraged him and so did the Resident's treatment of Antokolsky. From this point on, no further work by Chekhov was to appear in New Times. Russian Thought became his chief outlet for publication in periodicals. But there was no final break with Suvorin himself, despite what he wrote his sister; nor was there one later on, after Chekhov's violent disagreements with Suvorin over the Dreyfus case and the student disturbances. No matter how disgusted he sometimes was with Suvorin's newspaper, Chekhov could never bring himself to turn against the man to whom he owed his literary career.
Chekhov's "An Unknown Man's Story" was appearing in Russian Thought in two installments. The statement "To be continued" at the end of the first installment led some readers to expect it to be longer than it actually was.
The rest of this paragraph deals with Ivan Turgenev's novels and stories and characters who appear in them. Lavretsky and Liza are the hero and heroine of A Nest of Gentlefolk. On February 13, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin: "I am reading Turgenev. Delightful, but much weaker than Tolstoy. I don't believe Tolstoy wijil ever grow dated. His language might, but he himself will remain young forever." Turgenev's "The Dog," a story of the supernatural, was deplored by most critics of Chekhov's time as an unfortunate aberration of an otherwise admirably realistic writer (as were Turgenev's other visionary and metaphysical works, which are now seen as a key to an important aspect of his creative makeup).
8. Most Russian-English dictionaries translate the Russian pifia as pythoness. The translator of the truncated version of this letter in Lillian Hellman's collection read a herpetological meaning into this word and consequently rendered "Pythian priestesses" as "female pythons."
85. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, April 26, 1893
Greetings and welcome back. I didn't write you while you were in Berlin because the flooded roads made it impossible to get to the station very often, and I received your letter from Venice at a time when I figured you must already have reached Berlin.
First of all, let me tell you about myself. I'll begin by saying I'm ill. It's a vile, disgusting illness, not syphilis, something worse—hemorrhoids,1 [. . .], pain, itching, and nervous tension; I can't sit or walk, and my whole body is so irritated it makes me want to slip a noose around my neck. I feel that no one wants to understand me and that everyone is stupid and unfair, I'm always getting angry and saying stupid things, I think my relatives will breathe a sigh of relief when I leave. How do you like that! My illness can't be explained by my sedentary way of life, for I have always been lazy, or by any dissolute behavior or by heredity. I once had peritonitis though, and I can only conclude that it caused the lumen of my intestine to diminish in size and that the constriction has put pressure on a vessel somewhere along the way. In sum: I'll have to have an operation.
Everything else is fine. The cold spring seems to be over; I can take walks through the fields without my galoshes on and warm myself in the sun. I've been reading Pisemsky.2 He's a major, a really major talent. His best work is "The Carpenters' Guild." His novels are exhausting in their detail. Everything that pertains to his own times, all those digs at the reigning critics and liberals of the period, all the critical remarks with pretensions of being apposite and up-to-date, and all those would-be profound reflections scattered here and there—how shallow and naive they all are in this day and age! And therein lies the heart of the problem: the novelist interested in art should pass over everything that is of only temporary significance. Pisemsky's characters are alive, and his artistic temperament is powerful. Skabichevsky accuses him of obscurantism and betrayal of ideals in his History,3 but good Lord, of all our contemporary writers there isn't one who is a more passionate and confirmed liberal than Pisemsky. Every single one of his priests, government officials and generals is a villain. No one has reviled the old judicial and conscript systems the way he has. By the way, I've also read Bourget's Cosmopolis. Bourget throws together Rome and the Pope and Correggio and Michelangelo and Titian and the Doges, and a fifty- year-old beauty and Russians and Poles—but how wishy-washy and forced and cloying and false it all is in comparison with our own— well, all right—with our own coarse and simple-minded Pisemsky.
And now a page right out of a novel. It's a secret. Misha's fallen in love with a little countess,4 laid siege to her heart, and just before Easter was officially pronounced her fiance. His love was fierce, his dreams wide-ranging. At Eastertime the countess wrote she was going to visit an aunt in Kostroma. Until recently, there were no letters from her. Hearing that she was in Moscow, lovelorn Misha went after her and—lo and behold—found people hanging out the windows and crowding the gate of her house. What was going on? It turned out to be a wedding: the countess was marrying a gold-mine proprietor. Now how do you like that! Misha came home in despair and shoved the countess's tender, loving letters under my nose, begging me to resolve his psychological problem. But who the devil can? A woman will lie five times before wearing out a pair of shoes. But Shakespeare has already said as much, if I'm not mistaken.
Another piece of news, from the realm of psychiatry this time instead of from a novel. Yezhov seems to be going out of his mind. I haven't seen him, I can only judge by his letters. He is upset and swears obscenely in his letters for no reason, something he never used to do; he used to be shy, meek and chaste to the point of philistinism. Now his cynicism is of the coarsest variety. He wrote me that he submitted a filthy story to a journal and asked me to read a copy of the story so as to ease his troubled conscience. The story is about two lady philanthropists who meet a bedraggled little boy as they are out walking. When they ask him where he lives, the boy answers, "In [. . .]." The business about his book has completely shattered his nerves. I ought to go to Moscow, refer him to the right doctors, and see that he gets medical attention, but I have hemorrhoids and can only walk. I am forbidden to ride.
I probably won't go to America; there's no money for it.5 I didn't earn a thing all spring. I was ill all the time and fuming at the weather. It's a good thing I left the city! Tell all the Fofanovs, Chormnys6 and tutti quanti who live off literature that life in the country is immeasurably cheaper than in the city. This is brought home to me every day. My family doesn't cost me anything any more because the room, bread, vegetables, milk, meat and horses are all our own and don't have to be paid for. But there's so much work I have no time for anything else. I alone of all the Chekhov family am free to lie down or sit at a desk;
the rest of them work from dawn till dusk. Drive all poets and novelists into the country! Why should they beg and starve? Life in the city can't provide the poor with rich poetic and artistic material. They live within their four walls; the only places they see people are editorial offices and beer halls.
I have many patients. For some reason there are many consumptives. But you keep well now.
A drought is setting in. . . .
Yours, A. Chekhov
Chekhov was tortured by hemorrhoids intermittently for the rest of his
life.
Alexei Pisemsky (1820-81) was, as Chekhov rightly points out, a genuinely major Russian novelist and dramatist of the nineteenth century. Among his works, which deserve to be far better known in the West than they actually are, at least one novel (A Thousand Souls) and one play (A Bitter Fate) belong in the front rank of Russian literature of all periods. There is a study of his life and work in English, Pisemsky: A Provincial Realist by Charles Moser (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).
Alexander Skabichevsky's History of Modern Russian Literature, published in 1891, judged all writers on the basis of their adherence to a narrowly understood realism and their continuing fidelity to the social and didactic principles postulated by Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov in the 1860s. Pisemsky did not come off too well in Skabichevsky's book, but then neither did Tolstoy.
Countess Klara Mamuna, whom Maria Chekhova introduced to the family after meeting her during a vacation in the Crimea. Maria's memoirs describe her as a dwarf who spoke in a basso voice.
Chekhov and Tolstoy's son Lev had made vague plans to attend the Chicago Exposition of 1893.
Apollon Chormny, whose real name was Cherman, a totally forgotten writer.
86. To Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov1
Moscow, November 8 or 9, 18932 In Shakespeare's play As You Like It, Act II, Scene I, one of the lords says to the Duke:
To the which place a poor sequester'd stag, That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,
Did come to languish; and indeed, my lord, The wretched animal heav'd forth such groans That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat Almost to bursting, and the big round tears Cours'd one another down his innocent nose In piteous chase. . . .3
I wish you all the best.
A. Chekhov
A close friend and follower of Tolstoy who corresponded with Chekhov on behalf of the Tolstoyan publishing house Mediator in connection with securing the rights to publish some of Chekhov's stories in the Mediator's volumes intended for peasants and the proletariat.
This text is a message on a postcard, which was dated on the basis of a not entirely legible postmark.
In his letter to Suvorin of December 17, 1892, Chekhov wrote: "If you happen to see Leskov, tell him that Shakespeare in As You Like It, Act II, Scene I, has some good words concerning hunting. Shakespeare himself used to go hunting, but you can see from this scene what a poor opinion he had of hunting and of murdering animals in general."
Chekhov enjoyed bird hunting in his youth and he described this sport in excruciating detail in a very early story, "St. Peter's Day" (1881). But he lost his taste for it by the time he turned thirty. The episode involving Isaak Levitan and the wounded woodcock, which took place in April of the previous year (see Letter 70), must have consolidated his distaste.
87. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, November 11, .1893
If my latest letter is dated August 24th, you apparently never received the ones I sent you while you were abroad. Or maybe you did receive them and then forgot them? Though what difference does it make?
Your talk of Pleshcheyev's co-heiress reminded me of a conversation I had with a lawyer, Plevako's assistant. This lawyer told me that there is still another heiress, but that she has been bought off. I somehow got the feeling at the time that the lawyers themselves had tried to produce this co-heiress to give Pleshcheyev a scare and fleece him for all he's worth.1
I'm alive and well. I'm coughing more than I used to, but I'm still a long way from consumption, I think. I've reduced my smoking to one cigar a day. I stayed in one place all summer, riding from patient to patient, treating them, waiting for cholera. I saw a thousand patients and wasted much time, but cholera never came. I didn't write a thing. Whenever I was free from medical work, I would go for walks, read or try to put my cumbersome Sakhalin in order. The day before yesterday I got back from two weeks in Moscow which I spent in a daze. Because my life in Moscow consisted exclusively of feasts and new acquaintances, I've been nicknamed Avelan.[63] Never before have I felt so free. First of all, I have no apartment, so I live wherever I please, and second of all, I still don't have a passport, and . . . girls, girls, girls. I was tormented all summer by a lack of funds and was constantly agonizing over it, but now that my expenses have gone down, my mind is at rest. I feel liberated from money, that is, I'm beginning to think that I no longer need any more than two thousand a year and that I can either write or not.
Pascal[64] is well done, but there's something intrinsically wrong in the character of Pascal himself. When I have diarrhea at night, I put a cat[65] on my stomach to serve as a hot pack and keep me warm. Clotilde is the same as Abishag, the "cat" that kept King David warm. Her earthly destiny consists of nothing but keeping the old man warm. What an enviable fate! I'm sorry for that Abishag. She may not have composed the psalms, but she was probably purer and more beautiful in the eyes of God than the abductor of Uriah's wife. She's a human being, an individual, she is young and naturally desires youth, and forgive me, but you'd have to be a Frenchman to turn her into a hot-water bottle for a gray-haired Cupid with stringy rooster legs in the name of some damned principle or other. It hurts me to read about Clotilde being screwed by Pascal instead of someone younger and stronger. Old King David straining himself in the embrace of a young girl is a melon that has already known the frost of a fall morning and is still hoping to ripen. But every fruit has its own season. And what nonsense! Is potency a sign of true life and health? Is screwing the only thing that makes one a real person? All thinkers are impotent at forty, while ninety-year-old savages keep ninety wives apiece. Serf owners retained their reproductive powers and went on fertilizing their Agashkas and Grushkas up to the very moment when a stroke would force them to give up the ghost in their venerable old age. I'm not moralizing, and my own old age probably won't be free of attempts to "pull my bowstring," as Apuleius puts it in The Golden Ass. There's nothing wrong in human terms with Pascal sleeping with the girl. That's his private business. What is wrong is that Zola praises Clotilde for sleeping with Pascal and that he calls this perversion love.5
The astronomer is destitute.6 She's aged, grown thin and nervous, and has dark circles under her eyes. The poor thing is beginning to lose faith in herself and that's the worst thing that can happen. Blessed is he who is without faith and has always been without faith. All attempts to help her have foundered on her terrible pride.
I've been possessed lately by a certain frivolity, and at the same time I feel drawn to people as never before. Literature has become my Abishag, and I've grown so attached to it that I've come to disdain medicine. But what I love in literature is not the novels or stories you expect or have stopped expecting from me; it is what I can read stretched out on my couch for hours on end. I lack the passion for writing.
I have no plans for writing a drama. I have no desire for it. I see Potapenko often. The Odessa Potapenko and the Moscow Potapenko are as alike as a crow and an eagle. The difference is unbelievable. I like him more and more.7
Sakhalin is being sent to the Central Prison Administration in page proofs instead of proof sheets, although when they admitted me to Sakhalin they specified proof sheets as one of the conditions. I received a letter in an irritatingly official style from the Prison Administration that began "In correspondence to your letter . . ." The letter bears an official number. "In correspondence to" for "in response to." How stuffy.
I've been told you're writing a new play. Glad to hear it.
It's time I said good-bye now. We'll talk about the stories when we get together. You'll be in Moscow in November or December, won't you?
I wish you all the best. When you come, I'll stay at the Slavic Bazaar Hotel too. Yasinsky is in Moscow.
Hura-a-a-ah!
Yours, A. Chekhov
affection and sympathy for animals, cats were the only kind of animal he did not care for. Not long after marrying Olga Knipper, he wrote to her on August 30, 1901: "You wrote me about a female cat named Martin, but— ugh!—I'm scared of cats. I respect and value dogs. Why don't you get yourself a dog? We can't keep a cat, I'll remark in passing, because our Moscow apartment will have to stay unoccupied for six months out of almost every year. However, do as you like, darling; you may get yourself a crocodile if you like, I allow you everything and anything and for your sake I'd be even prepared to sleep with a cat."
This did not prevent the literary artist in Chekhov from seeing cats with an observant and sympathetic eye. Certainly, the dignified elderly tomcat Fyodor Timofeich in "Kashtanka," the hurt mother cat in "An Event" ("An Incident" in Constance Garnett's version) and the baffled kitten who is the hero of "Who Is to Blame?" are as warmly and appealingly presented feline characters as any that could be found anywhere in Russian literature.
We were able to reconstruct this passage in its entirety by combining the version in Maria Chekhova's edition with those of the two Soviet editions, since each chose to censor a different set of words and phrases. Through some miracle of oversight, the censors of the 1944-51 edition failed to realize (or perhaps chose not to notice) that the verb upotreblyat', deleted by Maria Chekhova, is employed by Chekhov in its secondary, crudely sexual meaning, rather than in its primary one, which is quite inoffensive and means "to use." Their reinstatement of this verb and of several phrases Maria Chekhova omitted enabled us to fill out her deletions; the passages the Soviet censors cut, by contrast, all appear in the pre-revolutionary edition.
Olga Kundasova again.
Ignaty Potapenko (1856-1929) had published stories since 1881, but his meteoric rise to fame began about 1890 with the publication of his novel On Active Duty. For the next ten years or so, his literary fame rivaled that of Chekhov and Korolenko. His reputation abroad preceded that of Chekhov and we can read in American magazines of ca. 1900 serious debates about whether Gorky, Korolenko or Potapenko was more likely to "inherit the mantle of Tolstoy." By the first decade of the twentieth century no one any longer took Potapenko seriously as a writer, in Russia or abroad.
He and Chekhov came to be good friends and it was Potapenko who got Lika Mizinova off Chekhov's hands by seducing her and taking her to Paris. Potapenko's memoirs about his friendship with Chekhov are among the better ones we have; they are particularly good and authoritative about the true circumstances of the initial failure of The Seagull at its premiere in 1896. The reference to "the Odessa Potapenko and the Moscow Potapenko" has to do with the contrast between his early stories of Ukrainian life and the successful novels and stories about the Russian intelligentsia and clergy he began writing after 1890.
88. To Alexei Suvorin
Yalta,[66]March 27, 1894
Greetings!! For almost a month now I've been living in Yalta, ever so boring Yalta, at the Hotel Russia, Room 39. Room 38 is occupied by Abarinova,[67] your favorite actress. We're having spring weather, it is warm and sunny, and the sea is as it should be, but the people are excruciatingly dull, dreary and lackluster. It was stupid of me to sacrifice all of March to the Crimea. I should have gone to Kiev and devoted myself to contemplating the holy shrines and Ukrainian spring.
My cough still hasn't died down, but I'm nevertheless setting off for the north and my penates on April 5th. I can't stay here any longer and besides, I'm out of money. All I took along is three hundred and fifty rubles. Subtract my travel expenses, and all that's left is two hundred and fifty. And you can't get fat on that. If I'd had a thousand or fifteen hundred, I would have gone to Paris, which for many reasons would have done me good.
Generally speaking I'm in good health; it's only in the particulars that I'm ill: my cough, for example, my palpitations and my hemorrhoids. Once the palpitations lasted six days straight and I felt foul the whole time. Now that I've completely given up smoking, I'm no longer overcome by moods of gloom or anxiety. Maybe it's because I've given up smoking, but Tolstoy's moral philosophy has ceased to move me; down deep I'm hostile to it, which is of course unfair. I have peasant blood flowing in my veins, and I'm not the one to be impressed with peasant virtues. I acquired my belief in progress when still a child; I couldn't help believing in it, because the difference between the period when they flogged me and the period when they stopped flogging me was enormous. I've always loved intelligent people, heightened sensibilities, courtesy and wit, and paid as little attention to whether people pick their corns or have suffocatingly smelly footcloths as to whether young ladies walk around in the morning with curlpapers on. But Tolstoy's philosophy moved me deeply and possessed me for six or seven years.[68] It was not so much his basic postulates that had an effect on me—I had been familiar with them before—it was his way of expressing himself, his common sense, and'probably a sort of hypnotism as well. But now something in me protests. Prudence and justice tell me there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than in chastity and abstention from meat. War is an evil and the court system is an evil, but it doesn't follow that I should wear bast shoes and sleep on a stove alongside the hired hand and his wife, and so on and so forth. But that's not the issue; it's not a matter of the pros and cons, the point is that in one way or another Tolstoy has departed from my life, he's no longer in my heart and he's left me, saying, "Behold, I leave your house empty."4 He dwells in me no longer. I'm tired of listening to disquisitions, and reading phonies like Max Nordau5 makes me sick. When people have a fever, they do not want to eat, but they do want something, and they express that undefinable desire by asking for "something slightly sour." Well, I too want something slightly sour. Nor am I alone in this sensation; I notice the very same mood all around me. It's as though everyone had been in love and gotten over it, and was looking around for new interests. It looks very likely that Russians will once again become absorbed in the natural sciences and that materialism will come back in style. The natural sciences are presently working miracles, and they can advance on the populace like Mamai6 and subdue it by their sheer mass and grandeur. But of course all this lies in the hands of God. And if you start philosophizing, it's bound to make you dizzy.7 A German from Stuttgart has sent me fifty marks for a translation of a story of mine. How do you like that? I'm in favor of the copyright convention, and some swine publishes an article saying that I denounced the convention in an interview with him. He ascribes statements to me I couldn't even pronounce.8
Address your letters to Lopasnya,9 and if you feel like wiring, a wire will still reach me in Yalta, since I'll be staying here until the fifth of April.
Keep well and don't worry. How's your head? Are your headaches more or less frequent than before? Mine are less frequent—from having given up smoking.
My humble regards to Anna Ivanovna and the children.
Yours, A. Chekhov
occurred in 1887, when he wrote his two most overtly Tolstoyan stories, "An Encounter," with its typical preaching of nonviolent resistance to evil, and "The Beggar," which asserts the human and moral superiority of an unlettered Russian peasant over a university-educated intellectual. Apart from these two atypical stories, Tolstoyan ideas have been discerned by various scholars in "The Cossack," "The Name-Day Party," "My Life" and a few other stories. A detailed study of the literary, philosophical and personal interrelationship between these two writers was published in 1963 by the fine Soviet literary scholar Vladimir Lakshin. Called Tolstoy and Chekhov, this excellent and absorbing book should be placed somewhere at the very top of any list of Russian works that need to be translated into other languages.
Slightly incorrect quotation of Matthew 23:38.
Remembered today as an early advocate of Zionism, Nordau was known in Chekhov's time mainly as the leading exponent of the theory of the fin de siecle degeneration and decadence of Western man.
A fourteenth-century Mongol chieftain, defeated by Dmitry of the Don at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. His name is used here as a synonym for a brutal, barbaric conqueror.
Quotation from Griboyedov's The Misfortune of Being Clever, Act II, Scene 1.
Chekhov was interviewed by a reporter from News of the Day in February of 1894. Almost all of his replies and opinions were garbled or replaced by their very opposite when the interview was published in the March 1 edition of that newspaper.
The nearest railroad and postal station to Melikhovo, Lopasnya was used as the postal address for Chekhov's estate.
89. To Alexei Suvorin
Moscow, October 15, 1894
With God's blessings let me begin by asking a favor of you. The writer Ertel1 has sent me a letter asking me to write you the following. In a school in Voronezh Province of which he is an honorary superintendent (he is a superintendent of the school, not the province) there is a library being started for peasants, and in part for teachers too. He wants to know whether you will consent to donate the books you publish that are suitable for readers of the category mentioned above. Ertel is troubling you with this request because you are a native of Voronezh Province and because the honorary superintendent of the school is a writer: he feels that the latter circumstance cannot fail to have an impact on your sense of solidarity with fellow writers. But the main reason he decided to ask you this favor is that you are "a good man who is genuinely in sympathy with popular education." While fulfilling his request, let me take the opportunity to call your attention to Ertel's story "The Seers" (in Russian Thought, XI, 1893), a very good story. For my part I wrote Ertel that I was very happy to be of service to him, but that he would do better to choose the books he needs from your catalogue and send you a list of them. His address is Alexander Ivanovich Ertel, Voronezh.
I'm still in Moscow, writing, reading proof, settling my highly shaky financial affairs and dreaming of Wednesday, the day I'll finally go home. Masha says the constant rains have completely ruined the roads and that passage is possible only by the most roundabout routes, in daylight, and only by simple cart. I'll probably have to walk from the station.
My same sister, Masha, says the house has become as cozy and warm as paradise after repairs. In my absence Masha not only installed new stoves and painted everything; she even constructed a heated lavatory. In return I made her a present of a ring, and will present her with twenty-five rubles when I have the money.
Today I had dinner at Morozova's.2 She is an extraordinarily wealthy and likable woman. We had crayfish soup with sterlet.
My humble regards to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya.
One more thing about Ertel: on his way back from abroad his suitcases and pockets were searched by the police.
Keep well.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Send me the address of Father Alexei Maltsev.3
1. Alexander Ertel (1855-1908), a rather interesting novelist, whose magnum opus, the two-volume novel The Gardenins, Their Retainers, Their Friends, and Their Enemies, was so highly admired by Tolstoy that he wrote an introductory essay for its second edition. Until about 1890, as his correspondence with Korolenko makes clear, Ertel did not believe that Chekhov possessed real writing talent and was highly suspicious of Chekhov's political orientation. But, under the impact of Korolenko's arguments and especially after meeting Chekhov in person at Lavrov's in 1893, Ertel came to realize that Chekhov was a writer to whom the standard criteria of Russian criticism were not applicable. This led him to an unprejudiced rereading of the stories he had earlier rejected and to the discovery that he could genuinely admire Chekhov's work. In subsequent years, the two writers carried on a friendly correspondence and exchanged copies of their books and other publications.
The philanthropic millionairess mentioned in Letter 64.
The priest of the Russian embassy church in Berlin. He is mentioned several times in Chekhov's letters to Suvorin but their connection remains unclear.
90. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, January 21, 1895
I will most definitely wire you. Please come, but don't bother to kiss "Kupernik's1 feet." She's a talented little girl, but I doubt you'll find her appealing. I'm sorry for her; she makes me annoyed with myself because three days a week I find her repulsive. She's a devious little devil, but her motives are so petty that the end result is more rat than devil. Now Yavorskaya2 is something else again. She's a very kind woman, and might even have turned out to be a good actress if she hadn't been ruined by her training. She's something of a hussy, but that doesn't matter. It never even occurred to me to use Kundasova in the story,3 for heaven's sake! First, Kundasova's attitude toward money is completely different; second, she has never had any family life; and third, everything else aside, she is something of an invalid. Nor does the old merchant resemble my father, because to the end of his days my father will remain what he's been all his life: a man of average caliber unable to rise above his situation. As far as religion is concerned, young merchants have little patience with it.4 If you had been whipped as a child on account of religion, you'd understand why. And what's so silly about their lack of patience? It may be expressed in a silly way, but in and of itself it's not as silly as you might think. It requires less justification than, say, an idyllic attitude toward religion, a gentlemanly, casual way of loving religion—like loving a snowstorm or a tempest from the comfort of your own study. I'll write the astronomer that you wish to see her. She will be touched and will probably try to come and see you.
I sent my book to Andreyevsky5 because he sent me his speeches a year or two ago. And since you haven't sent me the bound copy of your Love6 you promised, I was fully justified in not sending you my book. Besides, I knew you weren't any too fond of us "young writers" (and even saw fit to express uncertainty as to "whether they know anything or not"), I've lost interest in my books myself and so have no great desire to send them to anyone, and anyway Sytin7 has allocated me only ten copies so far. What do you say? Have I succeeded in exonerating myself?
Phew! Women rob men of their youth, but not me. I don't run
my own life; Im only the caretaker, and fate has done little to spoil me. I've had few affairs; Im about as much like Catherine the Great as a hazelnut is like a battleship. And the only excuse I can see for silk underwear is that it's softer to the touch and therefore more comfortable. I have a penchant for comfort, but debauchery doesn't tempt me, and I would never have appreciated Maria Andreyevna,8 for example.
I ought to take eight to ten months off and go somewhere far away for my health, Australia or the mouth of the Yenisei. Otherwise Im going to kick the bucket. All right, I'll go to Petersburg, but will I have a room there where I can hide? It's a highly important question because I'll have to spend all February writing to earn enough for the journey. Oh, how badly I need to get away! My chest is one big wheeze, and my hemorrhoids are enough to turn the devil's stomach. I'll have to have an operation. No, to heck with literature, I should have concentrated on medicine. Though of course it's not for me to decide. I owe the happiest days of my life and my best impulses to literature.
My humble respects to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya.
Yours truly,
A. Chekhov
I'll be in Moscow on the twenty-sixth. The Grand Moscow Hotel.
Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik (1874-1952) was the literary prodigy of the early 1890s. Because of the low standards of taste in poetry at that time, her trite and facile doggerel, full of obvious pseudo-poetic cliches, was acclaimed by the critics and liked by the reading public. By the time she was twenty, three of her comedies had been produced at the Maly Theater and by Fyodor Korsh. With her actress friend Lydia Yavorskaya, Tatyana formed something like a two-woman sexual-freedom league, which numbered among its joint conquests both Chekhov and the old Suvorin. She remained on close and friendly terms with Chekhov's family after his fling with her was over (chronologically it overlapped with his affairs with Lydia Yavorskaya and Lydia Avilova). Her affectionate and factually interesting memoir about her friendship with Chekhov, written in Soviet times, carefully avoids all mention of their one-time intimacy.
Lydia Yavorskaya (1871-1921), an exquisitely beautiful blonde, was the kind of theatrical personality we've come to associate with Hollywood in its heyday. Possessed of only a modest acting talent, she had a genius for publicity and self-promotion, for the sake of which she was willing to do anything: associate with Suvorin, join an anti-government student demonstration, call Viktor Burenin the greatest Russian playwright (in a self-glorifying interview she gave while on a visit to Paris) or exploit her affair with Chekhov. As Suvorin's journal (which contains many memorable passages on her) and the memoir of Alexander Lazarev tell us and as Ivan Bunin was to remember in his old age, Chekhov's affair with Yavorskaya was at its height during the period when he wrote The Seagull and was arranging its first performance. It was at her apartment that he read The Seagull to a group of friends and was surprised and shocked to hear that they believed it depicted Potapenko's affair with Lika Mizinova.
The period of Chekhov's involvement with Yavorskaya is the same one (1895, early 1896) that Lydia Avilova later identified in her patently spurious memoir Chekhov in My Life, written forty years after the events, as the period Chekhov was in love with her. That memoir seems to have fooled a total of two people: David Magarshack, who translated it into English and made it the basis of his biography of Chekhov; and Ivan Bunin, who read it in his old age and, remembering how attractive and desirable he had found Avilova in the 1890s, decided that Chekhov must have been in love with her too. As later Western biographers of Chekhov have pointed out, a careful reading of Chekhov's published letters to Avilova will convince anyone that there could never have been any serious or lasting emotional involvement with her on his part. His letters to Yavorskaya during the period in question were destroyed by her after she married a teen-aged and not very bright nobleman late in 1896 and, having become the Princess Baryatinskaya, resolved to obliterate the traces of her recent past.
After Chekhov's "Ariadne" was published in Russian Thought in December of 1895, Yavorskaya began spreading rumors, which managed to leak into the press, that she had served as the model for the heartless and predatory heroine of that story, acting apparently on the theory that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all. This may have been the cause of Chekhov's ending his affair with her; her engagement to Prince Baryatinsky came a few months after Chekhov's break with her. She was anxious in subsequent years to appear in The Seagull and in Chekhov's other plays, but he carefully prevented her from performing in any of them, rightly feeling that the showy, melodramatic acting style for which she was noted was ill suited for his plays. But he did recommend that Suvorin hire her when the latter started his own theatrical company, and it was with Suvorin's company that Yavorskaya was to score her most memorable successes, in Edmond Rostand's La Princesse lointaine and VAiglon, both of them translated into inflated and bombastic Russian verse by Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik.
3. Chekhov was repeatedly accused of depicting his personal friends and relations in his work. The painter Levitan broke off his friendship with Chekhov when he thought he recognized himself and his mistress in two of the characters in "The Grasshopper." The similarity of Lika Mizinova s affair with Potapenko to the Nina-Trigorin situation in The Seagull is one of the most recurrent themes in Chekhov criticism. In these two works, the resemblance was confined to the external situations: a painter having an affair with a doctor s wife in the story, a famous writer seducing and abandoning a girl in the play. The fictional characters themselves bore no resemblance to their alleged prototypes—as a personality, Nina is quite unlike Lika Mizinova;
there was no personal resemblance between Levitan and the painter Ryabovsky in "The Grasshopper"; and so on. The case is somewhat different with "Three Years." There, the personality, the physical appearance and the speech mannerisms of two of the characters had easily identifiable real-life models in Chekhov's life. The warehouse clerk Pochatkin had the physical appearance, the career and speech patterns of Chekhov's cousin Misha, while the character of Polina Rassudina looked, spoke and acted recognizably like Olga Kundasova. Chekhov's denial, therefore, is less convincing in this case than it was in other similar ones.
Suvorin's identification of Alexei Laptev's blind millionaire father in "Three Years" with Chekhov's own father seems off the mark, except for Laptev's attitude toward his father's cold and pharisaical religion. In this one aspect of the story, Chekhov must have drawn on his own conflict with his father. Laptev's discussion of his religious upbringing with his wife is strikingly similar to certain passages on this subject in Chekhov's own letters to Shcheglov and Suvorin (see Letter 68 and note 7 to that letter).
Sergei Andreyevsky (1847-1919), a noted criminologist, who was also a poet, essayist and literary critic. His critical study of The Brothers Karamazov (written in 1889) is one of the very few pieces of Dostoyevsky criticism written in Russian in the nineteenth century that can be read today without wincing. Andreyevsky's most durable accomplishment as a critic was his single-handed revival of the literary reputation of the poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, the greatest of Pushkin's contemporaries, who was banished from Russian literature in the 1840s by Belinsky for being too undesirably romantic and not sufficiently relevant socially. It is due to Andreyevsky's efforts in the 1890s that Baratynsky is today honored as a national classic in the Soviet Union and his works are published in large academic editions. Andreyevsky's own writings, on the other hand, have been banned since the Revolution because of his opposition to tendentiousness in literature; they have been out of print from 1924 to this day. His highly interesting posthumous philosophical work, The Book of Death, appeared in a German translation a few years ago.
Suvorin's novel, which is also called Fin de siecle.
The publisher of Chekhov's collection Stories and Novellas, 1894.
The lady whom Potapenko married after divorcing his first wife and abandoning Lika Mizinova.
91. To Yelena Shavrova
Melikhovo, February 28, 1895
You're right: it's a risky topic. I can't tell you anything definite; I can only advise you to lock up the story in a trunk, keep it there for a year, and then read it over. By that time things will seem clearer to you. I am afraid to decide for you for fear of making a mistake.1
The story is a little wishy-washy, it exudes tendentiousness, the details all run together like spilled oil, and the characters are barely sketched out. Some of the characters are superfluous, the heroine's brother, for example, and the heroine's mother. Some of the episodes are superfluous, the events and conversations before the wedding and in fact everything that has to do with the wedding. But if these are faults, they are not important ones. What in my opinion is much more important is that you failed to cope with the formal aspects. To resolve problems of degeneracy, psychoses, etc., you must be scientifically acquainted with them. You have exaggerated the importance of the disease (out of modesty let us designate it with a capital Latin S).2 First, S is curable, and second, if doctors find some serious disease in a patient, locomotor ataxia (tabes) or cirrhosis of the liver, for instance, and if this condition is due to S, then their prognosis will be comparatively favorable, because S can be treated. Degeneracy, general nervousness and flabbiness are not due to S alone, but to a combination of many factors: vodka, tobacco, the gluttony of the intellectual class, its appalling upbringing, its lack of physical labor, the conditions of urban life and so on and so forth. What is more, there are other diseases no less serious than S. Tuberculosis, for example. I also feel that it's not the duty of the artist to lash out at people for being ill. Am I to blame for having migraines? Is Sidor3 to blame for having S just because he is more predisposed to it than Taras? Is Akulka to blame because her bones suffer from tuberculosis? No one is to blame, or if someone is, then it's a matter for the health authorities, not the artist.
The doctors in your story behave abominably. You make them break the Hippocratic Oath, and what's more, you have them force a gravely ill, paralyzed patient to travel to the city. Was that unfortunate victim of mysterious S bounced all the way into the city on a tarantass? The ladies in your story regard S as if it were hellfire and brimstone. Well, they're wrong. S isn't a vice, it isn't the product of ill will, but a disease, and the people who have it need warm, human care. It's wrong for a wife to desert her sick husband with the excuse that the disease is contagious or disgusting. She is free to react to S however she likes, of course, but the author must remain humane to the very end.
By the way, do you know that influenza also ravages the organism in ways that are far from insignificant? Oh, there's very little in nature that isn't harmful and isn't handed down by heredity. Even breathing is harmful. For myself, I stand by the following rule: I write about sickness only when it forms part of the characters or adds color to them.
I am afraid of frightening people with diseases. I can't accept the idea of "our nervous age," because people have been nervous in all ages. Anyone who is afraid of being nervous should turn himself into a sturgeon or a smelt. A sturgeon can make a fool or a blackguard of himself once and only once, by getting caught on a hook. After that he goes into soups and pies.
I'd like to see you write about something cheerful and bright green, a picnic, for example. Leave it to us medics to write about cripples and black monks. I'm soon going back to writing humorous stories, because my psychopathological repertory is exhausted.
I'm building a steam bath.
I wish you all sorts of heavenly and earthly bliss. Send me some more "business papers," I enjoy reading your stories. But please allow me to lay down one condition: no matter how harsh my criticism, you must not think the story unsuitable for publication. My carping is one thing, publishing and royalties quite another.
Yours,
A. Chekhov
When she sent her story to Chekhov, Shavrova wrote: "The subject of the story seems too audacious to me and perhaps unsuitable for publication; my attention is so exhausted that I can no longer judge its structure, form, details and other such things" (Shavrova's letter to Chekhov of February 16,
1895).
Chekhov's drawing on a foreign alphabet for the letter to designate syphilis seems to correspond to the modern medical practice in the West, where the Greek sigma is commonly used as a symbol for this disease.
Sidor, Taras and Akulka are used by Chekhov as typical Russian peasant names and do not designate any particular persons.
92. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, March 16, 1895
You wrote you'd be in Moscow, and I waited and waited for a wire or a letter, counting on seeing you, but apparently you changed your Moscow plans. Instead of you the heavens sent me Leykin, who paid me a visit with Yezhov and Gruzinsky, two young lummoxes who didn't say a word and bored the whole estate to tears. Leykin has put on weight, gone physically downhill and looks a bit mangy, but he's grown kinder and more affable, which might mean that he hasn't long to live. When my mother was at the butcher's ordering meat, she told him she needed high-quality meat because Leykin from Petersburg was staying with us. "Which Leykin is that?" the butcher asked in amazement. "The one who writes books?" And he sent us excellent meat. So the butcher doesn't know I too write books, because all he ever sends me is gristle.
A very nice and very intelligent doctor, an admirer of Nietzsche, came from Moscow to visit me,[69] and we had a very pleasant two days together. The flutist Ivanenko, whom you've seen here, is down with consumption of the throat. That's all the news there is.
Well, we're releasing Sakhalin without waiting for permission.[70]It will be a thick book with endless footnotes, anecdotes and statistics. Who knows? We may get away with it. And if we don't, so be it, we all die in the end.
Have you read "The Mystery Correspondent" in February's Historical Herald?[71] Do you know who she is? What a story it would make! It's a pity I don't know any history or I'd write it myself. She's a remarkable individual, provided she isn't someone's invention.
Your short column on sports for university students will do a lot of good if you keep the idea alive.[72] Sports are absolutely essential. They are healthful and beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing contributes more to breaking down class barriers, etc. than street games and public games. Sports would provide friends for our young people living on their own. Young men would fall in love more often. But sports should not be instituted as long as there are still Russian students going hungry. Neither croquet nor skates on an empty stomach will contribute to a student's well-being.
May the heavens visible from Earth and visible from Sirius protect you. Let my name be remembered in your orisons, and drop me two or three lines. Has the astronomer been to see you?
Yours, A. Chekhov
Most of the book was serialized in Russian Thought in 1893-94. But, for purposes of book publication, Chekhov had a verbal agreement with Galkin- Vrasky to submit the proof sheets for approval by the Prison and Penal Colony Administration. After waiting many long months for an authorization, Chekhov and the editors of Russian Thought decided to publish the book without any governmental authorization at all, despite the fact that the last few chapters were not cleared by the censors for publication in the journal and did not appear in it. Actually, all that could befall Chekhov at that historical juncture for an unauthorized publication was the confiscation of the entire edition. However, neither the censors nor any other branch of the government made any fuss when The Island of Sakhalin was published in this manner. (The essay that accompanies The Island of Sakhalin in the 1963-64 edition of Chekhov's collected works stresses at great length the censorship difficulties with the last chapters at the time of the magazine publication, but neglects to mention that the complete book was published with impunity in violation of both the official censorship regulations and Chekhov's verbal agreement with Galkin-Vrasky.)
The Island of Sakhalin was widely and favorably reviewed in the Russian press. A wealth of documentation proves that Chekhov's book was instrumental in bringing about much-needed reforms in the penal-colony administration and that it helped improve the conditions under which the convict-settlers lived. Chekhov was far less successful in accomplishing the other goal of his Sakhalin trip. When his friend Dr. Grigory Rossolimo approached the dean of the medical school of Moscow University at Chekhov's request, to inquire into the possibility of the book on Sakhalin being accepted in lieu of a dissertation, "the dean opened his eyes wide, glanced at me over his spectacles, turned around and walked out without saying a word" (Rossolimo's memoir of Chekhov).
A possibly spurious memoir, purportedly written by a woman who lived during the reign of Catherine the Great.
Suvorin advocated in his columns the establishment of physical- education departments at Russian universities.
93. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, March 23, 1895
I told you Potapenko was a very lively person, but you didn't believe me. There are a great many treasures hidden deep down inside every Ukrainian. I have a feeling that when our generation grows old Potapenko will be the most cheerful and ebullient old man of us all.
Very well, then, I shall marry if you so desire. But under the following conditions: everything must continue as it was before, in other words, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I'll go visit her. I will never be able to stand the sort of happiness that lasts from one day to the next, from one morning to the next. Whenever someone talks to me day after day about the same thing in the same tone of voice, it brings out the ferocity in me. I turn ferocious in the company of Sergeyenko,1 for example, because he's very much like a woman ("an intelligent and responsive woman") and because it occurs to me when I'm in his presence that my wife could be like him. I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, does not appear in my sky every day. I won't write any better for having gotten married.
So you're going to Italy, are you? Splendid, but if you're taking Mikhail Alexeyevich along for a cure, then climbing stairs twenty-five times an hour and running to fetch the facchino,2 etc. certainly won't help improve his health. What he needs is to sit somewhere by the sea and take sea baths. And if that doesn't help, he might try hypnotism. Give my best to Italy. I love her passionately, even though you did tell Grigorovich that I lay down in the middle of St. Mark's Square and said, "How good it would be to stretch out for a while on the grass somewhere near Moscow."3 Lombardy made such an impression on me that I seem to remember her every tree, and Venice, I can see Venice by closing my eyes.
Mamin-Sibiryak4 is a very nice fellow and an excellent writer. Bread, his latest novel (in Russian Thought), has been generally praised; Leskov was especially taken with it. There are many excellent things to be found in his work, and the portrayal of peasants in his more successful stories is by no means worse than in "Master and Man."5 I'm glad to hear you've gotten to know him somewhat.
This is the fourth year I've been living at Melikhovo. My calves have turned into cows, my forest grown an arshin or more. My heirs will make good money from the timber and call me an ass, because heirs are never satisfied.
Don't go abroad too early; it's cold. Wait until May. I may go too. We could meet somewhere. . . .
Write me again. Isn't there anything new in the realm of the nonsensical and well-intentioned daydreams?6 Why did Wilhelm recall General W.?7 Is it that we're about to fight the Germans? In that case I'll have to go to war and perform amputations, and then write it all up for the Historical Herald.[73]
Yours, A. Chekhov
Chekhov first met Pyotr Sergeyenko (1854-1930) when they were both students at the same school in Taganrog. Sergeyenko later became a writer, journalist and a disciple of Tolstoy, publishing in 1898 a book about Tolstoy's day-to-day life at Yasnaya Polyana, which has retained some of its documentary value. Chekhov inevitably found Sergeyenko dull and depressing as a person, and there is no doubt that he turned down several invitations to meet Tolstoy and that their meeting was delayed for several years because he was unwilling to make Tolstoy's acquaintance in Sergeyenko's presence. Even more unfortunate was Sergeyenko's later role in helping to arrange the exploitative contract with the publisher Adolf Marx, in accordance with which, at the end of his life, Chekhov was done out of so much money that was rightfully his.
All Russian editions and the Koteliansky-Tomlinson translation into English reverently retain Chekhov's misspelling of the Italian word for porter as "fokino." The replacement of a with о results from the same extension of Moscow akanie dialect phonetics into a foreign language that Vladimir Mayakovsky was guilty of when he spelled Laredo as "Loredo" during his visit to America.
This joke of Suvorin's is gleefully quoted by Zinaida Gippius in her memoir Living Portraits as an actual statement of Chekhov's (although she probably got it from Maria Chekhova's edition of the letters, which she admittedly consulted before writing her memoir) as evidence of Chekhov's provinciality and lack of culture.
Dmitry Mamin (1852-1912), who published under the pen name Mamin-Sibiryak, was a novelist who specialized in describing life in the Urals and in Siberia.
A short story by Tolstoy.
Reference to the statement made by Nicholas II on January 17, 1895, when he received a delegation made up of representatives of the gentry, the zemstvos and the major cities, which came to him to plead for a more representative form of government. The tsar's reply was that some of the zemstvo conferences were carried away by "nonsensical daydreams" and that he intended to "support the principle of autocracy as firmly and unswervingly as his late lamented father did." After Chekhov read about this declaration, he wrote to Suvorin on January 19: "After the general jubilation caused by these great and joyous events subsides, write me. I'd be interested to know what the morning after is like, what kind of hangover he'll have, his condition at the moment when a person comes to feel like a wreck and at fault and to realize dimly that he had behaved offensively the day before."
Suvorin was in Moscow for the coronation of Nicholas II in May of 1896 and his journal contains one of the most vivid and indignant accounts we have of the infamous catastrophe of Khodynka, when a huge crowd was lured into an enclosed area by promises of gifts and souvenirs during the coronation and when thousands of people were trampled to death owing to the lack of even the most elementary precautions by the authorities.
A week after the catastrophe, Chekhov and Suvorin went to the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow to observe the interment of the victims, which was still going on. Suvorin was particularly struck by the number of children and adolescents who were killed.
General Werder, the titular head of the German colony in St. Petersburg, stated in a public speech, reported in New Times, that he was going to Germany at the request of the Kaiser.
The notes to the 1944-51 edition identify this man as Sergei Shubin- sky, the editor of Historical Herald (owned by Suvorin), which makes sense. The 1963-64 edition insists that Chekhov meant Nikolai Shubinsky, a lawyer married to the actress Maria Yermolova, but gives no reason for this supposition.
94. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, April 13, 1895
You ask me whether I received that letter. Yes, I did and I spoke to you about it in Petersburg. It shows you in a particularly suspect light, because you criticize both the present and the past. Remember what you wrote about Catherine the Great and silken underwear! While looking for that letter, I incidentally glanced through all your letters and put them into some semblance of order. How much good they contain! The period when your Tatyana Repina and my Ivanov were being produced is especially vivid. They bubble with life.
I am plowing my way through Sienkiewicz's Polaniecki Family.[74]It's a Polish cottage-cheese cake with saffron. Add a little Potapenko to Paul Bourget, sprinkle with Warsaw eau-de-cologne, divide in two, and there you have Sienkiewicz. The Polaniecki Family shows clear traces of Bourget's Cosmopolis, Rome and marriage (Sienkiewicz was recently married). It has catacombs and an old oddball professor who pines for idealism, and the heavenly countenance of Pope Leo XIII, who now resides among the saints, and an exhortation to return to the prayerbook, and a calumny on a modernist who dies of morphine addiction after confessing and taking communion, that is, repenting the errors of his ways in the name of the Church. It has an ungodly profusion of family happiness and disquisitions on love, and the hero's wife is so extremely true to her husband and her heart so subtly in tune with God and life that the result is cloying and uncomfortable, like a slobbery kiss. It is clear that Sienkiewicz has not read Tolstoy and is unfamiliar with Nietzsche, he talks about hypnotism like a philistine, but on the other hand every one of his pages is swarming with Rubenses, Villa Borgheses, Correggios, and Botticellis—the better to show off his culture to the bourgeois reader and covertly stick out his tongue at materialism. The novel's goal is to lull the bourgeoisie in its golden dreams. Be true to your wife, pray with her according to the prayerbook, make a fortune, enjoy sports—and you're all set in this world and the next. The bourgeoisie is very fond of what are commonly referred to as "positive heroes" and of novels with happy endings, because they make them feel at ease with the idea that you can hoard capital while maintaining your innocence, be a beast and yet be happy.[75]
We've been having a pitiful sort of spring. The fields are still covered with snow, you can't get anywhere either by sleigh or carriage and the cattle are pining for grass and freedom. Yesterday a drunken old peasant stripped and took a swim in the pond, while his ancient mother beat him with a stick and everyone else stood around and laughed. After his swim, the peasant walked home through the snow in his bare feet, followed by his mother. A while ago the old woman had come to me to be treated for black and blue marks; her son had beaten her. How base it is to keep putting off educating the illiterate masses!
Yavorskaya is not having an affair with Korsh, but it's true he's jealous.
How did the play at the Literary Artists Club go?
I wish you all the best. My congratulations on the Sino-Japanese peace,[76] on our good luck in grabbing an ice-free Feodosia on the Pacific and constructing a railroad line to it. As if we didn't have enough problems as it is. I have a feeling we're letting ourselves in for a whole lot of trouble with that ice-free port. It will end up costing us more than if we'd set out to conquer all of Japan. Of course, futura sunt in manibus deorum.4
Misha arrived with the announcement that he's received a Stanislav medal, third class.
Yours, A. Chekhov
1893: "I've enjoyed reading Without Dogma. It's an interesting and intelligent book, but it is so full of discussions, aphorisms, references to Hamlet and to Empedocles, repetitions and emphases that reading some stretches is as strenuous as reading a narrative poem in verse. Much coquetry and little simplicity. But nevertheless it is attractive, warm and vivid. . . ."
The word rendered as "innocence" can also mean "virginity" in Russian; Chekhov quotes a popular saying about a prostitute who plies her trade and manages to preserve her virginity at the same time.
The conclusion of the war of 1894-95, in which the newly modernized Japan defeated China.
Japan had acquired the rights to the ice-free port of Dalny (Dairen) on the Liaotung Peninsula by its peace treaty with China. Russia, backed by Britain and France, forced Japan to give up this port and started plans for constructing the Eastern China Railway from Siberia to Dalny. The resultant series of events culminated in Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1906.
95. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, October 21, 1895
Thank you for your letter, warm words and invitation. I will come, but probably not before late November; I have a hell of a lot of things to do. First, in the spring I'm going to build a new school in the village1 where I serve as honorary superintendent, and before I start I have to draw up the plans and estimates and make trips here and there, etc. Second, believe it or not, I'm writing a play that I probably won't finish until the end of November. I can't say I'm not enjoying writing it, though I'm flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage. The comedy has three female roles, six male roles, four acts, a landscape (a view of a lake), much conversation about literature, little action and five tons of love.2
Reading about Ozerova's3 fiasco made me feel sorry for her because there's nothing more painful than failure. I can imagine how much that little Jewess wept and shivered when she read the Petersburg Gazette, where they call her acting downright ridiculous. I read about the success of The Power of Darkness at your theater. Of course Anyutka should be played by Domasheva and not by "little darling," whom (in your own words) you find so appealing. Little darling ought to play Matryona.4 When I visited Tolstoy in August, he told me while washing and drying his hands that he would not alter the play. And, with that in mind, I now think he knew back then that his play would be passed in toto for the stage. My visit with the Tolstoys lasted a day and a half.
He made a marvelous impression on me. I felt as free and easy as if I had been at home. The talks I had with Lev Nikolayevich were equally free and easy. I'll tell you about them in detail when we get together.5 My "Murder" will appear in Russian Thought in November, and "Ariadne," another story, in December.
I am horrified, and here's why. There is a superb journal that is published in Moscow and known even abroad called Surgical Chronicle. It is edited by the well-known surgeon-scientists Sklifosovsky and Dyak- onov. Every year there is an increase in the number of subscribers, but by the end of the year there is still a deficit. This deficit has always (until January of next year, 1896) been underwritten by Sklifosovsky, but because he has been transferred to Petersburg, Sklifosovsky has lost his practice and has no money to spare and now neither he nor anyone on earth knows who will underwrite the 1896 deficit, in case there is one, and, judging by previous years, we can expect a deficit of a thousand to fifteen hundred rubles. When I learned that the journal was in danger, I did something rash. The absurd thought that an absolutely indispensable journal which would be making a profit in three or four years was going to expire for such a paltry sum, the absurdity of it all struck me so hard that in the heat of the moment I promised to find them a publisher, being quite certain that I would. I did everything I could: I searched, I begged, I humiliated myself, I drove here and there, I had dinner with the damnedest people, but I found no one. Only Soldatenkov6 is left, but he's abroad and won't be back before December, and our problem has to be solved by November. How I regret that your printing plant is not in Moscow. If it were, I wouldn't be forced into this ridiculous role of unsuccessful middleman. When we get together, I'll paint a true picture7 of the perturbations I have gone through. If I weren't building the school, which will cost me about fifteen hundred, I would undertake the publication of the journal at my own expense, that's how painful and difficult it is for me to reconcile myself with this clear absurdity. On October 22nd I'm going to Moscow to suggest to the editors as a last resort that they ask for a subsidy of fifteen hundred to two thousand a year. If they agree, I'll rush straight to Petersburg and start pleading my case. How are these things done? Will you teach me? To save the journal I am willing to see anyone and wait in anyone's reception room, and if I succeed, I'll heave a sigh of relief and satisfaction, since saving a good surgery journal is as useful as performing twenty thousand successful operations. In any case advise me as to what I should do.8
After Sunday write to Moscow if you want to reach me. The Grand Moscow Hotel, Room 5.
How is Potapenko's play? What's Potapenko up to in general? Jean Shcheglov has sent me a despondent letter. The astronomer is destitute. Everything else is all right for the time being. Fm going to go to operettas in Moscow. During the day Г11 putter around with the play, and in the evening I'll go to an operetta.
My humble respects. Write, I beg of you.
Yours, A. Chekhov
The village of Talezh.
Chekhov began writing The Seagull in October, 1895. There was an early draft, which he reworked in the spring of 1896, and the final draft, submitted to the censorship for approval in July of 1896.
The actress Lyudmila Ozerova, who was Suvorin's particular favorite, had appeared in the role of Luise in Schiller's Kabale und Liebe. Her performance was panned by one of the leading critics. Her first name and her patronymic Ivanovna make it highly unlikely that she was actually Jewish.
Suvorin opened his private theater with a widely acclaimed production of Tolstoy's peasant tragedy The Power of Darkness. The role of the little girl Anyutka was played by Maria Domasheva, who was twenty in 1895. In I9^5> when she was forty, Domasheva scored one of her greatest hits playing a fifteen-year-old girl in Meyerhold's production of The Green Ring by Zinaida Gippius. Chekhov felt that Domasheva was more suited for the young girl's role in Tolstoy's play than Lyudmila Ozerova ("the little darling"). The role of Matryona in The Power of Darkness is that of the hero's aged and evil mother.
Chekhov stayed with Tolstoy in Yasnaya Poly ana on August 8 and 9, 1895. He was present at Tolstoy's reading of the recently completed portions of Resurrection and pointed out to Tolstoy the improbability of the sentence of two years' hard labor, which the heroine of the novel, Maslova, is given. From his experiences at Sakhalin, Chekhov knew that four years was the shortest possible hard-labor sentence. Tolstoy thereupon made the necessary correction in his manuscript.
Kuzma Soldatenkov, a prominent Moscow publisher.
Quotation from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Chapter One, Stanza XXXIII, line 1.
Suvorin wrote back, offering a loan of fifteen hundred rubles to help the journal. A suitable publisher was eventually found, but the journal ran into trouble getting its next editor approved by the authorities. Chekhov's correspondence for 1896 frequently mentions his involvement in trying to rescue this foundering medical journal. A considerable portion of the time he spent in St. Petersburg in connection with the premiere of The Seagull in October of 1896 was devoted to arranging various matters connected with the Surgical Chronicle.
"THE SEAGULL"
There exists no exact, incontrovertible evidence about just when Chekhov reworked The Wood Demon into Uncle Vanya. In her chronicle of Chekhov's life, Nina Gitovich amasses some impressive indirect evidence to show that he did it in the very early 1890s, only to put Uncle Vanya aside and to bring it out after the successful revival of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theater. But most of the knowledgeable Soviet commentators insist that Uncle Vanya was in fact written after The Seagull, and the logic of the situation is on their side, for Uncle Vanya is surely the more authentically "Chekhovian" play of the two, more totally free from the conventions of Ostrovskian drama that had dominated the Russian stage since the 1850s and from the patterns and formulas of the Western well-made social play. It was in The Seagull that this liberation first occurred, the creative breakthrough which made Chekhov as much an innovator in the field of drama as he already was in the art of prose narrative. The characters in the plays of Ostrovsky's heirs had clear-cut motivations, always knew what they wanted and expressed their wishes and intentions in simple and direct terms. In Chekhov's mature plays, the characters do not necessarily fully understand what it is they want and an entirely new form of artfully oblique and seemingly irrelevant dialogue is devised to show the reality behind their overtly stated intentions and emotions. Where earlier drama depended on startling and dramatic events for its structure and its impact, Chekhov's plays show that something not happening can also be valid dramatically; when an overtly dramatic event does occur (Uncle Vanya's firing a pistol at the professor, Tusenbach's death in Three Sisters), it neither concludes the play's action, nor changes the basic situation of the other characters. Dramatic events are internalized—the implications of people's interrelations are just as important as their external manifestations. Except for Konstantin Treplyov's suicide at the end of The Seagull (a holdover from Ivanov, although far better motivated dramatically), the action of Chekhov's mature plays does not conclude at the final curtain—the future lives of Nina Zarechnaya, of Sonya and Uncle Vanya, of the three sisters, of Ranevskaya and Anya are all discernible because Chekhov has indicated or suggested their probable form. Above all, it is the dramatic possibilities of human noncommunication that Chekhov explores and demonstrates in his plays from The Seagull on.
He did not devise his new manner entirely by himself. The years that separate the writing of The Wood Demon from The Seagull (1889-95) were a time of exciting new developments in Western European drama. New dramatic forms and new subject matter were being discovered and developed by Henrik Ibsen, Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Tolstoy rejected these new playwrights with veritable fury. Younger Russian realists—Gorky and Bunin—did not deign to notice them. But Chekhov, like the younger writers who were later to form the Russian Symbolist movement, followed the development of the new drama in the West with avid and fascinated interest (Tatyana Shakh-Azizova's little book Chekhov and Western European Drama of His Time, Moscow, 1966, is a highly knowledgeable account of his relationship to his Western contemporaries). He did not care for some of the new playwrights, but Maeterlinck and Strindberg fascinated him and he found many interesting things in Ibsen, Bj0rnson and Hauptmann. Reading these writers and seeing productions of their plays suggested to Chekhov that a totally new approach to writing drama was possible. The Seagull was the result.
It is the last of Chekhov's pieces a these. While it does not include social, political or ecological polemics, as Ivanov and The Wood Demon did, The Seagull is the most complicated play Chekhov ever wrote. In addition to its intricately plotted series of amorous triangles, and its variations on the Oedipal implications of Shakespeare's Hamlet (on this aspect of the play, see Thomas G. Winner, "Chekhov's Seagull and Shakespeare's Hamlet," in The American Slavic and East European Review, XV, February, 1956), it comprises, as its essential element, Chekhov's typology of the varieties of creative personality. The play contrasts two successful non- innovative artists, the writer Trigorin and the actress Arkadina, who owe their success to exploiting what is safe and accepted in their respective arts, with two young innovative artists, the writer Konstantin Treplyov and the actress Nina Zarechnaya, whose road to artistic integrity, originality and innovation brings them to personal tragedy. What Is Art?, the title of
Tolstoy's treatise, with which Chekhov was to disagree so strongly, would also make a suitable subtitle for The Seagull.
Chekhov's meditations on the nature of creative personality, which are such an integral part of The Seagull, can be read in part as a comment upon and response to the disquisitions on the same topic in Guy de Maupassant's travel sketch Sur I'eau (Maupassant was as overrated in the Russia of Chekhov's time as he later was in America; the more myopic French and American critics have repeatedly suggested that Maupassant is Chekhov's Western counterpart, even though his shallow despair and misanthropy are the very opposite of Chekhovian depth and compassion). Trigorin's second-act speech about his obsessive collecting of literary material, which Tolstoy believed was Chekhov's self-portrait and in which others saw a portrait of Potapenko, is actually almost a paraphrase of corresponding passages in Maupassant. But Chekhov also pointed out his disagreement with Maupassant by having Arkadina read a passage from Sur I'eau at the beginning of Act II and then close the book with the remark: "The rest is both uninteresting and wrong."
The opening night of The Seagull on October 17, 1896, has gone down in history as one of those celebrated occasions when the first-night audience failed to realize that they had witnessed a masterpiece destined to be admired by posterity, an opening night similar to those of Verdi's La Traviata, Bizet's Carmen and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. The Russian tradition blaming the fiasco on inept direction and poor performances by unimaginative actors is a legend created much later by the directors of the Moscow Art Theater, especially Stanislavsky, in their understandable desire to claim all the credit for rescuing the unappreciated masterpiece from oblivion. A study of eyewitness accounts—the journal of Nikolai Leykin, the memoirs of Potapenko and Koni, some of the contemporary press accounts—shows that the original production, while under- rehearsed and by no means ideal, was not as bad as subsequent legend made it out to be. The key role of Nina was taken by Vera Kommissar- zhevskaya, probably the most creative and sensitive actress in the entire history of Russian theater, then on the threshold of her brilliant career. The director was the playwright Yevtikhy Karpov, usually treated by Western commentators on Chekhov as an unimaginative hack who ruined the play with his direction. But Karpov was the man who discovered and developed Vera Kommissarzhevskaya's acting genius and who was later to direct her in some of her greatest triumphs. In later years he also staged some highly acclaimed productions of Gorky. A look at Karpov's own naturalistic plays, such as The Workers' Quarter or The Community-Supported Widow, shows that he was one of the more interesting minor playwrights of Chekhov's time, highly aware of new theatrical forms and open to original and innovative ideas. While Chekhov was to object to many things in Stanislavsky's subsequent production of The Seagull, he found little to criticize in Karpov's direction and was actually moved to tears at one of the rehearsals.
The fact of the matter is that the audience which gathered at the Empress Alexandra Theater in St. Petersburg on October 17 would have booed any production of The Seagull, even one directed by Stanislavsky himself. In an unbelievably ill-advised move, Chekhov allowed his fervent admirer, the actress Yelizaveta Levkeyeva, to use The Seagull's opening night for her benefit performance. A one-time protegee of Alexander Ostrovsky, noted for playing the ingenue roles in his plays, she was now, in the nineties, a popular comic actress specializing in broad farces. The house was filled, in consequence, with Levkeyeva's admirers. For these people Chekhov was primarily the comic author of "A Horsy Name" and "The Malefactor" (he remains the favorite humorist of many Russians to this day), and they came, attracted by the combination of Chekhov's and Levkeyeva's names, expecting an evening of hilarious laughter.
Because the audience was packed with Levkeyeva's lowbrow fans on the opening night, many members of the St. Petersburg intellectual community were not able to see the play until its second and third performance. Repeated a few days later before a sold-out house and a more discerning audience, The Seagull became an artistic triumph. As Vera Kommis- sarzhevskaya wrote to Chekhov after the second performance:
Petersburg, October 21, 1896 Monday, 12 midnight
I've just returned from the theater, dear Anton Pavlovieh. Victory is ours.
The play is a complete, unanimous success, just as it ought to be, just as
it had to be. How I'd like to see vou now, but what I'd like even more is
j 7
for you to be present and hear the unanimous cry of "Author." Your—no— our Seagull, because I have merged with her forever heart and soul—is alive; her sufferings and faith are so ardent that she will compel many others to have faith. "Think of your vocation and have no fear of life." I clasp your hand.
V. Kommissarzhevskaya
Had the management allowed the play to run for the rest of the season, it would have undoubtedly become a major hit, and there would have been no need for Stanislavsky's revival three years later. But the management read the press notices based on the first-night reaction and closed the play after a total of five performances. The whole experience was probably the most harrowing emotional ordeal of Chekhov's entire life.
96. To Anatoly Koni
Melikhovo, November 11, 1896
Dear Anatoly Fyodorovich,
You can't imagine how happy your letter made me.1 I saw only the first two acts of my play from out front. After that I went backstage, feeling all the while that The Seagull was failing. After the performance, that night and the following day, people kept assuring me that my characters were all idiots and that my play was dramatically unsound, ill-considered, incomprehensible, even nonsensical, and so on and so forth. You can see the situation I was in. It was a failure I couldn't have imagined in my worst dreams. I was embarrassed and chagrined, and left Petersburg filled with all sorts of doubts. I thought that if I had written and staged a play so obviously abounding in monstrous shortcomings, then I had lost all sensitivity and that consequently my mechanism had run down once and for all. When I got home, I had word from Petersburg that the second and third performances had been successful. I received several letters, both signed and anonymous, that praised the play and berated the critics. Reading the letters gave me pleasure, but I was still embarrassed and chagrined, and it unwittingly came to me that if kind people found it necessary to console me, then I was certainly in a bad way. But your letter had a very decisive effect on me. I've known you for a long time, I respect you highly, and I believe you more than all the critics put together. You felt as much while you wrote your letter, which is why it is so beautiful and convincing. I am reassured now and can think about the play and the production without revulsion.
Kommissarzhevskaya is a marvelous actress. At one of the rehearsals many people wept as they watched her, and they said she is the best actress in all Russia today. Yet on opening night even she succumbed to the general mood of hostiUty to my Seagull and seemed to grow frightened and was barely audible. Our journalists are undeservedly cold to her and I feel sorry for her.
Let me thank you for the letter from the bottom of my heart. Believe me, the feelings that prompted you to write it are more valuable to me than I can express in words, and I will never, never forget, no matter what may happen, the concern you call "unnecessary" at the end of the letter.
Your sincerely respectful and devoted,
A. Chekhov i. Here is the complete text of Koni's letter which Chekhov is answering:
Petersburg, November 7, 1896
Dear Anton Pavlovich,
My letter may surprise you, but even though I'm drowning in work, I cannot resist writing you about your Seagull, which I finally found time to see. I heard (from Savina) that the public's attitude to the play upset you greatly. Let one member of the audience—uninitiated as I may be in the secrets of literature and dramatic art, but acquainted with life as a result of my legal practice—tell you that he thanks you for the deep pleasure your play afforded him. The Seagull is a work whose conception, freshness of ideas and thoughtful observations of life situations raise it out of the ordinary. It is life itself on stage with all its tragic alliances, eloquent thoughtlessness and silent sufferings—the sort of everyday life that is accessible to everyone and understood in its cruel internal irony by almost no one, the sort of life that is so accessible and close to us that at times you forget you're in a theater and you feel capable of participating in the conversation taking place in front of you. And how good the ending is! How true to life it is that not she, the seagull, commits suicide (which a run-of-the-mill playwright, out for his audience's tears, would be sure to have done), but the young man who lives in an abstract future and "has no idea" of the why and wherefore of what goes on around him. I also very much like the device of cutting off the play abruptly, leaving the spectator to sketch in the dreary, listless, indefinite future for himself. That's the way epic works end, or rather turn out. I won't speak of the production, in which Kommis- sarzhevskaya is marvelous. But Sazonov and Pisarev, or so it seems to me, didn't understand their roles and don't play the characters you meant to portray.
Perhaps you are shrugging your shoulders in amazement. Of what concern is my opinion to you, and why am I writing all this? Here is why. I love you for the moments of stirring emotion your works have given and continue to give me, and I want to send you a random word of sympathy from a distance, a word which as far as I know may be quite unnecessary.
Sincerely, A. Koni
In his memoirs, Koni recalled that he was moved to write this letter by the outrage he felt at the unruly behavior of the opening-night audience and by the gloating and slanderous reviews of the play he read in the next few days in St. Petersburg newspapers. The entire affair made him recall the story that the initial failure of Carmen helped aggravate Georges Bizet's heart disease and led to his untimely death and the accounts of Mikhail Glinka's pain and anguish at the hostile reception of his subsequently popular second opera Ruslan and Lyudmila by the musicians and by the general public.
97. To Lydia Veselitskaya (V. Mikulich)[77]
Melikhovo,
between November n and 13, 1896
Dear Lydia Ivanovna,
I left Petersburg the very day after my play's opening and didn't read the papers (they looked ominous). Then my kind friends kept assuring me in their letters that it was bad acting and not the play itself that was at fault and that the second and third performances had been successful. I was happy to take their word for it, and so my chagrin was very soon dispelled. Nonetheless your charming letter came just in time; it breathed concern and friendship, and I yielded to its spell and cheered up. Then I made a long series of inquiries to find out what your patronymic is. I wanted to send you my book with an inscription about how greatly I respect and thank you. Finally, after a long wait, the information came from Ivan Ivanovich Gorbunov,[78] and I am now sending you the book and asking you to accept it.
I haven't been to the Tolstoys. First the play prevented me from going; then it snowed and it was too late. Permit me to thank you once again from the bottom of my heart and clasp your hand.
Devotedly, A. Chekhov
98. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, December 14, 1896
I got your two letters about Uncle Vanya, one in Moscow, the other at home. Not so long ago I got a letter from Koni, who was at The Seagull. You and Koni have given me many good moments with your letters, but nonetheless my heart has become metal-plated; I feel nothing for my plays but disgust, and I have to force myself to read the proofs. You may say again that this is not very intelligent, that I'm being silly, proud, egocentric and so on and so forth. Yes, I know that, but what can I do? I'd be glad to rid myself of this silly feeling, but I can't, I simply can't. The trouble is not that my play was a failure; after all, most of my earlier plays also failed, and each time it was like water off a duck's back. It isn't the play that was unsuccessful on October 17th; it was my own person.1 One thing struck me as early as the first act, to wit: the people with whom I'd been open and friendly up to October 17th, the people with whom I had enjoyed carefree dinners, in whose defense I had broken lances (Yasinsky, for example)—they all wore peculiar expressions on their faces, extremely peculiar expressions. . . . In short, what happened was what justified Leykin's writing me a letter of condolence for having so few friends,2 and enabled The Week3 to query, "What did Chekhov ever do to them?" and The Theatergoer4 to print a whole article (in issue ninety-five) claiming that my fellow writers had staged a demonstration against me at the theater. I am calm now; my mood is back to normal. But I still can't forget what happened, any more than I could forget it had they punched me in the face.
And now I have a favor to ask of you. Send me my usual yearly bribe—your yearbook—and do you think you could get hold of someone in close contact with the central administration to find out why we haven't received authorization yet for the journal Surgery?5 Will it be authorized? I submitted the application back on October 15th in behalf of Professor Dyakonov. Time can't wait, and we're suffering terrible losses.
Sytin has bought an estate near Moscow for fifty thousand. It is fourteen versts from the station and near the highway.
You divide plays into those meant to be played and those meant to be read. Into which category, pray tell, would you put A Bankrupt,6 particularly the act during the whole of which Dalmatov and Mikhailov talk all by themselves of nothing but bookkeeping and score a huge success? I think if a play meant to be read is acted by good actors, it becomes one meant to be played.
I'm gathering material for a book along the lines of Sakhalin in which I will treat all sixty zemstvo schools in our district exclusively from the vantage point of their day-to-day operational problems. It will be aimed at helping zemstvo officials.7
I wish you earthly and heavenly bliss, sound sleep and a good appetite.
Yours, A. Chekhov
i. The fact that The Seagull first opened in St. Petersburg and not in Moscow was an additional reason for the play's failure. The giggles and hisses in the audience during the first act's play-within-the-play made a large number of St. Petersburg journalists and literary men realize that here was a heaven-sent opportunity to express in a quasi-legitimate manner their long-standing resentment of Chekhov and his ever-growing success. He had previously made himself unpopular in St. Petersburg literary circles by his lack of sociability when he was there to arrange his trip to Sakhalin (Letter 40). Upon his return from Sakhalin, the hostility of his St. Petersburg colleagues was openly expressed (Letter to Maria Chekhova, quoted on p. 183). Alexander Chekhov's letters to his brother testify that this hostility turned to actual hatred when Suvorin chose to serialize The Duel in New Times in ten lengthy installments, which usurped the space normally allocated to a number of the newspaper's columnists and other regular contributors.
Returning home from the opening night, Nikolai Leykin recorded in his private journal a vivid account of how various journalists and drama critics jumped out of their seats in the middle of the first act and rushed off to the bar, exclaiming happily to each other: "He's lost his talent" and "He's written himself out." After looking over the reviews in the morning papers the next day (October 18), Leykin wrote in his journal:
Except for New Times, all the papers are solemnly announcing the failure of Chekhov's Seagull, with genuine solemnity and with a note of gloating. You'd think they've finally caught a wolf who prior to his capture had massacred a large number of cattle. How could St. Petersburg Gazette permit itself such a tone when writing of Chekhov? I'm simply astounded. Its drama critic all but hops with joy along the columns of his review and heaps abuse [on Chekhov] most authoritatively. And Chekhov wrote so many things for the St. Petersburg Gazette once, and published some of his finest stories there, including his very best story, "The Huntsman."
2. In his letter to Chekhov, Leykin wrote:
Oh, how indignant we, your friends, were about the reviewers after the first performance of The Seagulll Right after the first act there they were, hissing, running along the corridors and the bar, exclaiming with self-assurance: "Where is there any action? Where are there any [recognizable] types? It's all so watery." They were actively organizing the failure of the opening night, since their words were addressed to the benefit-performance habitues. The opening of your play attracted all the journalists and all the fiction writers, and as I exchanged a few words with all of them, I had occasion to observe how very few true friends you have.
Ieronim Yasinky, whom Chekhov had considered a personal friend, wrote in his review that the play produced a "wild and incoherent impression." The only favorable notice that The Seagull received in the St. Petersburg press was Suvorin's article published in his own newspaper, in which he blamed the failure on lack of rehearsals, and Lydia Avilova's letter to the editor of St. Petersburg Gazette written in protest against their review.
The current-events column in The Week contained this query: "Whom could Chekhov have harmed, whom could he have offended, in whose way might he have stood to have deserved all that hatred suddenly advancing upon him from somewhere or other? Or is it simply enough to be talented, famous and loved?"
The St. Petersburg correspondent of The Theatergoer, a magazine published in Moscow, wrote that the opening of The Seagull was unparalleled in his experience in the overt hostility of a large part of the audience toward the playwright and the actors. He came to the disbelieving conclusion that one half of the audience consisted of Chekhov's personal enemies, who were using the occasion to settle personal grudges.
The medical journal that was formerly called Surgical Chronicle (see Letter 95).
A play by Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson.
Chekhov never accomplished this project.
THE INESCAPABLE DIAGNOSIS
Chekhov returned to melikhovo from the St. Petersburg opening of The Seagull in an embittered mood. Neither the steady flow of letters from various literary figures and anonymous admirers, who wrote that they had seen one of the five St. Petersburg performances and recognized the plav's beauty and importance (these letters continued arriving until the end of 1896), nor the news that Nikolai Solovtsov had staged a Kiev production of The Seagull which was received with great enthusiasm by Kiev audienccs and newspapers managed to dispel his bitterness and disappointment completely. He at first turned down Lavrov's and Goltsev's offer to publish the text of the play in Russian Thought and gave his permission only after their repeated and insistent pleas. In its printed form The Seagull brought Chekhov many new admirers, but it was also rejected and disliked by some intelligent and articulate people, among them Tolstoy, who thought it an inept imitation of Ibsen. After its magazine publication, Chekhov allowed Suvorin to include The Seagull in a volume of his collected plays. There it was unexpectedly joined by Uncle Vanya, which had not been published or performed anywhere previously, or even mentioned in Chekhov's correspondence.
Chekhov spent the last two months of 1896 correcting the proofs of "My Life," which was serialized in the monthly literary supplement to the popular magazine The Cornfield (Niva), and writing "The Peasants," first published in Russian Thought in April of 1897. These were two of the most significant works of his maturity. "My Life" is a short novel about a young nobleman who rejects the values of his father and of his social class. It is a description of what in today's America has come to be called dropping out, except that Chekhov's Misail Poloznev does his dropping out the hardest possible way. Instead of expressing his protest by joining the dissident revolutionary counterculture, as many of his contemporaries did, he decides to become a member of the proletariat. He does it openly and honestly, without self-dramatization and, above all, as a purely private, personal gesture. He is cursed by his uncomprehending father, harassed by provincial authorities, admired by a few intellectuals who understand his motivation, and mostly resented by the common laborers with whom he tries to live. At the end of the story, after losing the woman he loves and bringing tragedy into his sister's life, Misail attains integrity and moral stature, but his path is shown to have been a hard and lonely one. "The Peasants" was the result of Chekhov's close, first-hand observations of the conditions in which the peasants around Melikhovo lived. Similar in method to some of the recent American semi-fictionalized studies of urban poverty, "The Peasants" is an overwhelmingly vivid closeup of what living on the edge of starvation will do to human beings and to their relationships with each other. In no other work is Chekhov's biological training and adherence to scientific methods so telling: where another writer would try to shock or to involve the reader, Chekhov offers him sober and precise observations of peasant life, which make the harrowing conditions described all the more real and believable.
Both "My Life" and "The Peasants" had considerable trouble passing the official censorship. The sympathetic presentation of a young man's rejection of the ruling-class culture and the demonstration of how little the government and the Church did to alleviate the physical misery in which a large percentage of the population of the Russian Empire lived—this was strong stuff indeed. Numerous cuts were made by the censors in both these stories, but before the year was over, they were published by Suvorin in a volume in which not only were the censors' deletions restored, but some of the objectionable formulations reinforced and made more pointed. The fact that the pro-government Suvorin was the publisher apparently made it possible to print things that could not be allowed to appear in the liberal- dissenting Russian Thought of Lavrov.
"My Life" was largely overlooked by the critics at the time of its publication, but "The Peasants" created a greater sensation in the press than any of Chekhov's other published works. The peasant problem was of tremendous concern to everyone, and various political and economic factions tried to use Chekhov's story to support their own view of what needed to be done and to disprove their opponents' theories. The leader of the "legal" Marxists saw in "The Peasants" an indictment of Populist views; the followers of Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov neither knew nor understood the Russian peasants; while Nikolai Mikhailovsky characterized it as the weakest thing Chekhov ever wrote and cautioned against drawing any conclusions about peasant life on the basis of anything written by such an irresponsible writer. The success of these two works with the general reader was genuine and spectacular. Chekhov's older contemporaries could remember nothing comparable to the excitement generated by the publication of "The Peasants" since the first appearance of the major novels by Turgenev or Dostoyevsky. It was after "My Life" and "The Peasants" that most educated Russians realized that in Chekhov their country had a truly great living writer, second only to Tolstoy in importance.
Early in 1897, the Russian government was conducting a population census. Believing that the availability of precise demographic and economic information about the countryside might eventually lead to improved living conditions for the peasants, Chekhov became deeply involved in the strenuous census taking in the neighboring villages. But in March an event occurred which forced him to slow down his pace and eventually to change his entire mode of life. By 1897 Chekhov had had tuberculosis for at least ten years without realizing it. All the expected symptoms were there: racking cough, night sweat, palpitations, spitting blood. He still refused to see another doctor about any of these symptoms, and when the possibility of tuberculosis was mentioned by others, he'd reply that if he had it, he would have been dead years ago. On March 22, 1897, Chekhov met Suvorin for dinner at one of Moscow's most elegant restaurants, the Hermitage. During the first course, Chekhov opened his mouth to say something, a torrent of blood came out and he collapsed at the table. He had hemorrhages again the next day and the next. On March 25, his colleague Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky (the same one who had deprived him of rowboats by not sending them to Luka some nine years earlier), prevailed on Chekhov to allow himself to be hospitalized and to get a thorough medical examination, apparently his first one since his student days. At the clinic of Dr. Ostroumov, where he was taken, tuberculosis in an advanced stage, affecting both lungs, was diagnosed.
99. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, January 17, 1897
Today is my saint's day!!
You can't stay in the Panayev Theater, of course. There's a crying need for a theater, and if you don't build one someone else will, and then you'll be angry at yourself for the rest of your life and heap abuse on the new theater in your newspaper. There's no risk whatsoever involved in building a new theater.1
You ask me when I'm coming. The problem is, I'm terribly busy.[79]I've never had as much work as I do now. It's hard for me to take the time off, but I'll have to spend some time in St. Petersburg before spring in any case, for something very important—important mainly for me.
Russian Thought is doing a brisk book business. There's a tremendous demand in the provinces for serious scientific literature. The bookstore is in a room adjoining the editorial offices, next door to the business office. There are educated people on the sales staff. Sytin's new gray-covered self-teaching manuals based on English models are also selling briskly.
As for whether the plague will strike us, nothing definite can be said at present. If it does, it probably won't raise much of a fright; both populace and doctors have long since grown used to the accelerated mortality rate caused by diphtheria, typhus, typhoid fever and the like. After all, even without the plague no more than four hundred out of a thousand reach the age of five here; in villages and in cities, at factories and on back streets you won't find a single healthy woman. The most frightening thing about the plague is that it will make its appearance two or three months after the census. The peasants will put their own interpretation on the census and start pouncing on the doctors, claiming they have been poisoning the excess population so there is more land left over for the landowners. Quarantine measures are not strong enough. Khavkin's inoculations do offer some hope, but unfortunately Khavkin is unpopular in Russia: "Christians have to be on their guard against him; he's a Jew."[80]
Write me something. I wish you all the best.
Yours, A. Chekhov
The clock Alexei Petrovich sent has breathed its last. Pavel Boure announced to me yesterday it cannot be repaired—and the clock has now gone for scrap.[81]
100. To Vladimir Yakovenko[82]
Melikhovo, January 30, 1897
Dear Vladimir Ivanovich,
Having read your letter in The Physician, I wrote to Moscow to have my Island of Sakhalin sent to you. In it you will find some information on corporal punishment and, incidentally, a reference to Yad- rintsev,2 whom I recommend to you. If you contact Senator Anatoly Fyodorovich Koni by mail, he will probably agree to tell you which literary sources he used while writing the biography of the well-known philanthropist Dr. Haas (the prison doctor).3 I also recommend Kistya- kovsky's4 study of capital punishment; it is an account of all the tortures that the punishers have ever inflicted on the punished.
By the way, lawyers and jailers understand corporal punishment (in the narrow, physical sense) to encompass more than birch rods, lashes or blows with the fist. They also include shackles, unheated cells, withholding of meals (as practiced on schoolboys), bread and water, prolonged kneeling, repeated bowing to the ground and being tied to a post.
The census has exhausted me. I've never before had so little time for anything.
I wish you all the best and clasp your hand.
Yours, A. Chekhov
My humble regards to Nadezhda Fyodorovna and Drs. Heinicke and Vasilyev.
That corporal punishment affects physical health is evident from the doctors' statements you will find in the court proceedings involving charges of torture.
Koni's address is: Anatoly Fyodorovich Koni, Nevsky Prospect 100, Petersburg.
them with case histories of patients whose health was demonstrably harmed by corporal punishment. Chekhov, who had met Yakovenko and his wife, Nadezhda, previously, is here writing in response to this request for information.
Yadrintsev was the author of a study dealing with the life of convicts in Siberia.
Dr. Fyodor Haas (1780-1858) was a much-admired humanitarian of the early nineteenth century. He brought about important reforms in the treatment of prison inmates and he spent all of his personal earnings on helping them. At the time this letter was written, Anatoly Koni was working on his biography of Dr. Haas, which was published in book form later in
1897.
A. F. Kistyakovsky's book on the death penalty was published in St. Petersburg one year earlier.
101. To Alexei Suvorin
Moscow, February 8, 1897
The census is over.1 I've had enough of the whole business; I had to count and write until my fingers ached and issue instructions to fifteen census takers. The census takers did an excellent job, though they were almost ridiculously pedantic. On the other hand the land captains who were in charge of the census in the districts behaved disgracefully. They did nothing, understood little and, when the going was at its roughest, pleaded illness. The best of them turned out to be a vodka-loving prevaricator a la Khlestakov,2 who was a character suitable for a comedy if nothing else. The rest of them were as colorless as hell, and it was irritating to have to deal with them.
I am in Moscow at the Grand Moscow Hotel. I'll be staying here a while, about ten days, and then go home. All through Lent and all through April I'll be tied up with carpenters and caulkers and such. I'm building another school. A deputation of peasants came and begged me, and I didn't have the heart to say no. The zemstvo is putting up a thousand, the peasants have collected three hundred—no more, and the school can't possibly cost less than three thousand. Which means I'll be spending another summer thinking about money and scraping it together here and there. All in all, life in the country involves a lot of bother. In view of imminent expenses it is very much to the point to ask whether you've sent the contract to the theater administration.3
Guess who's been to see me! Who do you think? It's Ozerova, the famous Ozerova-Hannele. She arrives, sits with her feet on the couch, and never looks you in the face. When the time comes for her to leave, she puts on her jacket and worn-out galoshes with the awkwardness of a little girl ashamed of her poverty. She's a little queen in exile.4
The astronomer, on the other hand, has perked up. She is running all over Moscow giving lessons and is carrying on debates with Klyuchevsky.5 She's almost recovered and is apparently beginning to regain her former pace. We collected two hundred fifty rubles for her, which are in my keeping, but it's been a year and a half now and she still has not touched them.
Chertkov, the well-known Tolstoy disciple, has had his apartment searched. Everything Tolstoy's followers had collected about the Duk- hobors and all other sects was confiscated, and thus all the evidence against Mr. Pobedonostsev and his satanic hosts has disappeared in a flash, as if by magic. Goremykin went to see Chertkov's mother and told her, "Your son has a choice: either the Baltic provinces, where Prince Khilkov is already living in exile, or abroad." Chertkov chose London. He's leaving February 13th. Tolstoy has gone to Petersburg to see him off, and yesterday they sent Tolstoy his warm coat, which he had left behind. Many people are going to see him off, even Sytin, and I am sorry I cannot do the same. I cherish no tender feelings for Chertkov, but I am deeply, deeply outraged at what they have done to him.6
Why not stop in Moscow on your way to Paris? It would be nice if you did.
Yours, A. Chekhov
[83] Chekhov worked as census taker and supervisor continuously from January 10 to February 5, 1897.
[83] The bragging young impostor in Gogol's The Inspector General.
[83] Chekhov still had not received his royalties for the five performances of The Seagull in St. Petersburg because of a mix-up about his signature on the contract.
[83] On February 22, 1897, Chekhov wrote in his notebook: "Went to Serpukhov to see the amateur theatricals for the benefit of the Novoselki school. Hannele Ozerova traveled with me as far as Tsaritsyno. She's a little queen in exile imagining herself to be a great actress; she's illiterate and rather vulgar." Chekhov seems to have seen quite a lot of Lyudmila Ozerova in the early months of 1897. The wording in the Russian original that connects Ozerova's name with the heroine of Gerhart Hauptmann's Hanneles Himmel- fahrt (known simply as Hannele in both Russian and English) may be interpreted to mean that she was a famous performer of Hannele (i.e., "Ozerova of Hannele fame"). But Hauptmann's play was banned by ecclesiastic censorship in Russia as sacrilegious and except for a single performance in honor of the coronation of Nicholas II, directed by Stanislavsky, it was not played. Therefore it seems more likely that Chekhov is using the name of Haupt- mann's heroine as a nickname for Ozerova.
Vasily Klyuchevsky was a famous historian, the author of the standard history of Russia used in Chekhov's time. He was Olga Kundasova's (the "astronomer's") teacher at the Vladimir Guerrier courses, where she attended his classes together with Maria Chekhova.
The beginning of the reign of Nicholas II was marked by intensified government persecution of religious minorities. Tolstoy and his disciples collected evidence of such persecution, which was carried out at the instigation of the sinister Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Among his prime victims at that time was the Dukhobor sect. The aim of the search operation Chekhov describes (it took place on February 2) was double: to destroy evidence of religious persecution which could be used abroad and to separate Tolstoy from his most intransigent apostle, Chertkov. Ivan Gor- emykin was the Minister of the Interior, and Prince Dmitry Khilkov was an aristocratic disciple of Tolstoy who was exiled by the government and had his children taken away from him for following Tolstoy's teachings. During Tolstoy's stay in St. Petersburg, where he went to say good-bye to Chertkov and two other disciples who were being exiled to remote provinces, he had a conversation with Suvorin in which he expressed his negative opinion of The Seagull. As Tolstoy was leaving to return to Moscow a tremendous public demonstration of support and sympathy took place at the railroad station. Two years after this incident, Tolstoy helped a large number of Dukhobors and members of other persecuted Russian sects to emigrate to Canada and the United States.
102. To Alexei Suvorin
Melikhovo, March 1, 1897
I stayed in Moscow some twenty days, spent all my advances and now I'm at home, leading a chaste and sober life. If you go to Moscow during the third week of Lent, I will too. I am presently spending my time building1 (for the zemstvo, not for myself), but I can get away provided you send me a wire to Lopasnya a couple of days ahead of time. At the actors' conference you'll probably see the plans for the huge people's theater we are planning. We means the representatives of the Moscow intelligentsia (the intelligentsia is meeting the capitalists halfway, and the capitalists are not averse to reciprocating). A theater, auditorium, library, reading room, buffets and so on and so forth will be gathered under one roof in a neat, attractive building. The blueprints are ready,2 the constitution being drafted, and the only thing that is holding us up is a paltry half million. There will be stockholders, but it will not be a charitable organization. We are counting on the government's sanctioning us to issue one-hundred-ruble shares. I've become so caught up in the project I already believe in its success and can only wonder why you don't build a theater. In the first place, it's needed. And, in the second, it's fun and will take up two years of your life. If the theater building is not constructed nonsensically, if it doesn't resemble the Panayev Theater, it can't possibly operate at a loss.
I recently helped arrange a benefit performance in Serpukhov to raise funds for the school. The actors were amateurs from Moscow. Their acting was quite respectable, even restrained, and better than that of professionals. There were Paris gowns and genuine diamonds, but all we netted was a hundred and one rubles.3
There's no news, or rather there is, but it's uninteresting or sad. There is much talk about the plague and the war and about the Synod and the Ministry of Education merging into one body. Levitan, the landscape painter, seems close to death.4 He has an aneurysm of the aorta.
I'm having bad luck. I've written a short novel based on peasant life, but people say it will never pass the censors and will have to be cut by half.5 In other words, more losses.
If we have good spring weather in Moscow, let's go to Sparrow Hills and the monastery. From Moscow we'll go together to Petersburg, where I have a piece of business to attend to.6
I've written you and you haven't written back, so I've authorized my brother to pay you a visit and find out what the matter is. I've also asked him to find out the location of the contract the theater management sent me and is now demanding back.
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