Letters of Anton Chekhov

Has Davydov left the Empress Alexandra Theater? What a capri­cious hippopotamus.

Well, I'll be seeing you soon. In the meantime drop me a line or two. My humble regards to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya. Be happy.

Yours, A. Chekhov

The village school at Novoselki, not far from Melikhovo.

The plans for this "popular theater," i.e., a theater with cheaply priced seats and with a repertoire designed for audiences with little or no education, were drawn up by Chekhov's architect friend Schechtel. For all the enthusiasm expressed in this letter, the project never got off the ground.

According to Mikhail Chekhov's Around Chekhov, the "Paris gowns and genuine diamonds" were worn by Yelena Shavrova and her sister Olga,

who on Chekhov's invitation agreed to come and help a group of amateurs put on a play for the benefit of the village school at Novoselki.

Chekhov's friend Levitan died in 1900. In accordance with his last wish, his brother destroyed all his correspondence after his death, which deprived the world of a large number of Chekhov's letters.

"The Peasants."

Apparently a reference to Chekhov's consent to pose for a portrait which the owner of the Tretyakov Gallery commissioned Iosif Braz to paint for that gallery's series of portraits of Russian writers.

103. To Rimma Vashchuk¹

Moscow, March 27, 1897

Dear Madam,

I read your story "In the Hospital" in the clinic, where I am now confined. I'm writing my reply from my bed. The story is very good, starting from the point I marked in red. But the beginning is banal and unnecessary. You ought to continue, provided, of course, that you enjoy writing, that's condition number one; condition number two is that you're young and can still learn how to punctuate properly.

As far as your "Fairy Tale" is concerned, I wouldn't call it a fairy tale. It seems to me more like a conglomeration of words like gnome, fairy, dew and knights—all of which are fake diamonds, at least on Russian soil, which has never known the tread of knights or gnomes and where you'll have trouble finding anyone who can picture a fairy dining on dew and moonbeams. Drop all that. You must be a sincere artist and depict only what exists or what in your opinion should be; you must paint coherent pictures.

To go back to the first story: you shouldn't write so much about yourself. You write about yourself, you yield to exaggeration, and you run the risk of ending up the loser. Either people won't believe you or they'll be cold to your effusions.

I wish you all the best.

A. Chekhov

1. Arriving at his hotel in Moscow on March 21, Chekhov found a note from Rimma Vashchuk, who described herself as an experienced writer who had been "writing for many years" and asked him to look at some of her manuscripts. She was in fact a schoolgirl of seventeen who had just begun her studies in the women's courses of Moscow University. Chekhov complied with her request, but was able to read her stories only after he was hos­pitalized at Dr. Ostroumov's clinic.

104. To Rimma Vashchuk

Moscow, March 28, 1897

Instead of getting angry,¹ why don't you read my letter through a little more attentively. I clearly stated, did I not, that your story is very good, except the beginning, which feels like an arbitrarily added structure. It is not up to me to permit or prohibit you to write. I referred to your youth because at thirty or forty it is too late to start. I referred to the need for learning to punctuate properly because in a work of art punctuation often plays the part of musical notation and can't be learned from a textbook; it requires instinct and experience. Enjoying writing doesn't mean playing or having a good time. Experiencing en­joyment from an activity means loving that activity.

Forgive me, I'm having trouble writing; I'm still in bed.

Read my letter once more and stop being angry. I was totally sincere then, and I'm writing you again now because I sincerely wish you success.

A. Chekhov

1. After reading the preceding letter, Rimma Vashchuk sent Chekhov an angry reply in which she accused him of "pouring cold water on her ardent dreams" and said that she expected "more heart and more generosity" from Chekhov. Upon receiving the present letter, she cent Chekhov a note of apology for her rudeness. She published Chekhov's letters to her in the Soviet journal The Young Guard in 1957, one year before her own death.

105. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow, April 1, 1897

The doctors have diagnosed pulmonary apical lesions and have ordered me to change my way of life. I can understand the former but not the latter, because it is almost impossible. They order me to live in the country, but living permanently in the country presupposes constant fussing about with peasants, animals and the elements in all their forms, and it is as difficult to avoid cares and anxieties in the country as to avoid burns in hell. But I will still try to change my life as much as possible, and I've already sent word with Masha that I will no longer practice medicine in the country. It will be both a relief and a great deprivation for me. I am giving up all my district duties and buying a dressing gown, and I will bask in the sun and eat and eat. My doctors have ordered me to eat about six times daily, and they are indignant at finding I eat so little. I am forbidden to do much talking, to go swim­ming and so on and so forth.

All my organs besides the lungs were found to be healthy. [. . .] Until now I felt I had been drinking exactly as much as I could without doing any harm to myself, but it turns out I'd been drinking less than I was entitled to. What a shame!

The author of "Ward Number Six" has been transferred from ward number sixteen to ward number fourteen. It is spacious and has two windows, Potapenko-type lighting, and three tables. I am not losing much blood. After Tolstoy came to see me one evening (we talked at great length), I hemorrhaged violently at four in the morning.¹

Melikhovo is a healthful spot. It's right on a watershed and at a good altitude, so it's free from fever and diphtheria. After taking coun­sel, we all decided I should continue living at Melikhovo and not go off anywhere. All I have to do is make the house a bit more comfortable. When I get tired of Melikhovo, I'll go to the neighboring estate I've rented for my brothers when they come to visit.

I have a constant stream of visitors. They bring me flowers and candy and things to eat. Heaven, in a word.²

I read about the performance at Pavlova Hall in the Petersburg Gazette.³ Tell Nastya that had I been there I would definitely have pre­sented her with a basket of flowers. My most humble respects and greetings to Anna Ivanovna.

By now I can write sitting up instead of lying on my back, but as soon as I finish writing, I go back to reclining on my sickbed.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Please write, I beg of you.

1. Tolstoy visited Chekhov at Dr. Ostroumov's clinic on March 28. Visitors were restricted to ten minutes but Tolstoy stayed for more than thirty. The medical personnel at the clinic must have realized that Tolstoy's visit was exciting and exhausting their patient, but there was nothing they could do: one didn't ask Lev Tolstoy to leave. The two writers argued about the premises of Tolstoy's treatise What Is Art? (see next letter) and talked about immor­tality. On April 16, Chekhov wrote to Mikhail Menshikov: "Tolstoy came to see me while I was at the clinic and we had a most interesting conversation, interesting mainly for me' because I listened more than I talked. We dis­cussed immortality. He recognizes immortality in its Kantian form, assuming that all of us (men and animals) will live on in some principle (such as reason or love), the essence of which is a mystery. But I can only imagine such a principle or force as a shapeless, gelatinous mass; my I, my individu­ality, my consciousness would merge with this mass—and I feel no need for this kind of immortality, I do not understand it, and Lev Nikolayevich was astonished that I don't."

In the course of this visit, Chekhov told Tolstoy of an article he had read about the folk theater of the Siberian tribe of Voguls. Tolstoy later used this account in the final version of What Is Art?, where he cited the Vogul theater as an example of simple, infectious and therefore good art.

In addition to Tolstoy, Chekhov was visited at the clinic by Lydia Avilova, Lyudmila Ozerova and Ivan Shcheglov. After the news of his illness spread, he had to suffer a steady stream of callers. On April 7, he wrote to Suvorin: "Yesterday I had visitors all day long, it was simply disastrous. They let them in two at a time, they would all ask me not to talk but at the same time they kept asking questions." There were also a large number of letters from well wishers, which Chekhov had to answer personally.

A charity soiree, at which Suvorin's daughter Anastasia (Nastya) made her acting debut, appearing in the company of Savina and Kommissarzhev- skaya. According to the annotations in Suvorin's published journals, she was active as an actress in the United States in the 1920s.

106. To Alexander Ertel

Melikhovo, April 17, 1897

My dear friend Alexander Ivanovich,

I'm at home now. Before Easter I spent two weeks in Ostroumov's clinic coughing blood. The doctor diagnosed apical lesions in my lungs. I feel splendid. I feel no pain whatsoever and nothing bothers me in­ternally. But the doctors have forbidden me vinum,¹ motion and talk, ordered me to eat a lot and forbidden me to practice—and I am bored, as it were.

There is no news of the people's theater. It was discussed at the conference in a muted and uninteresting manner, and the group in charge of drafting the constitution and getting things started seems to have lost its enthusiasm.² It must be because of spring. The only mem­ber of the group I've seen is Goltsev, and I didn't have a chance to dis­cuss the theater with him.

There's no news. Literature is at a standstill. A lot of tea and cheap wine is being consumed in editorial offices without much pleas­ure, for no other reason, apparently, than that there's nothing better to do. Tolstoy is writing a book on art. He visited me at the clinic and told me that he'd abandoned his Resurrection because he didn't like it and that he was now writing exclusively about art and had read sixty books on the subject. His idea is not new; it's been reiterated in various forms by clever old men in every century. Old men have always been inclined to think the end of the world is at hand and to assert that morals have fallen to the пес plus ultra, that art has grown shallow and thread­bare, that people have grown weak, and so on and so forth. Lev Niko- layevich is out to convince everybody in his book that art has in our time entered upon its final phase, that it is stuck in a blind alley from which it has no way out (forward).³

I do nothing but feed the sparrows with hempseed and prune a rosebush a day. When I prune them, the rosebushes bloom luxuriantly.⁴ I have no household duties.

Keep well, dear Alexander Ivanovich. Thank you for your letters and your friendly concern. Write me for my infirmity's sake, and don't reproach me too greatly for not keeping up my end of the correspond­ence. From now on I will try to answer your letters the moment I read them.

I clasp your hand warmly.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Actually, all alcoholic beverages.

Cf. Letter 102.

Chekhov rejected in toto two of the basic premises of Tolstoy's What Is Art? even before reading it, namely the idea that in order to be good, moral and "infectious," a work of art has to be instantly comprehensible to an illiterate peasant or to a child (a premise that led Tolstoy to his violent re­jection of Shakespeare, Baudelaire and Wagner as being inaccessible and immoral) and the concomitant notion that all the arts and especially painting and music were going through a period of utter decline throughout the Western world at the end of the nineteenth century. Chekhov's disagreement deepened after he read the published work.

Chekhov was widely admired by his neighbors around Melikhovo for his way with plants. His rosebushes were considered particularly remarkable, and some of his published letters to his neighbors contain advice on the care and treatment of roses.

107. To Prince Vladimir Argutinsky-Dolgorukov¹

Melikhovo, April 28, 1897

I envy you, dear Vladimir Nikolayevich. I envy your stay in England,² your knowledge of English, and your youth and health.

I like your story, but it's not your work, is it? It's a translation from English. There's not a single Russian sentence in it, not a one! I enjoyed it very much, and I hasten to do your bidding: I am returning it to you, on the condition, however, that you send me another story as soon as possible. I am interested in following your beginnings and in seeing where you finally arrive. Only, please do write more; writing so little will get you nowhere. You must hurry and develop a skilled hand so that by the time you're thirty your work will have a definite character and you can win yourself a place in the literary market.

I spent March and early April in a clinic. I was coughing blood. Things are better now. The spring is magnificent, but I'm so short of money that I'm at my wits' end.

Well then, I'll be looking forward to your story and letter. Keep well. I clasp your hand and wish you all the best.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Give my regards to Balmont and his wife.³

Argutinsky-Dolgorukov was twenty when he briefly met Chekhov in Odessa in 1894. On December 29, 1894, he wrote Chekhov a letter in which he reminded him of their acquaintance and said: "Our brief encounter in Odessa made such an indelible impression on me that since then, in moments of sadness or dissatisfaction, the thought of you awakens within me with such power that I want to talk only of you and to share with others the spell that your personality casts over everyone." Chekhov replied with a friendly letter and offered to meet Argutinsky-Dolgorukov in Moscow. He came to be­lieve that this young man might possess a literary talent and strongly en­couraged him to write fiction. But, despite Chekhov's encouragement and his own half-hearted efforts, nothing worth publishing was ever produced by the young prince.

Argutinsky-Dolgorukov was studying at Oxford.

The poet Konstantin Balmont (see Letter 155) was giving a series of lectures on Russian poetry at Oxford at the invitation of the Taylor Institute.

NICE.

THE DREYFUS CASE

с hekhov's convalescence after he returned to Melikhovo proceeded slowly, handicapped by his inability to curtail his numerous activities and involvements as the doctors had ordered him to do. The same stream of visitors and well wishers of which he had complained at the Ostroumov clinic continued at Melikhovo, with people who had come to inquire about the state of his health staying overnight, then staying for a few days, and requiring to be fed and housed. Both Chekhov and his family received such visitors with unfailing hospitality, and only occasionally do we detect a note of irritation in his reaction, as in the letter to Leykin of July 4, 1897: "I have enough house guests to fill a pond. I'm out of space, out of bedding and out of patience conversing with them." As soon as he was able to move about, his time was claimed by the zenistvo, by the school where he was honorary superintendent, by the library affairs in Taganrog and by a special clinic for alcoholics which he was helping to organize. There were trips to surrounding villages, to Serpukhov and to Moscow. Chekhov probably would not have lasted for more than two years had his doctors not insisted categorically that he not spend his winters in the harsh climate of Central Russia. They urged him to move either to the Crimea or to the French Riviera. He accordingly decided to spend the winter of 1897-98 in Nice, the city whose status as the Mecca for tuber­cular patients from all over the world was so grimly described by Maupas­sant in Sur Veau.

Chekhov left Russia on September 1, 1897, and stayed in France until early May of 1898. He settled in Nice at the Pension Russe, a boarding- house for visiting Russians on Rue Gounod, where Mikhail Saltykov-

Slichcdrin had also once resided. It was owned by a Russian lady and was especially celebrated for its elegant Russian-style cuisine (a typical dinner menu: borsch t, poissoti glace, squab, veal, salad greens, ice cream and fruit). Chekhov's most frequent companion in Nice was Maxim Koval- cvsky, a professor of sociology who had been dismissed from Moscow University in 1887 on political grounds (as Chekhov put it in a letter to his sister, "for being a freethinker"). There were also visitors from Russia: Potapenko, the artist Alexandra Khotyaintscva, the actor-playwright Alex­ander Sumbatov and others. The stories Chekhov wrote in Nice deal for the most part with people trapped in remote Russian provinces: "In the Cart," about a selfless young village schoolmistress who finds some satis­faction in her work despite the atrocious working conditions; "The Home­coming" (V rodnom uglu), in which a young girl prefers a loveless mar­riage to provincial stagnation and idleness; and "Ionych," a portrait of a pleasant young doctor who gradually degenerates into a selfish, obese miser in an environment of provincial inactivity. It was also in Nice that Chekhov began writing his 1898 trilogy of stories about human self- domestieation, consisting of "The Man in a Shell," his great study of deliberate conformity; "Gooseberries," which dissects self-enslavement in response to the acquisitive instinct; and "About Love," which shows a case of the suppression of the natural desire to love under the weight of custom and convention. The common framework shared by these three stories underlines the unitv of their themes and outlook.

j

Chekhov's stay in Nice coincided with the reopening of the Dreyfus case, which had been racking France since 1894. Chekhov followed the most recent developments in the case—the acquittal of Major Esterhazy, the true perpetrator of the crime for which Dreyfus had been convicted, at a patently rigged court-martial; the publication of Emile Zola's celebrated article "J'aceuse," denouncing that acquittal; and Zola's own trial on charges of libel—both in the Russian press and in various French news­papers (it was in Nice that he finally learned to read French fluently). After reading the transcripts of the original trial, Chekhov became con­vinced of the falsitv of the charges against Dreyfus. It came as something of a shock to Chekhov to realize to what extent the case and its new developments were distorted in much of the Russian press. He was partic­ularly revolted by the stance taken by Suvorin's New Times, which repre­sented the reopening of the case and the trial of Esterhazy as a shady conspiracy cooked up by an international Jewish syndicate. Chekhov made resolute efforts to convince Suvorin of the injustice of his paper's position, but Suvorin, although in his talks with Chekhov he agreed with his argu­ments, was either unwilling or unable to change the anti-Scmitic policy of his editors and staff. Chekhov's involvement with the Dreyfus affair reached its peak during his visit to Paris in April, 1898, when, after making the personal acquaintance of Mathieu Dreyfus (the brother of the de­fendant) and Bernard Lazare, the journalist whose disclosures had led to the reopening of the case, he agreed to be interviewed by Lazare and to lend the prestige of his name to the Dreyfusard cause. But Lazare let someone else write up the notes of his interview with Chekhov, with the result that when Chekhov was sent the text for approval he found his own statements and opinions distorted. The trend of the entire piece was to present Chekhov not as defending Dreyfus but as denouncing Russian public opinion and the Russian government (Chekhov's letter to Ivan Pavlovsky of April 28, 1898). This left Chekhov with no choice but to veto the publication of the interview.

108. To Alexandra Khotyaintseva¹

Biarritz,² September 17, 1897

You ask me, most esteemed artist, if the weather is warm here. In the first few days after I arrived, it was cold and damp, but now I'm as hot as if I were in a baker's oven. It is especially hot after lunch, which consists of six greasy courses and a whole bottle of white wine. The single most interesting thing here is the ocean: it roars even in quiet weather. From morning till night I sit in the Grande Plage and swallow newspapers, while a motley crowd of cabinet ministers, wealthy Jews, Adelaides,³ Spaniards and poodles passes before me. The ladies' dresses, varicolored parasols, the bright sunshine, lots of water, cliffs, harps, guitars, singing—all this combined carries me a hundred thou­sand versts away from Melikhovo.

When are you coming to Paris? It's nice there now.

A few days ago there was a cowfight in Bayonne. Spanish pica­dors engaged in combat with cows. Spunky little cows, evil-tempered and quite agile, ran about the arena like dogs, chasing the picadors. The spectators were in a frenzy.⁴

Makovsky⁵ is here. He is painting portraits of the ladies.

Keep well. Give my regards to your mama and your brother and remember me in your orisons. Thanks for your letter.

Yours, A. Chekhov

1. Alexandra Khotyaintseva (1865-1942) was an artist of some talent. Her drawings and sketches of Chekhov, made during his stay in Nice, com­bine the method of a newspaper cartoon with some Toulouse-Lautrec-like features. She was another attractive woman brought into Chekhov's life by his sister, who met her at an evening art course in which they were both enrolled. Khotyaintseva became a frequent visitor at Melikhovo, and when Chekhov went to Nice, she suddenly appeared there, too. Although she was clearly smitten with Chekhov and although he wrote to his sister that he found her more pleasant and intelligent than the other ladies he met at the Pension Russe, he insisted they remain merely good friends, and Khotyaintseva accepted the situation with much better grace than had Lika Mizinova when she was in a similar position a few years earlier. Alexandra Khotyaintseva wrote an amusing little memoir about Chekhov's life in Nice.

Chekhov went to Biarritz at the invitation of the wealthy Varvara Mor- ozova and her editor-husband Sobolevsky (who wore a bathing suit on the Biarritz beach which, in Chekhov's opinion, made him look like Petronius Arbiter). He spent two weeks there, staying at the Victoria and passing leisurely days on the same beach where ten years later the eight-year-old Vladimir Nabokov would be playing with a little girl named Zina, also aged eight. Chekhov, for his part, acquired while in Biarritz, a nineteen-year-old teacher of French named Margot, of whom he wrote to Anna Suvorina and Lika Mizinova. Margot supposedly followed him to Nice at his suggestion, but for some reason was not able to locate him once she got there.

"Adelaide" was Chekhov's nickname for a certain lady, the wife of a military-school director, who was never without a lorgnette. It is used here, by extension, as a generic term to describe all lorgnette-carrying ladies.

Chekhov's reaction to this cowfight stands in amusing contrast to Vladimir Mayakovsky's account of the bullfight he witnessed in Mexico in 1925. Mayakovsky immediately identified with the bulls, and applauded a bull's goring of a spectator, feeling quite certain that the bull was doing it to avenge his fallen fellow bulls.

Konstantin Makovsky, an academic painter of opulent pseudo-historical pageants. His huge canvas depicting a rather operatic wedding ceremony in a boyar's family today graces the De Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

109. To Alexei Suvorin

Nice,

October 1, 1897

You're not quite right about Gorev.¹ One time out of five he gives a good, even remarkable, performance. He has a bad way of raising his shoulders and firing out his lines, but sometimes, in some plays, he is capable of reaching a pitch of intensity which no other Russian actor can duplicate. He's particularly good when backed up by a good en­semble, when those around him are also giving good performances.

I am staying at the Russian boardinghouse here. My room is rather spacious and has a southern exposure, carpeting, a couch like Cleopatra's and a lavatory. The lunches and dinners are prepared by a Russian cook (borscht and meat pies), and the food is plentiful, as plentiful as at the Hotel Vendome and every bit as delicious. I pay eleven francs a day. The weather here is warm; even in the evening it doesn't feel like fall. The sea is touchingly affectionate. The Promenade des Anglais is all covered with verdure and looks radiant in the sun. Every morning I sit in the shade and read the paper. I do a lot of walking. I've made the acquaintance of Maxim Kovalevsky, a former Moscow profes­sor who was dismissed under the provisions of Article 3.² He is a tall, fat, lively, utterly good-natured man. He eats a lot, jokes a lot, and works an awful lot, and I feel cheerful and lighthearted with him. He has a contagious, resonant sort of laugh. He lives in Beaulieu in his own pretty little villa. Yakobi³ the artist is also here; he calls Grigorovich a black­guard and a swindler, Aivazovsky⁴ a son of a bitch, Stasov an idiot, etc. Kovalevsky, Yakobi and I had dinner together the day before yesterday, and we laughed so much during the meal that our sides ached, much to the amazement of our waiters. I have oysters all the time.

Morozova writes it's cold in Biarritz: it's even gone below freez­ing. Paris is having beautiful weather judging by Figaro. If you go to Paris, I'll go too. But the way I see it you ought to come to Nice first to take in some sun, and then we could go on to Paris together. The weather in Nice, I repeat, is warm and very pleasant. Sitting on the embankment, basking in the sun and looking out to sea is sheer delight.

My regards and heartfelt greetings to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya. I wish you all the best. Don't pay any attention to that odd sensation in your legs. You have a very sound constitution.

Nice, Pension Russe.

Yours, A. Chekhov

I miss Russian newspapers and get no letters.

The actor Fyodor Gorev, who back in 1888 played the male lead in the Moscow production of Suvorin's Tatyana Repina (cf. Letter 14, note 2). Gorev was an adherent of the emotional, underrehearsed school of acting and scored some of his greatest successes in intuitive and improvisational per­formances, introducing sudden pauses and bits of pantomime that came as total surprises to the other actors in the play.

After his dismissal from Moscow University for holding and advocating opinions that were considered subversive, Kovalevsky voluntarily chose to emigrate and live abroad. In his memoir about his friendship with Chekhov, he quoted a sort of political credo he claimed to have pieced together from various lengthy conversations, despite Chekhov's aversion to political dis­cussions. Here are two of that credo's most salient passages: "He wished particularly that the peasants be allowed to own their land, not as a group, but each as his personal property; that the peasants live in freedom, sobriety and material affluence and have at their disposal numerous schools and have proper medical facilities."

"Chekhov was not particularly concerned with the relative advantages of republic or monarchy, federalism or parliamentarism. But he wanted Russia to be free, purged of all national animosities, its peasantry given the same rights as all the other classes, allowed to participate in the zemstvo system and represented in the legislative assembly. A broad tolerance of various religious denominations, a press allowed to evaluate current affairs without hindrance from anyone or anything, freedom of assembly, association and political rallies, total equality of everyone before the law and in the courts—such were the indispensable conditions of that better future for which he consciously yearned and the advent of which he expected" (Maxim Kovalevsky, "On A. P. Chekhov," first published in 1915 in Stock Exchange News, St. Petersburg, and reprinted in Moscow in i960 in the collection Chekhov as Remembered by His Contemporaries.

Valerian Yakobi, painter and illustrator, whose illustrations for The Cornfield were oleographically reproduced and sent to that journal's sub­scribers as bonuses. Chekhov enjoyed his humor but did not think much of his art.

Ivan Aivazovsky (1817-1900) was a painter of marine subjects whose very name became a synonym for art and beauty in nineteenth-century Russia. "A sight worthy of Aivazovsky's brush" was the standard way of describing something ineffably lovely (Chekhov quoted this phrase in Uncle Vanya). Aivazovsky's seascapes (remarkably similar to the pictures of waves and sea spray that one sees today in galleries specializing in commercial non-art) were a rare instance of noncivic, non-storytelling painting that nineteenth-century critics liked and praised.

Chekhov met Aivazovsky in person during his visit with the Suvorins in the Crimea in 1888. He described the encounter in his letter to Maria Chekhova of July 22, 1888:

Yesterday I visited Shakh-Mamai, Aivazovsky's estate, situated some twenty-five versts from Feodosia. The estate is as opulent as something out of a magic tale, the sort of estate that one may probably still see in Persia. Aivazovsky himself is a hale and hearty old man of about seventy-five, looking like a mixture of an insignificant Armenian and an overfed bishop; he is full of a sense of his own importance, has soft hands and shakes your hand like a general. He's not very bright, but he is a complex personality, worthy of further study. In him alone there are combined a general, a bishop, an artist, an Armenian, a naive grandpa and an Othello. He is married to a very lovely young woman, whom he controls with an iron hand. Among his friends are sultans, shahs and emirs. He helped Glinka compose Ruslan and Lyudmila [it is a matter of historical record that Aivazovsky supplied Glinka with three Tatar folk melodies, which were all utilized in that opera]. He was a friend of Pushkin's but he has never read Pushkin. He has not read a single book in his life. When he is offered something to read, he says: "Why should I read it? I have my own opinions." I spent the whole day with him and stayed for dinner.

At that dinner Chekhov met Dr. Praskovya Tarnovskaya, nee Kozlova, the wife of a famous venereal-disease specialist and a prominent writer of medical texts and a civic leader in her own right. She was also the sister of Vladimir Nabokov's maternal grandmother. Chekhov described his encounter with her in the already quoted letter to Maria: "She's an obese, bloated chunk of flesh. If she were stripped naked and painted green, she'd be a swamp frog. After a chat with her, I mentally crossed her off my list of physicians." For a more sympathetic and attractive view of Dr. Tarnovskaya, see Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, pp. 67-68.

110. To Alexei Suvorin

Nice,

January 4, 1898

Here is my schedule. At the end of January (old style),¹ or more probably at the beginning of February, I'm going to Algiers, Tunis, et caetera. I'll then come back to Nice to wait for you (you wrote you'd be coming to Nice), and after spending some time here we'll go to Paris together if you like, and from there take the express train to Russia in time to celebrate Easter. Your last letter arrived here unsealed.

I go to Monte Carlo very rarely, once every three or four weeks. When I first arrived and Sobolevsky and Nemirovich² were here, I gambled very moderately and at low stakes (rouge et rtoir) and would occasionally bring home fifty or a hundred francs. But then I had to give up gambling because it exhausts me—physically.

The Dreyfus case has gotten up steam and is on its way, but it's still not going full power ahead. Zola is a noble soul, and 1(1 belong to the syndicate and have already received a hundred francs from the Jews)³ am delighted by his outburst.⁴ France is a wonderful country and has wonderful writers.

On New Year's Eve I sent you a New Year's telegram. I'm afraid it may not have reached you in time because there was a large backlog of telegrams at the post office. So, just in case, I wish you a Happy New Year again, this time in writing.

Write and tell me whether I should expect you in Nice. I hope you haven't changed your mind.

Koni s friend Hirschmann,⁵ the Kharkov eye doctor, a well-known philanthropist, has come to Nice to visit his tubercular son. He is a saintly man. We get together and talk from time to time, but his wife gets in the way. She is a fussy woman, not particularly bright, and more boring than forty thousand wives.⁶ There is a Russian artist here, a woman, who draws ten to fifteen caricatures of me a day.⁷

Judging from the excerpt printed in New Times, Lev Nikolaye- vich's article on art is of no particular interest.⁸ It's all so old hat. Saying that art has grown decrepit and entered a blind alley, that it isn't what it ought to be, and so on and so forth is like saying that the desire to eat and drink has gone out of date, outlived its usefulness, and is no longer necessary. Of course hunger is old hat and the desire to eat has led us into a blind alley, but eating is necessary all the same, and we will go on eating no matter what fortunes our philosophers and angry old men dream up for us in their clouded crystal balls.⁹ Keep well.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Russians traveling abroad referred to the Julian calendar still in use in their country as "old style" and to the Western Gregorian calendar as "new style." Because Chekhov mentions the publication of Zola's article (see note 4 below), this letter must have been dated according to tKe Gregorian calendar.

Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the future founder of the Moscow Art Theater.

A sarcastic reference to the repeated assertions of New Times that anyone offering proof of the innocence of Dreyfus was in the pay of an international Jewish syndicate.

Emile Zola's "J'accuse," which outlined the conspiracy that led to the conviction of Dreyfus and the acquittal of Esterhazy, was published in VAurore on January 1, 1898.

Leonard Hirschmann, professor of medicine at the University of Kharkov.

There are numerous variations in Chekhov's stories and letters on a humorous formula that can be expressed schematically as: more (something) than forty thousand (some kind of relatives). The formula has its origin in Hamlet's lines (Act V, scene 1):

I lov'd Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not (with all their quantity of love) Make up my sum.

Alexandra Khotyaintseva, some of whose drawings of Chekhov, Kovalevsky and various denizens of Pension Russe are reproduced in Volume 68 of Literary Heritage.

Tolstoy's What Is Art?, a portion of which was printed in New Times as a separate article.

"Clouded crystal balls" replaces an untranslatable reference to a Russian peasant saying about the use of beans for fortunetelling.

111. To Fyodor Batyushkov¹

Nice,

January 23, 1898

Dear Fyodor Dmitrievich,

I am returning the proofs to you.² The printers didn't leave any margins, so I had to paste in my corrections.

Please send the reprints of your article, the one you wrote me about, to Nice.³ I'll most likely be staying here until April, so I'll be bored, and your article will do me a double service.

All we talk about here is Zola and Dreyfus. The overwhelming majority of the intelligentsia is on Zola's side and believes that Dreyfus is innocent. Zola has been growing by leaps and bounds. His letters of protest are like a breath of fresh air, and every Frenchman now has the feeling that, thank God, there is still justice on this earth and that if an innocent man is convicted, there is someone to defend him.⁴ French newspapers are extremely interesting, whereas Russian newspapers are hopeless. New Times is simply disgusting.

I hope you will send some copies of my story to my sister. Her address is: Maria Pavlovna Chekhova, Lopasnya, Moscow Province.

The weather here is wonderful and summery. I haven't once put on my galoshes or fall coat all winter, and in all that time I've had to carry an umbrella only twice.

Allow me to wish you all the best and to thank you for your concern, which I value highly. I clasp your hand, and looking forward to your article, I remain,

Sincerely and respectfully yours,

A. Chekhov

1. Fyodor Batyushkov (1857-1920) was a literary scholar and one of the founders of comparative-literature studies in Russia. He corresponded with Chekhov in his capacity as the editor of the Russian portion of Cosmopolis, an international journal published in Paris and St. Petersburg in four lan­guages.

"A Visit with Friends/' which Chekhov wrote at Batyushkov's request especially for Cosmopolis.

A published version of the lecture Batyushkov delivered at the Shake­speare Circle of St. Petersburg on the subject of "Peasants in Balzac, Chekhov and Korolenko."

The innocence of Dreyfus and the justice of Zola's position are repeatedly asserted in Chekhov's letters dating from this period. Here are two of the more eloquent passages:

To Alexandra Khotyaintseva, February 2, 1898:

You ask me whether I still think that Zola is right. And I ask you: could you have such a poor opinion of me that you could doubt even for a moment that I am on Zola's side? One of his fingernails is more important than all those who now sit and judge him in the assizes, all those generals and noble witnesses. I've been reading the stenographic transcript and I cannot see where Zola was wrong and what other preuves are needed.

To Mikhail Chekhov and Mikhail's wife Olga, February 22, 1898:

You ask what my opinion is about Zola and his trial. First of all, I take into account what is self-evident: all of Europe's intelligentsia is on Zola's side, and against him is everyone who is questionable and disgusting. Here is the way things stand: imagine the university ad­ministration dismissing one student instead of another due to an error. You start objecting and they shout at you: "You are insulting science!" although the only thing science and the university administration have in common is that both the administrators and the professors wear dark blue frock coats. You give them your word, you assure them, you expose the culprits and they shout at you: "Where's your proof?" "Very well," you say, "let's go to the registrar's office and have a look at the records." "You can't! That is classified information!" So what can you do? The motives of the French government are clear. Just as a re­spectable woman who was one single time unfaithful to her husband will then permit herself a series of flagrant indiscretions, fall victim to insolent blackmail and finally commit suicide, all in order to hide her first misdeed, so is the French government forging blindly ahead, stumbling left and right to avoid admitting its mistake.

New Times is conducting an absurd campaign, but the majority of Russian newspapers, if not exactly on Zola's side, are opposed to prosecuting him. Appealing the sentence won't do any good, even if the outcome is favorable. The whole issue will be settled of its own accord, in some accidental way, as a result of the explosion of all those gases that are accumulating in Frenchmen's heads. It will all come out all right in the end.

112. To Alexei Suvorin

Nice,

February 6, 1898

The other day I was struck by the conspicuous advertisement on the first page of Neiv Times announcing the publication of Cosmopolis with my story "On a Visit" in it. In the first place, my story is called "A Visit with Friends," not "On a Visit." In the second, that kind of publicity turns my stomach. Besides, the story itself is far from conspicuous; it's the kind that can be turned out one a day.

You write that you are irritated by Zola, while everyone here has the feeling a new and better Zola has been born. His trial has been as effective as turpentine in cleansing him of his incidental grease spots, and the French now see him shining in all his true radiance. There is a purity and moral intergrity in him that no one suspected. Try to follow the entire scandal from its very beginnings. Just or unjust, Dreyfus's demotion made a gloomy, disheartening impression on everyone (includ­ing you, now that I think of it). Everyone noticed that during the degradation ceremony Dreyfus behaved like a decent, well-disciplined officer, while those attending—the journalists, for example—shouted, "Shut up, you Judas" at him, that is, they behaved badly, indecently. Everyone left the ceremony dissatisfied and with a disturbed conscience. Dissatisfaction was especially great on the part of Dreyfus's defense attorney, Demange, an honest man who had felt there was something suspicious going on behind the scenes as far back as the hearing. Then there were the experts who, to convince themselves they hadn't made a mistake, spoke only of Dreyfus and his guilt, and kept wandering and wandering all over Paris. As it turned out, one of the experts was insane, the author of a monstrously absurd scheme, and two were crackpots. Inevitably the Ministry of War's Information Bureau—that military consistory that goes after spies and reads other people's letters— had to be brought into the discussion. It had to be brought in because Sandherr, the Bureau's head, turned out to be stricken with progressive paralysis, Paty de Clam proved to be a sort of Berlin Tausch, and Picquart suddenly resigned under mysterious and scandalous circum­stances.¹ And wouldn't you just know it, a large number of juridical errors came to light. Little by little people became convinced that Dreyfus had in fact been condemned on the basis of a secret document which had been shown neither to the defendant nor his attorney, and law- abiding people saw in this a fundamental violation of the law. Even if the letter had been written by the sun itself and not merely Wilhelm, it ought to have been shown to Demange. All sorts of guesses were prof­fered as to the contents of the letter. Cock-and-bull stories started making the rounds. Dreyfus is an officer, so the military became defensive. Dreyfus is a Jew, so the Jews became defensive. . . . There was talk of militarism, of Yids. Such utterly disreputable people as Drumont² held their heads high. Little by little, a messy kettle of fish began stewing; it was fueled by anti-Semitism, a fuel that reeks of the slaughterhouse. When something is wrong within us, we seek the cause from without and before long we find it: it was the French who messed things up, it was the Yids, it was Wilhelm. . . . Capitalism, the bogeyman, the Masons, the syndicate and the Jesuits are all phantoms, but how they ease our anxieties!³ They are a bad sign, of course. Once the French be­gan talking about the Yids and the syndicate, it meant they had begun to feel something was wrong, that a worm had begun to grow within, that they needed the phantoms to ease their stirred-up consciences. Then there's that Esterhazy, that duelist straight out of Turgenev, a bounder, a man who has long been an object of suspicion, not respected by his colleagues, and the striking similarity between his handwriting and that of the document, the uhlan's letters, the threats he somehow never carried out, and finally a trial that was shrouded in mystery and that came to the odd conclusion that the document was written in Esterhazy's handwriting, but not by Esterhazy's hand. And the gas kept accumulat­ing, pressure began to build up, and the atmosphere became depressingly stifling. The free-for-all in the Chamber of Deputies was purely and simply a phenomenon of nerves, a hysterical result of this tension.⁴ Zola's letter and his trial are both phenomena of the same order. What do you expect? The first to sound the alarm are bound to be the nation's best people, its vanguard, and that is exactly what happened. The first to speak up was Scheurer-Kestner.⁵ Frenchmen who know him well (ac­cording to Kovalevsky) say he's a "dagger blade," he's so clear and above reproach. The second was Zola. And now he's being tried.

Yes, Zola's no Voltaire.⁶ None of us are Voltaires, but there comes a time in our lives when the reproach of not being a Voltaire is as irrelevant as can be. Think of Korolenko, who stood up for the Multan pagans and saved them from forced labor.⁷ Nor was Doctor Haas a Voltaire, yet his wonderful life ran its course quite happily.⁸

I know the trial from the stenographic transcripts, which are utterly different from the newspaper accounts, and I have a clear under­standing of Zola. The main thing is that he is sincere, that is, he bases his judgments only on what he can see, not on phantoms the way the others do. Even sincere people can err, that goes without saying, but their errors cause less harm than sober-minded insincerity, prejudices or political motivations. Let us assume that Dreyfus is guilty—even so Zola is right, because the writer's job is not to accuse or persecute, but to stand up even for the guilty once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment. "What about politics and the interests of the state?" people may ask. But major writers and artists should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from it. There are enough accusers, prosecutors and secret police without them, and in any case the role of Paul becomes them more than that of Saul. No matter what his sentence, Zola will still experience vital joy at the end of the trial, his old age will be serene, and he will die with a clear, or in any case assuaged, conscience. The French have suffered much pain and they grasp at every word of consolation and every healthy reproach that comes from without. That's why Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson's letter⁹ and the article by our own Zakrevsky (which was read here in The News)¹⁰ were so popular here and why the abuse heaped on Zola—which the tabloids they despise offer them every day—is so disgusting. No matter how nervous Zola may act,¹¹ in court he still represents French common sense, and the French love him for it; they are proud of him, even though they also applaud the generals who in their simple-minded way try to scare them first with military honor, then with war.¹²

Look at what a long letter I've written. It's spring here. The mood is similar to that of the Ukraine at Eastertime. The weather is warm and sunny, the bells are ringing, the past keeps coming to mind. Come! Duse is going to appear here, by the way.

You write that my letters haven't been reaching you. Really? I'll send them registered.

I wish you health and all the best. My most respectful regards and greetings to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya.

This paper comes from the offices of Le petit Nigois.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Colonel Jean-Conrad Sandherr was actually the head of the so-called Statistical Section, a cover name for the counter-intelligence branch of the French army; Major du Paty de Clam was the principal manipulator of the rigged-up evidence that was used to convict Dreyfus; Major Tausch of the German secret police w&s put on trial in Berlin in 1897 for engaging in blackmail with the aid of confidential information to which he had access in his work; Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart was forced to resign from the French General Staff after he discovered documents establishing the guilt of Esterhazy and tried to use them to clear Dreyfus.

Edouard Drumont, the author of a two-volume anti-Semitic tract La

France Jnive and publisher of the ultra-reactionary newspaper Libre Parole, which led the anti-Dreyfus press campaign.

This sentence is printed in full in both Soviet editions of Chekhov's letters. But when the passage is quoted in various other Soviet sources (e.g., Ilya Ehrenburg's essay on Chekhov), the word "capitalism" is usually deleted.

During the session of the Chamber of Deputies on January 22, 1898, Jean Jaures verbally assaulted the anti-Dreyfusard Prime Minister Jules Meline, and the rightist deputy Comte de Bernis was slugged physically by some Socialists, whereupon he ran after the departing Jaures and hit him on the back of the head.

Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, the vice-president of the French Senate, led the fight for reopening the Dreyfus case in 1897.

In his regular column in New Times, Suvorin had accused Zola of publicity seeking and remarked that Zola must be envious of Voltaire's laurels. Suvorin's column and Chekhov's letter both refer to Voltaire's frequent de­fense of victims of religious persecution and his fight for the abolition of cruel and unjust laws. Among Voltaire's numerous humanitarian activities in the sixties and seventies of the eighteenth century were his successful interces­sion on behalf of the Calas family, Protestants who were falsely accused of having murdered their son for wanting to convert to Catholicism; his futile efforts to save the life of the nineteen-year-old Chevalier de la Barre, con­demned to torture and death for having blasphemed and mutilated a crucifix; and his struggle to save from decapitation the governor of the French West Indies, convicted without proper trial for having been taken prisoner by the British.

In Chekhov's lifetime and during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Vladimir Korolenko amassed a record as a one-man Civil Liberties Union that could stand comparison to that of Voltaire. The Multan case Chekhov refers to is the best-known instance where Korolenko's intercession led to a reversal of an unjust legal verdict. In December of 1894, seven Udmurts (members of a Finnic tribe also known as Votyaks) from the village of Old Multan were put on trial and convicted in Vyatka Province for having allegedly murdered a Russian beggar for purposes of ritual sacrifice to their pagan gods. Korolenko became involved in the case after the first appeal of the sentence failed, although the appeal proceedings revealed that the accused and some of the witnesses had been subjected to torture to extract the evidence against them. In 1896, Korolenko appeared as one of the defenders and also as a witness at the third trial of the Old Multan vil­lagers. He succeeded in proving that human sacrifice was never a part of the Udmurt religion and that the whole case had been fabricated by the local Russian authorities in order to smear the entire Udmurt nation, to compel them to abandon their native gods, and to bring about their conversion to Christianity. Despite governmental meddling in the selection of the jury and the introduction of supposedly scholarly witnesses willing to testify that the religion of the Udmurts required blood sacrifices, the second appeal resulted in full acquittal of the Udmurts.

In 1913, Korolenko was involved in a case that was far more famous than the Multan one, but that was in fact almost its literal repetition— that of Mendel Beilis, the Jew who was put on trial in Kiev on similar charges of human sacrifice, supposedly required by his religion. Beilis had a far more adequate defense than the obscure Udmurts, but nevertheless Korolenko volunteered to help with the preparation of the defense. Because of his heart condition, he was not allowed to do so by his doctors, but he neverthe­less organized writers' protests, wrote a series of articles and insisted on being present at the trial as the correspondent of several liberal newspapers.

Volume 9 of the ten-volume edition of Korolenko's collected works, pub­lished in Moscow in 1955, contains more than seven hundred pages of his articles on humanitarian issues and civil-liberty causes. There are studies of conditions in prisons, re-examinations of unjust verdicts of courts-martial, accounts of brutal dispersals of strikers and infringements on the freedom of the press, articles urging famine relief and a summary of the Dreyfus affair. The volume also documents Korolenko's campaign of several decades to abolish the death penalty. These articles range chronologically from 1890 until World War I. Not included are Korolenko's humanitarian and pub­licists writings and his letters to Maxim Gorky from the period after the October Revolution. These are among the most eloquent writings in Russian on human rights, championing the freedom of thought, decrying the death penalties imposed by Lenin's government for the illegal sale of bread and pleading for mercy toward the old-time liberals and revolutionaries who were being killed in the name of the very revolution to which they had de­voted their lives. (Lenin's reaction to Korolenko's post-revolutionary writings was: "They are all the same. They call themselves revolutionaries, socialists, even 'of the people,' but they have no notion of what the people need.") Two years after the October Revolution, Korolenko no longer had any forum in which he could object to injustice and defend the oppressed.

Because of the considerable prestige of his name both in Russia and abroad, Lenin made a determined effort to win Korolenko to his side, and in 1920 he sent the People's Commissar of Education, the intellectual Anatoly Lunacharsky, to Korolenko's home in the Ukraine to try to enlist his support. Lunacharsky invited Korolenko to express his objections to Leninist practices in writing, promising to publish them with his own commentary and, if neces­sary, rebuttal. Korolenko wrote a set of six essays in which he developed the idea that a socialism which speaks in the name of the proletariat while disregarding the proletariat's wishes and depriving it of all freedom and of basic human rights is neither revolutionary nor democratic. Korolenko's Letters to Lunacharsky were never printed in the Soviet Union and his Soviet biographers pretend that this work does not exist; but shortly before his death in 1921, Korolenko sent these essays to be published abroad, thus becoming the first in a long list of important twentieth-century Russian writers to resort to this stratagem.

On Dr. Fyodor Haas, see Letter 100, note 3.

Bj0rnstjerne Bj0rnson wrote Zola an open letter, in which he called

Zola's fight for justice a service to the whole of humanity.

The Russian journalist Ignaty Zakrevsky published a glowing eulogy of Zola in the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange Gazette on January 27, 1898.

While the Russian text speaks unequivocally of Zola's nervousness, both Constance Garnett and Sidonie Lec^erer in Lillian Hellman's edition of the letters have Chekhov accuse him of being "neurotic." In general, while Lederer cannot begin to match many of Garnett's excellent renditions, she has a great knack for repeating some of her predecessor's worst misreadings.

In a number of Chekhov biographies, both Soviet and Western, and in the respective memoirs of Maria and Mikhail Chekhov, this letter is repre­sented as signaling Chekhov's final and definite breaking-off of his relations with Suvorin. When this is asserted, it has become customary to quote Chekhov's letter to his brother Alexander of February 23, 1898, where he wrote: "New Times has been behaving revoltingly about the Zola case. The old man and I have exchanged letters on this subject (in a rather moderate tone, however) and have both lapsed into silence. I don't want to write him and I don't want his letters, in which he tries to justify his newspaper's tactlessness by his love for the military. I don't want them because they became a bore a long time ago." The passage in the letter to Alexander goes on to criticize New Times for conducting a campaign of vilification against Zola while at the same time serializing his new novel without paying him royalties and concludes: "And in any case, berating Zola while he is on trial is unworthy of literature."

There was indeed a lapse in Chekhov's correspondence with Suvorin, but it lasted for only a few months. On April 20, 1898, Suvorin was in Paris and, as his journal tells us, Chekhov came there and spent a week with him. After that, their correspondence and personal encounters went on as before. Chekhov's Russian biographers and his younger siblings wanted him to drop Suvorin so badly that they invented a break that in fact never happened. As a close reading of Suvorin's journal and of some passages in the journal of Ivan Shcheglov suggests, the cooling-off in their relationship that took place during the last few years of Chekhov's life came from Suvorin's side rather than from Chekhov's. Like many writers of the older generation, Suvorin con­sidered all Chekhov's plays after The Seagull failures and believed that they were a sign that Chekhov's talent was declining. In the early years of the twentieth century, Suvorin was far more interested in the literary career of his second literary discovery and protege, Vasily Rozanov, who shared Suvorin's reactionary beliefs, his anti-Semitism and anti-materialism as Chekhov never could.

YALTA

When chekhov returned то Russia from France in May of 1898, he brought two gifts for his native city of Taganrog: Mark Antokolsky's statue of Peter the Great, which he had talked the sculptor into donating to the city when he met him in Paris, and over three hundred volumes of classical French writers for the Taganrog municipal library, for which he paid out of his own pocket. Once Chekhov was back in Melikhovo, the same round of school building, medical and literary projects, and endless stream of visitors was resumed. But the stay on the French Riviera did not seem to have done his health much good. It is from this period on that the image of Chekhov as an invalid—the emaciated look, the graying beard, the long black overcoat buttoned to the top, all so familiar to modern readers—becomes a reality, attested in photographs and in mem­oirs. As the fall of 1898 approached, he left for the Crimea, expecting to spend the fall and part of the winter in Yalta. But what was intended as a visit of a few months turned out to be a permanent stay.

In October, Chekhov's father died quite unexpectedly. With the father dead, Mikhail married and living independently, and Chekhov himself forced to reside in the south the greater part of every year, it no longer made sense to maintain Melikhovo for his mother and sister only. The estate in which so much work had been invested by the entire family and where Chekhov had lived some of his happiest years was put up for sale. Chekhov purchased a plot of land in Autka, a Tatar village situated within twenty minutes' walk of Yalta, on which he began building his new permanent home. By now there was a steady demand for his writing of all periods and Chekhov began making plans for an edition of his com- plctc collected works. There were plans to have this edition brought out by Suvorin, but Suvorin's publishing house handled things in such a hap­hazard and unsatisfactory way that in January of 1899 Chekhov allowed Pyotr Sergcyenko to talk him into signing the ill-advised, exploitative contract with the publisher Adolf Marx (see Letter 118 and the notes to it). It enabled Chekhov to finish building his Autka home but involved him in endless busywork and in financial problems that were to plague him for the rest of his life.

Among the letters Chekhov wrote during his first two years of residence in Yalta we find several of his more important and personal statements about life, literature, justice and the relationship between the individual and the state. Chekhov's self-appraisal as a writer in the postscript of his letter to Grigory Rossolimo (Letter 130) is an indispensable companion piece to his other credo, the 1888 letter to Pleshcheyev (Letter 23). It is the lack of familiarity with these two basic Chekhovian documents or the failure to realize their paramount importance that is responsible for so much of the misunderstanding of Chekhov's person and his work by foreign critics. Chekhov's letters about the student riots that occurred in the spring of 1899 show his deepening concern about control of the press by the government and the absence in Russia of adequate channels for expression of popular sentiments, such as he could observe in France during the trial of Zola. Chekhov's letter to Suvorin about the "court of honor" to which Suvorin was subjected as a result of his published opinions of the student disturbances is an eloquent plea against putting any writer on trial for the content of his writings (Letter 123).

Of special interest is Chekhov's correspondence with Maxim Gorky, whose literary star began its dazzling ascent at about that time and whose enormous fame and popularity eclipsed within a few short years the reputations of all Russian writers except Tolstoy, both at home and abroad. Chekhov's letters of literary advice to Gorky stand out in the ocean of words published in Russian since Chekhov's time about this celebrated but uneven writer as the most astute literary critique of Gorky's work ever written. For all his personal fondness for Gorky, Chekhov was able not only to see the interesting and attractive sides of the younger man's talent, but also to point out and to warn Gorky against the maudlin, affectcd and bombastic aspects of his writing, which were indeed to come to the fore in Gorky's work written roughly between Chekhov's death and World War I and which make so much of his output from that period such an unreadable bore today.

Because of his worsening physical condition, Chekhov was obliged to curtail drastically the volume of his creative writing after lie settled in Yalta. But, as if in compensation, almost everything he wrote in his final period is a major or a minor masterpiece. Back in 1895, Chekhov extended his recurrent theme of the lack of mutual comprehension, and the inability of living creatures to communicate fully with each other, to the world of animals, when he wrote his children's story "Whitebrow," about the en­counter of a domestic puppy with a she-wolf and her cubs. All the animals in the story as well as the puppy's peasant owner misunderstand and con­tinually misinterpret each other's intentions and motives. Late in 1898, Chekhov wrote a profound little story about a similar situation among humans, "The New Villa," in which a well-meaning liberal engineer and his wife fail to bridge the cultural gap that separates them from the peasants in a nearby village; they are ultimately forced to move away by a hostility that no amount of good will or effort on both sides can overcome. "The Lady with the Dog" of 1899 is one of the great love stories in Russian literature. The overwhelmingly attractive heroine of this story, trapped in an unfortunate marriage, can stand comparison to the similarly trapped Tatyana in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, but Chekhov manages to avoid both Pushkin's neo-classical and rationalis­tic choice of duty over love and Tolstoy's moralistically motivated con­demnation of his heroine's adultery. The shattering "In the Ravine" of 1900, arguably Chekhov's highest achievement in prose fiction, confronts the theme that in a more subdued form and in a totally different social milieu is also basic to the play Three Sisters, written at about the same time: the inability of the good but weak to defend themselves from those who are armed with the strength of selfishness.

The move to the Crimea coincided with the beginning of Chekhov's greatest period as playwright. This period is connected with the Moscow Art Theater, whose involvement with Chekhov dates from the production of The Seagull in their very first season in the winter of 1898-99, which marked the beginning of the most brilliant age in the history of Russian theater, extending from the last two years of the nineteenth century till the forcible standardization of theaters by the Stalinist regime in the 1930s. Chekhov's two last and greatest plays were written for this company, and its productions of his major plays brought them their world-wide fame and set the pattern for subsequent productions in Russia and abroad. Yet the circumstances of Chekhov's association with this company, particularly in its initial stages, have been so distorted by the mytnologizing proclivities of the theater's founders, whose version of the events has become inter­nationally accepted, that it would not be out of order to outline some of the actual facts.

The accepted version goes something like this: After the St. Petersburg failure of The Seagull in 1896, Chekhov lost faith in his own powers as a playwright. His plays were not performed anywhere, and when Vladimir

Nemirovich-Danchenko asked for permission to produce The Seagull dur­ing his company's first season, Chekhov refused, saying, as Nemirovich- Danchenko's memoirs have it, that he would never be able to survive the emotional ordeal of having this play performed and that his plays were worthless. There followed, according to the memoirs of both Nemirovich- Danchenko and Stanislavsky, prolonged negotiations, after which Chekhov yielded to their powers of persuasion. After the rehearsals began, Maria Chekhova supposedly made a dramatic visit to the theater, begging them to cancel their plans as being too dangerous for her brother's health. The production itself was a triumph, bringing The Seagull out of oblivion and setting the scene for the company's subsequent triumphs with Chekhov's other plays. This is the account we find in most Soviet sources on Chekhov to this day and this is roughly what Western scholars tell us, including such knowledgeable ones as Maurice Valency, who outlines this version of events in his thorough study of Chekhov's plays, The Breaking String.

As a matter of historical record, the St. Petersburg premiere of The Seagull was followed, as we have seen, by a highly successful Kiev produc­tion in November of 1896. During the next year, the play was produced in Astrakhan, Taganrog, Kharkov and other provincial cities. By the fall of 1898, it had its first foreign production, when it was presented in Prague in Czech translation. After the publication of Chekhov's collected plays by Suvorin in 1897, Uncle Vanya was produced in rapid succession in Odessa, Kiev, Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov and Tiflis in Georgia. All these produc­tions were received with acclaim, they were written about in the press, and, by the end of 1898, royalties from these two plays represented a sizable portion of Chekhov's income. Therefore, it made no sense for him to lose faith in his plays or dread a Moscow production of The Seagull.

Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was a stage director and author of popular Ostrovskian social melodramas that indicted the wealthy plutoc­racy and the merchant class. His friendship and correspondence with Chekhov dated from 1888. Despite the rather shoddy quality of his own plays, Nemirovich had good taste in literature and saw the originality and importance of Chekhov's plays. He had a hard time persuading his co- founder of the Moscow Art Theater, Konstantin Alexeyev, the wealthy heir to a textile fortune, who later became famous as actor and director under the name Stanislavsky, to include The Seagull in the repertory of their revolutionary new theater. In this theater, for the first time in the history of the Russian stage, the director was to have total control over all the elements of the production, and the production itself was thought of as a coherent artistic whole rather than the sum of its diverse parts.

On April 25, 1898, Nemirovich wrote to Chekhov asking for his per­mission to produce The Seagull in Moscow (his letters to Chekhov were published in the Moscow Art Theater Yearbook for 1944). Chekhov was traveling from France to Russia when the letter was mailed and he did not receive it until May 6 (as stated in his letter of that date to Alexander Sumbatov). Chekhov's initial reply to Nemirovich was lost (or possibly destroyed), but it must have been negative, for on May 12 Nemirovich complained in his letter to Chekhov: "Why won't you authorize our pro­duction? After all, The Seagull is playing all over the country. Why can't we do it in Moscow? The play has numerous admirers, I know [some of] them. The enthusiastic reviews in Kharkov and Odessa newspapers are quite unprecedented." On May 16, i.e., ten days after receiving the original request, Chekhov wrote to Nemirovich authorizing him to produce any Chekhov play he liked. So much for the protracted negotiations, Chekhov's stubborn refusals, the danger to his life, and the rescue of the forgotten Seagull. As for Maria Chekhova's dramatic intervention, she denied it ever happened after the first publication of Stanislavsky's My Life in Art and of Nemirovich's memoirs; in her own memoirs she cited documentary evidence to prove that she could not have made the visit they both de­scribed, because she did not know of the production until the very last moment, when she received an invitation to attend the opening night. But theatrical legends are resilient and the fantasies of the Moscow Art Theater's founders will probably go on being cited as fact for some time to come.

Chekhov was gratified by the new success of The Seagull in Moscow, but he was not particularly happy about the scenario of stage effects which Stanislavsky devised for it and he strongly disliked some of the perform­ances. When Nemirovich wanted to do the Moscow premiere of Uncle Vanya, Chekhov's answer was to offer that play to the Maly Theater, a tradition-bound, government-owned company, which was the very opposite of the Moscow Art Theater in its artistic methods and principles. But since the Maly was an official theater, the play had to pass a government- appointed committee of literary experts. There ensued the unique little comedy, already described in the introductory essay, of three liberal liter­ary scholars finding Uncle Vanya dramatically unsound and socially ir­relevant and therefore unfit to be played in the Imperial Theaters unless Chekhov revised it according to their specifications. After reading their recommendations, Chekhov handed the play over to Nemirovich, who produced it in October of 1899. The success of this play in Moscow was hampered by the character of Professor Serebryakov, which was correctly seen by some of the public and some of the press as a caricature of the Russian liberal academic intelligentsia. This caused widespread resentment in Moscow's academic and university circles (Nemirovich's letter to Chekhov of October 27, 1899, shows that he, Chekhov and the actor who played the role were all aware of this interpretation and wanted it that way). Yet gradually, after some uncertain months, Uncle Vanya became acccptcd as the important play it was both in Moscow and in St. Peters­burg. But while the satirical aspects of Professor Serebryakov's role were either resented or acclaimed, the equally important ecological message the play contains seems to have escaped general notice entirely.

By the time Chekhov came to write his next play, Three Sisters, his fortunes as a playwright were firmly linked with the Moscow Art Theater, both through its successful presentations of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya and through his love affair with the company's leading actress, Olga Knipper.

113. To Alexei Suvorin

Melikhovo, August 24, 1898

Sytin tried to buy my humorous stories for five, not three thousand. The temptation was great, but I still decided not to sell; I have no particular desire for a collection with a new title. I've grown tired of turning out collections every year and constantly giving them new titles; it's so dreary and disorganized. No matter what Kolyosov says, sooner or later I'll have to publish the stories in numbered volumes and call them just that: Volume One, Two, Three . . . , in other words publish an edition of my collected works. It would solve a number of my problems, and it's what Tolstoy advises me to do. The humorous stories I've collected now would make up the first volume. And if you have no objections, I could start work editing the future volumes some­time in the late fall and winter when I won't have anything else to do. Another consideration in favor of my plan is that it's better if I myself take care of the editing and publishing rather than my heirs.¹ The new volumes won't do the old, unsold ones any harm because the latter will dwindle away at railroad stands, though for some reason they refuse to stock my books. The last time I took the Nikolayev line I didn't see any of my books on the stands.²

I'm building another new school, the third to be exact.³ My schools have the reputation of being model schools. The reason I'm telling you this is I don't want you to think I spent the two hundred rubles you donated on some nonsense or other. I won't be at Tolstoy's on August 28th⁴ because first, the trip there is cold and damp, and second, what's the point of going? Tolstoy's life is one long celebration; there's no reason to set aside a special day. And third, Menshikov⁵ dropped by on his way from Yasnaya Polyana and said Lev Nikolayevich was grumbling and making faces at the very thought of having visitors come to wish him a happy birthday on August 28th. And fourth, I won't go to Yasnaya Polyana because Sergeyenko will be there. Sergeyenko and I were at school together in Taganrog. He used to be a joker, a clown, a wit, but as soon as he began thinking of himself as a great writer and friend to Tolstoy (whom, by the way, he wears out terribly), he became the most tiresome man on earth. I'm afraid of him. He's a hearse stood up on end.

Menshikov said that Tolstoy and his family had made a special point of inviting me to Yasnaya Polyana and that they would be offended if I didn't go. ("But not on the 28th, please," added Menshikov.) But I repeat: it's grown damp and very cold, and I've begun coughing again. I'm told my health has improved greatly, and at the same time they're chasing me away from here. Ill have to go south. I'm in a rush finishing off all sorts of things I've started and there are certain things I must do before I leave. I have no time to think about Yasnaya Polyana, though I ought to go there for a day or two. And I really want to go there.

My route: first the Crimea and Sochi, then, when it gets cold in Russia, I'll go abroad. The only place I want to go is Paris; I'm not at all attracted to warm regions. I fear this trip as if it were exile.

I've received a letter from Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko in Moscow.⁶ His project is in full swing. They've had nearly a hundred rehearsals, and the actors are attending lectures.

If we decide to publish my stories in volumes, we ought to get together before I leave, talk it over, and, incidentally, raid your finance bureau for a bit of cash.

Where is Kolomnin now? If he's in Petersburg, would you do me a favor and tell him to send me as quickly as possible the photographs he promised me?

Keep well and happy. I wish you all the best.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Send me a telegram about something or other. I love getting telegrams.

The publisher Ivan Sytin wanted to bring out a collected edition of Chekhov's humorous stories only, but Chekhov was more attracted by the prospect of a multivolume, chronologically arranged edition of all of his prose fiction. This letter is a part of his negotiations with Suvorin on this subject. Fyodor Kolyosov was the manager of Suvorin's bookstores.

As already mentioned, Suvorin held a monopoly on bookstands in all the railroad stations in Russia.

The peasant school at Melikhovo.

August 28, 1898, was Tolstoy's seventieth birthday.

On Mikhail Menshikov, see Letter 134.

Possibly the letter of August 21, 1898, outlining the preparations for rehearsals of The Seagull (Nemirovich-Danchenko's letter to Chekhov of that date in the Moscow Art Theater Yearbook for 1944).

114. To Mikhail Chekhov

Yalta, October 26, 1898

Dear Michel,

No sooner had I mailed you my postcard than I received your letter. I knew what all of you had to go through at Father's funeral, and I felt vile inside. I didn't hear of Father's death until the evening of the thirteenth, when Sinani told me.¹ For some reason nobody wired me, and if I hadn't happened to stop by Sinani's shop I would have remained in the dark a good deal longer.

I'm buying a plot of land in Yalta so I can build a place to spend my winters. Constantly wandering around, moving from hotel to hotel, with their doormen and undependable food and so on and so forth is a frightening prospect. Mother could spend the winters with me. There is no winter here; it is late October and the roses and other flowers are outdoing one another with blossoms, the trees are green and the weather warm. There's water everywhere you look. Nothing more than a house itself is needed here, no outbuildings, because everything is located under one roof. Coal, firewood, janitor's quarters and everything else is in the basement. Hens lay all year round, and they don't even need any special housing; a few partitions are enough. There is a bakery and a market place nearby. So it will be very warm and very comfortable for Mother. Incidentally, everyone gathers saffron milk caps and chanterelles in the State Forest all autumn long. That will keep Mother entertained.² I won't do the building myself; everything will be done by an architect. The house will be ready by April. By city standards the lot is large. There will be room for an orchard, flowerbeds and a vegetable garden. Starting next year Yalta will have its own railroad line.³

Kuchukoy⁴ is unsuitable for a permanent residence. It's a very charming summer cottage and worth buying only because it's so charm­ing and—reasonably priced.

As for your insistence on marriage, what can I say? Marriage for love is the only kind of marriage that's interesting. Marrying a girl only because she's nice is like buying something you don't need at a market merely because it is pretty. The point around which family life revolves is love, sexual attraction, one flesh. Everything else is dreary and unreliable, no matter how cleverly it is calculated. Therefore, the point is one of finding a girl you love, not one you think is nice. As you see, a mere bagatelle is all that's holding us back.⁵

There's nothing but sad news from Serpukhov District: Witte has had a stroke, Kovreyn has had a stroke, Sidorov has died and Vasily Ivanovich (the bookkeeper) has consumption.⁶

Masha's coming tomorrow. We'll hold counsel and discuss every­thing thoroughly. I'll let you know what we decide.

Prince Urusov, the lawyer, is here.⁷ He is an able raconteur. He too wants to buy a plot of land. Soon there won't be a single patch left in Yalta; everyone is in such a hurry to buy. My literature helped me to buy the lot. The only reason they sold it to me so cheaply and on credit is that I'm a writer.

Keep well, and give Olga Germanovna and Zhenya⁸ my regards. Guarding against typhus is not so hard; it's not contagious. All you have to do is refrain from drinking unboiled water.

My Uncle Vanya is making the rounds of the provinces and has been successful everywhere. You never know when you're going to win and when you're going to lose. I'd placed no hopes whatsoever on that play. Keep well and write.

Yours, A. Chekhov

I'm glad to hear that Father was buried in the New Virgin Cemetery. I wanted to wire and tell you to bury him there, but I thought it was too late. You guessed what I had in mind.

Doctor Borodulin⁹ is here and sends his regards. A nice little official at the State Bank asked after you and also wished to have his regards forwarded.

Isaak Sinani owned a bookstore in Yalta. Subsequently, he and Chekhov became good friends. Chekhov's father died on October 12 as a result of an unsuccessful minor operation. On October 20, Chekhov wrote to Mikhail Menshikov: "My father died. The main cog in our Melikhovo mechanism is gone. I expect that life at Melikhovo will now lose all its charm for my mother and my sister and that I'll have to build a new nest for them else­where. This is all the more likely since I'll no longer be in Melikhovo in the winter and the two of them won't be able to manage without male help."

A mother who was a passionate mushroom collector is another thing that Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Nabokov have in common (see Speak, Memory, pp. 43-44). How very much alive the traditional Russian mushroom- gathering mystique is in the Soviet Union today was made evident a few years ago by Vladimir Soloukhin in his delightful book The Third Sport (Tretya okhota, Moscow, 1968)—the first two sports being hunting and fish­ing, respectively.

This was only a rumor; no railroad to Yalta was built in Chekhov's lifetime.

An almost inaccessible little estate on the seacoast, situated in Gurzuf, some thirty versts from Yalta, which Chekhov bought hoping to use it as an excursion and picnic site in the summer, after he visited it with Isaak Sinani and became captivated by its scenic beauty.

Of the previous translators of Chekhov's letters, only Koteliansky understood this sentence.

Dr. Ivan Witte, Dr. Ivan Kovreyn and the bookkeeper Vasily Fyodorov were Chekhov's associates during his voluntary work at the Serpukhov zemstvo and its hospital. It is not known who Sidorov was.

Prince Alexander Urusov (1843-1900) was a practicing lawyer, drama critic and historian of Russian theater. He published one of the earliest critical articles on Chekhov in the West (a study of "The Duel," which ap­peared in La Plume, Paris, No. 67, 1892). He was the only critic who had a high opinion of The Wood Demon in the early nineties and he tried to convince Chekhov to arrange a staging of that play after the success of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theater. Urusov's critical article about the latter gave Chekhov much pleasure, which was expressed in two letters of appreciation he wrote to Urusov.

Mikhail Chekhov's wife and daughter.

Dr. Vasily Borodulin, a Yalta physician. Chekhov was to inquire about the state of Dr. Borodulin's health in a letter he wrote to Maria from Badenweiler a few days before his own death.

115. To Jacques Merpert¹

Yalta, October 29, 1898

Dear Yakov Semyonovich,

So far it's very good. But throw out the word I've underlined in green. And I have a feeling the biographical detail is a bit excessive. I wouldn't name all his brothers and teachers; it only clutters things up. I would use another device for indicating dates. "In 1839" means very little to a Frenchman; it might be better to say instead: "When Dostoyevsky was twenty years old." Nor would it be out of place to give a very short and uncomplicated historical and literary summary of the period during which Dostoyevsky made his debut and lived. You should point out that he made his debut under such and such circumstances during the reign of Nicholas I and the reign of Belinsky and Pushkin (remember that the latter had an enormous, an overwhelming influence on him).² And names like Belinsky, Pushkin and Nekrasov are to my mind more effective for purposes of dating than figures, which listeners don t absorb and which say nothing to them.

The general tone of your article is even, pleasant and convincing.

Im looking forward to the next part.

If you see Ivan Yakovlevich,³ give him my regards.

Yours, A. Chekhov

I sent you the Pushkin by parcel post. I hope you've received it by now.

Merpert was a Russian-speaking Frenchman whom Chekhov met in Paris in the spring of 1898. He was planning to give a series of public lectures on Dostoyevsky in Paris and he asked for Chekhov's permission to send him the texts of these lectures for approval and suggestions. The present letter is Chekhov's reaction to the first installment. He must have agreed to look at the lectures as an act of kindness toward Merpert. Of the important Russian writers of the nineteenth century, Dostoyevsky interested Chekhov least of all.

Chekhov waited until he was twenty-nine years old before he got around to reading Dostoyevsky's major novels. On March 5, 1889, he wrote to Suvorin: "I've purchased Dostoyevsky in your store and now I'm reading him. It's all right, but much too long and lacking in modesty. Too pretentious." In Chekhov's early story "An Enigmatic Character" (1883), the heroine, a self-dramatizing fortune huntress, keeps justifying her preying on rich old men by saying that she is "a sufferer in the Dostoyevskian manner." In other Chekhov stories and letters, the name of Dostoyevsky occurs only when Chekhov is ridiculing someone's posturings or hysterical behavior.

This lack of affinity for Dostoyevsky is only natural if we remember Chekhov's gentle humanity, relativistic moral outlook and scrupulous reliance on precise and unbiased observations of everyday life—all the basic Chekhovian essentials that make him the very antipode of Dostoyevsky in the Russian literary tradition. But there is also a historical dimension involved. We must remember that Tolstoy found all Dostoyevsky's novels with the exception of Notes from the House of the Dead artistically unbearable and that Chekhov's younger contemporary Bunin refused to recognize that Dostoyevsky possessed any literary talent at all. It was only in the Symbolist age—in the early twentieth century—that Dostoyevsky was given his full measure of recognition and became a living literary influence in Russian literature.

Even if we take into account Chekhov's lack of enthusiasm for

Dostoyevsky's work, the astoundingly ill-informed statement that Dostoyevsky made his debut "in the reign of Pushkin" (and the fact that Chekhov did not know it was Gogol rather than Pushkin who had had "an enormous, an overwhelming influence" on the young Dostoyevsky) must be blamed on the generally embryonic state of Russian Dostoyevsky studies and criticism at the end of the nineteenth century.

3. Ivan Pavlovsky, the Paris correspondent of New Times, whom Chekhov had known since childhood and through whom he met Merpert.

116. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)¹

Yalta,

December 3, 1898

Dear Alexei Maximovich,

I very much enjoyed your last letter. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I wrote Uncle Vanya a very long time ago.² I have never seen it staged. In the last few years it has often been produced in pro­vincial theaters, perhaps because I included it in my volume of col­lected plays. I feel indifferent toward all my plays and have long since ceased following the theater. I have no desire to write for the theater any more.³

You ask what I think of your stories. What do I think? Your talent is not to be doubted, and it is a genuine major talent to boot. It manifested itself with extraordinary power, for instance, in your story "In the Steppe." I actually felt envious at not having written it myself. You are an artist and an intelligent man. You have an admirable ability to feel. You are three-dimensional, i.e., when you describe a thing, it becomes visible and palpable. That is genuine art. There you have what I think, and I'm very glad to be able to tell it to you. I'm very glad, I repeat, and if we were to get to know one another and chat for an hour or two, you would become convinced of how highly I esteem you and what hopes I place on your talent.

Shall I talk about your shortcomings now? That's not quite so easy. Talking about a talent's shortcomings is like talking about the shortcomings of a tall tree growing in the garden; the issue at hand is not the tree itself, but rather the tastes of the person looking at the tree. Isn't that so?

I'll start by saying that, in my opinion, you lack restraint. You are like a spectator in the theater who expresses his delight with so little restraint that he prevents himself and others from listening. This lack of restraint is especially evident in the nature descriptions you use to break up your dialogues. When I read them—these descriptions—I feel I'd like them to be shorter, more compact, only about two or three lines long. Frequent reference to languor, murmuring, plushness and the like give your descriptions a rhetorical quality and make them monotonous; they discourage the reader and become almost tiresome. The same lack of restraint is evident in your descriptions of women ("Malva," "On the Rafts") and love scenes. It is neither a majestic sweep nor bold strokes of the brush; it is simply lack of restraint. Then the frequent use of words that do not belong in the type of stories you write —such words as musical accompaniment, discus, harmony—is annoy­ing. You often speak of waves. In your descriptions of intellectuals I feel a tenseness somewhat akin to caution. That doesn't come from not having observed intellectuals enough. You know them, but you don't know exactly from what angle to approach them.

How old are you? I don't know you, I don't know where you come from or who you are. But I feel you ought to leave Nizhny for two or three years while you're still young and rub shoulders with literature and the literary world—not to learn the ropes from us and become a real pro,⁴ but to submerge yourself in literature totally and grow to love it. Besides, people age faster in the provinces. Korolenko, Potapenko, Mamin, Ertel are all wonderful people. They may bore you a bit at first, but you'll get used to them in a year or two and come to value them as they deserve, and their company will more than make up for the discomforts and inconveniences of life in the capital.

I'm off to the post office. Keep well and happy. I clasp your hand. Thank you once again for your letter.

Yours,

A. Chekhov

i. Alexei Peshkov (1868-1936), whose last name suggests the Russian word for "pawn," chose Maxim Gorky ("Max the Bitter") as his pen name when he became a writer. The Concise Literary Encyclopedia (Moscow, 1964) tells us that he is "the founder of the literature of socialist realism and the progenitor of Soviet literature." He traveled a long and convoluted road be­fore he attained that eminence. Of middle-class origin, self-educated, Gorky worked as a stevedore and baker and tramped all over Russia before he made his debut as a journalist and short-story writer at the age of twenty-four. He became a protege of Vladimir Korolenko, whose friendship gained him entry into important literary journals. Gorky's early stories about vagabonds and romantic outsiders, who are rejected by a society they despise, brought to Russian literature a dimension that neither Tolstoy nor Chekhov had: genuine flamboyance. These stories combined social criticism with a Nietzschean note of contempt for the common herd (the young Gorky's Nietzscheanism has been declared a bourgeois invention and a heresy by

Soviet literary historians, but it is obvious and well documented). As Gorky wrote to a Ukrainian worker who aspired to become a poet: "The public is a herd of cattle and it is our enemy. Smash it in the face, in the heart, on its noggin! Smash it with strong, hard words! Let it feel pain, let it feel discom­fort!" (Gorky's letter to A. Shablenko, written at the end of 1900.)

Such sentiments found a warm response in the hearts of the Russian liberal intelligentsia and the educated members of the merchant class, whose guilty and masochistic frame of mind can be very easily imagined in the America of the 1970s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn caught the very essence of the Gorky cult in pre-revolutionary Russia when he made Gorky the favorite writer of the educated peasant-born millionaire Roman Tomchak in August 1914: "Roman loudly praised his books and plays everywhere. He found in him his own trait: never fawn on those who favor you. Roman was thrilled by the insolence with which Gorky lashed out at and poured bilious acid over the kingpins of commerce and industry, who applauded him delightedly—so full-flavored, so biting, so new." The still-powerful Nikolai Mikhailovsky threw all his prestige into asserting Gorky's reputation and succeeded better than in his attempts to wreck Chekhov's. By 1899, Gorky was a friend and correspondent of Tolstoy and Chekhov and a living legend throughout Russia. A carefully projected personal image of an uneducated laborer, expressed in clothes, demeanor and speech mannerisms, lent Gorky an aura of "the man of the people"; the tsarist government cooperated in making him a celebrity and a martyr by subjecting him periodically to brief but well- publicized arrests, expelling him from various cities on trivial pretexts and keeping him under constant all-too-visible police surveillance.

It was during his friendship with Chekhov that Gorky wrote his best early works: the novel Foma Gordeyev and the plays The Philistines and Lower Depths. The production of the latter by Stanislavsky in Moscow and by Max Reinhardt in Berlin made Gorky as famous as Tolstoy in the West. In the first few years of the twentieth century his work was translated into many languages. By 1902 there was a book in English about his life and work; by 1905 there was one in French (there were only a handful of Chekhov's stories available in English and in French at the time and not a single play; surveys of the Russian literary scene in American, British and French magazines were likely to assign Chekhov fourth place in their list of Tolstoy's younger successors, after Gorky, Korolenko and Potapenko). This enormous and not fully deserved celebrity of Gorky in the West (comparable to Yevgeny Yevtushenko's fame in our own day, which is likewise not based on literary significance or excellence) delayed the realization of Chekhov's importance in other countries for several decades and it entirely screened from Western view the genuine literary brilliance of the exciting Symbolist period in Russian literature, which took place in the early years of the twentieth century.

By the time of Chekhov's death, Gorky was deeply involved in politics and in revolutionary activities.» He became a member of the Bolshevik party in 1905, raised funds for it, but frequently dissented from its aims and policies in pre-revolutionary years. His propagandistic novels and plays that date from that period enjoyed a great popular success, but they are inferior to his earlier and later work—not because of their political or revolutionary content, but because their melodramatic plots, cardboard exploiters and saintly factory workers who spout pseudo-philosophical pseudo-profundities are so obviously shoddy when compared to what Gorky could do when he was at his best. These are the very works, however (e.g., the novel The Mother and the play The Enemies) that are extolled in Soviet criticism as the fountainhead of the Socialist-Realist method in literature. Gorky's novel The Confession (1908), which suggested that there might be a religious and mystical dimension in the coming Revolution, resulted in a serious ideological clash with Lenin.

In the years immediately preceding the Revolution, Gorky was the center of an artistic coterie that included the composer Sergei Rachmaninov, the basso Fyodor Chaliapin and the writer Ivan Bunin, which was dedicated to the preservation of nineteenth-century forms and traditions and was opposed to the innovative trends represented by Symbolism and Futurism in literature and Cubism in the visual arts. Genuinely revolutionary innovators, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, no longer took Gorky seriously as a literary artist. In 1916, with the writing of the first part of his autobiographical trilogy, Gorky's literary output took a retrospective turn, which resulted in some of the finest things he ever wrote—the autobiographi­cal trilogy and his series of literary portraits of various writers.

Gorky was still a Bolshevik party member at the time of the October Revolution, but he was as outraged as Korolenko by its betrayal of all the professed aims of the Russian revolutionary movement and by its crushing of what civil liberties did exist. He remained in Russia for some three years after the Revolution, using his political influence and connections to protect various writers from government persecution and to fight for the preservation of the Russian classical literary heritage, which post-revolutionary proletarian literary groups were eager to discard altogether. In 1921, Gorky went into voluntary exile with the encouragement of Lenin, who came to regard as an acute embarrassment Gorky's presence and his constant criticism of govern­ment practices (expressed in a series of newspaper essays that were collected later in the book Untimely Thoughts and in other similar writings, all of which are today banned in the Soviet Union). An interesting and revealing portrait of Gorky in exile is to be found in Nina Berberova's recent book The Italics Are Mine (New York, 1969).

The death of Lenin, to whom he had been personally attached, put Gorky through an emotional crisis and reconciled him to Soviet realities. After a few exploratory visits in the late 1920s, he returned to Russia permanently in 1931. The same Gorky who as a young man declared freedom to be the highest value in human life, whose very name symbolized liberation to count­less young Russians at the turn of the century, now lent the prestige of his name to consolidating Stalin's regime and helped formulate the restrictive, oppressive and entirely artificial doctrine of Socialist Realism, which is still officially the only possible mode of expression any Soviet writer may use. For all this Stalin rewarded Gorky in a way that no other government ever rewarded a writer. He was deified.

While Gorky was still alive, the major and ancient Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod was renamed Gorky. So were countless schools, universities, research institutes and theaters. The Moscow Art Theater, which owed its first success and its international reputation to its productions of Chekhov's plays, is known today as the Gorky Moscow Art Theater. Gorky's profile appears on the masthead of the Literary Gazette, next to Pushkin's and below Lenin's, the three presumably representing the greatest literary figures Russia ever produced. "Gorky is the founder of Socialist Realism" a young govern­ment official reminds a literary lady in Chapter 56 of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, which takes place in December of 1949. "To cast doubt on Gorky is as criminal, you know, as to doubt . . ." The name that the young man dares not pronounce is of course that of Stalin. Solzhenitsyn's brief evocation of Gorky's name in this novel and similar references to him in Solzhenitsyn's other novels and stories invariably cut to the very heart of the matter and reflect what must have been decades of meditation over the causes and re­sults of the Gorky cult both before and after the Revolution.

It has been possible to doubt the wisdom of Stalin in the Soviet Union during the last few decades, but anyone who dared question the artistic value of Gorky's work today would be in major trouble with the authorities. A government-decreed campaign of critical acclaim, begun in the thirties and continuing to this day, assigns to Gorky a wide-ranging influence on other writers and other literatures which he in fact never exercised and an in­novative originality he never possessed. It is partly as a result of this cam­paign that the true and dazzling innovators of twentieth-century Russian literature, such as Alexei Remizov, Fyodor Sologub and Andrei Belyi are forgotten in Russia and unknown abroad.

Gorky died in 1936 under mysterious and still unexplained circumstances. The persistent avoidance of the subject of his death by his Soviet biographers lends credence to the supposition that he was poisoned on Stalin's orders to make sure he did not cause any embarrassment during the show trials of the old Bolsheviks which Stalin was then preparing.

The correspondence between Chekhov and Gorky was initiated by the latter, when he sent Chekhov an adoring letter in October or November of 1898, couched in that same "aw-shucks-I'm-just-a-simple-boy" tone and diction that he affected in his letters to Tolstoy and Anatoly Koni (but not in his letters to his wife or personal friends). Chekhov's reply began an exchange that went on intermittently until his death. The most fascinating thing about their correspondence is the way each of the two recasts the other in his own mold. Chekhov keeps seeing a subtle and poetic Gorky that never existed and Gorky keeps telling Chekhov how brutal his writing manner is and what a powerful indictment of society he has managed to write. Gorky loved and admired Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, but it would be hard to misunderstand and to misinterpret these two plays more than he did.

This is why the Chekhov we meet in Gorky's oft-translated and oft-quoted memoir of him lacks the verisimilitude of the Chekhov memoirs by such lesser writers as Ignaty Potapenko and Alexander Serebrov. Gorky's other literary portraits are masterful. His memoir of Lev Tolstoy is probably the finest single literary portrait of this complex, towering writer that we have. Gorky's memoir of Alexander Blok testifies to his ability to get into a mind totally alien to his own and take his readers along with him. But Gorky's portrait of Chekhov is refracted through the prism of his wishful thinking. The Chekhov we meet there is the kind of Chekhov Gorky wanted to exist and the kind he could have loved, rather than the Chekhov who actually lived and whom we know from his stories, plays and letters.

Most scholars assume that Uncle Vanya was written at the end of 1896. Chekhov's statement that he wrote it "a very long time ago" gives some support to Nina Gitovich's theory that it was written shortly after The Wood Demon. But the statement may also represent Chekhov's excuse for refusing to discuss this play with Gorky or to answer his questions about it, since he so clearly failed to understand it (see note 3 below).

Chekhov is replying to the ecstatically enthusiastic letter Gorky wrote him after seeing the Nizhny Novgorod production of Uncle Vanya. Gorky wrote that "Uncle Vanya is a completely new species of dramatic art, it is a hammer with which you pound on the public's empty heads." Gorky went on to compare the powerful effect produced by Uncle Vanya to a pig that he once saw destroy a flowerbed; he doubted that such brutal attacks on public sensibilities could lead to practical results, such as awakening the Russian public from its torpor. Gorky also praised Chekhov for what he thought was his indifference to human suffering: "You know, I feel that in this play you are colder than the devil to human beings. You are as indifferent toward them as snow, as a blizzard." This was precisely the point about Chekhov that Nikolai Mikhailovsky had been making repeatedly for the past twelve years, much to Chekhov's disgust; but where Mikhailovsky thought it a shortcoming, Gorky is offering praise. Small wonder that Chekhov preferred to thank Gorky curtly for liking his play and to change the subject by passing on to a discussion of Gorky's own stories.

In the original, this is a quotation from Ivan Krylov's fable "The Jackass and the Nightingale," in which the jackass advises a singing nightingale to take some lessons from the barnyard rooster in order to get professional polish.

117. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)

Yalta, January 3, 1899

Dear Alexei Maximovich,

This is a reply to both your letters.¹ First of all, Happy New Year. From the bottom of my heart I wish you happiness—new happiness or old, as you like.

Apparently you didn't quite understand me. I said nothing about crudity.² I only said that certain foreign words—words without Russian roots—or rarely used words seemed out of place. With other authors words like "fatalistically" go by unnoticed, but your stories are musical and well proportioned and every little rough spot cries bloody murder. All this, of course, is a matter of taste, and maybe it's merely excessive irritability on my part, the conservatism of a man who has long since formed certain set habits. I can reconcile myself to "collegiate assessor" and "captain second class" in descriptions, but "flirtation" and "cham­pion"³ (when used in descriptions) repel me.

So you're an autodidact.⁴ In your stories you're an artist through and through and a genuinely intellectual one at that. The crudity you spoke of is what characterizes you the least. You are intelligent and extremely sensitive. Your best works are "In the Steppe" and "On the Rafts," or have I already written you that? They are excellent stories, exemplary stories. They show an artist who has gone through a very good school. I don't think I'm mistaken. Your only fault is your lack of restraint and lack of grace. When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace. You tend to expend too much.

Your nature descriptions are artistic; you are a true landscape painter. But your frequent personifications (anthropomorphism), when the sea breathes, the sky looks on, the steppe basks, nature whispers, talks, grieves, etc.—these personifications make your descriptions a bit monotonous, sometimes cloying and sometimes unclear. Color and expressivity in nature descriptions are achieved through simplicity alone, through simple phrases like "the sun set," "it grew dark," "it began to rain," etc., and this simplicity is more characteristic of you than of most any writer.

I didn't like the first volume of the recently renovated Life.⁵ It can't be taken seriously. Chirikov's story is naive and dishonest. Veresayev's story is a crude imitation of something or other, possibly of the husband in your "Orlov and His Wife." It is crude and naive as well. That type of story won't get him very far. Your "Kirilka" is ruined by the figure of the land captain; the general tone is well sustained throughout. Don't ever write about land captains. There's nothing easier than writing about disagreeable men in power, readers love it, but only the most un­pleasant, untalented sort of readers.⁶ I have the same aversion to char­acters of the latest vintage (such as land captains) that I have for "flirtation" and therefore I may be wrong. But I live in the country, I know all the land captains of my own and the neighboring districts, I've known them for years and I find that they and their activities are com­pletely atypical, entirely uninteresting, and I think I'm right about that.

And now a word about vagabondage.⁷ Vagabondage is all well and good and quite alluring, but as the years go by, you lose mobility and become attached to one spot. And the literary profession has a way of sucking you in. Failures and disappointments make time go by so fast that you fail to notice your real life, and the past when I was so free seems to belong to someone else, not myself.

The mail has come. I have to read my letters and newspapers. Keep well and happy. Thank you for your letters and for seeing that our correspondence is now on a firm footing.

I clasp your hand.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Gorky's letters to Chekhov of ca. December 6 and December 29 (or 30), 1898.

In the first of his two letters, Gorky thanked Chekhov for advising him against using pretentious words and said that he was led to use them by his fear of appearing crude.

Both here and in his previous letter, Chekhov is objecting to Gorky's use of foreign loan words, which were acceptable Russian words at the time but clashed stylistically with the speech of Gorky's characters. A modern equivalent would be to use such words as "Zeitgeist" and "discotheque" in a story that described the life of sharecroppers.

In the first of his two letters, Gorky wrote: "I am a thirty-year-old auto- didact. I don't expect to become better than I am; may God help me stay on the rung I have attained—it is not a high one but it is good enough for me. In general, I'm not a very interesting figure."

The journal Life was taken over by Vladimir Posse (see Letter 132) at the end of 1898 and turned by him into the literary organ of the Russian "legal" Marxists (i.e., those Marxists who had hoped to bring about a Marxist form of government in Russia by nonviolent means). Gorky became a lead­ing contributor to that journal; he and its other contributors later formed the nucleus of Gorky's literary group "Knowledge" (Znanie), which opposed the innovative and experimental trends in Russian literature in the first decade of the twentieth century. Yevgeny Chirikov and Vikenty Veresayev, mentioned in this letter, were later associated with the "Knowledge" group.

If there ever was a wasted piece of literary advice, this is it. Gorky's greatest successes and some of his most admired works were portrayals of "unpleasant men in power." His role as the progenitor of Socialist Realism is derived from his demonstration of class origins and of the biologically determined inevitability of the villainy of such men under the conditions of capitalism.

Gorky rejected Chekhov's suggestion that he move to one of the capitals. He wrote: "I do not like big cities and before I got into literature, I was a vagabond."

118. To Ivan Orlov¹

Yalta,

February 22, 1899

Greetings, dear Ivan Ivanovich,

Your friend Krutovsky² came to see me, and we talked about the French and about Panama, but I didn't get to introduce him to my circle of Yalta friends because when he'd finished talking about politics he went off to see the Hurdy-Gurdies.³ That was yesterday, and today he's in Gurzuf.

I've sold Marx everything—my past and future—and I've become a Marxist for the rest of my life.⁴ For every three hundred twenty pages of prose already published I will receive five thousand from him. In five years I'll get seven thousand, etc., and every five years I'll be getting a raise, so when I'm ninety-five I'll be earning barrels of money. I'm getting seventy-five thousand for my past. I managed to haggle out of him the income from the plays for myself and my heirs. But nonetheless, alas, I still have a long way to go to catch up with Vanderbilt. Twenty-five thousand is already down the drain,⁵ and the other fifty thousand will be spread out over a period of two years, so I can really live it up.

There's no news in particular. I'm writing very little. Next season my play will be staged at the Maly Theater,⁶ its first performance in either Petersburg or Moscow, so I'll obviously be getting a few extra pennies. My house in Autka has failed to get under way as yet because of the damp weather we've been having throughout most of January and February. I'll have to leave before it's completely built. My Kuchukoy vanilla (as Pastukhov, editor of the Moscow Press, calls the villa)⁷ is enchanting, but nearly inaccessible. I'm dreaming of building an in­expensive cottage there, European style, so I can spend time there in the winter too. The present two-story cottage is suitable for summer living only.

My telegram about Devil's Island was not meant to be published; it was a completely private telegram. It has caused a great deal of indignant grumbling here in Yalta.⁸ Kondakov,⁹ who is a member of the Academy and one of the local oldtimers, said to me, "I'm hurt and annoyed."

"What do you mean?" I asked in amazement.

"I'm hurt and annoyed that I wasn't the one who had that tele­gram put in the papers."

And, in fact, Yalta in the winter is a pill not everyone can swal­low: the boredom of it all, and the gossip, intrigues, and most shameless slander. Altschuller¹⁰ is having a tough time getting adjusted. Our dear Yalta residents are gossiping about him something ferocious.

You cite the Scriptures in your letter. Let me likewise cite a pas­sage from the Scriptures in reply to your complaints about the governor¹¹ and your various setbacks: place not your hope in princes nor the sons of man. . . .¹² And let me remind you of another expression that has to do with the sons of man, the very ones who are so holding you back: the sons of our age. The governor is not at fault, no sir, it's the whole intelligentsia, all of it. As long as our boys and girls are still students, they're honest and good, they're our hope, they're Russia's future; but as soon as those students have to stand on their own and grow up, our hope and Russia's future goes up in smoke, and all that's left on the filter is cottage-owning doctors, rapacious public officials, and thieving engineers. Keep in mind that Katkov, Pobedonostsev and Vyshnegradsky¹³ are all university graduates, they are our professors, they are not old fogies, but professors and guiding lights. ... I have no faith in our intelligentsia; it is hypocritical, dishonest, hysterical, ill-bred and lazy. I have no faith in it even when it suffers and complains, for its op­pressors emerge from its own midst. I have faith in individuals, I see salvation in individuals scattered here and there, all over Russia, be they intellectuals or peasants, for they're the ones who really matter, though they are few. No man is a prophet in his own country,¹⁴ and the individuals I've been talking about play an inconspicuous role in society. They do not dominate, yet their work is visible.¹⁵ Think what you will, but science is inexorably moving forward, social consciousness is on the increase, moral issues are beginning to take on a more disturb­ing character, etc., etc., and all this is going on independently of the intelligentsia en masse, in spite of everything.

How is Witte? Kovreyn is here. He is comfortably settled. Koltsov is feeling a bit better.¹⁶1 clasp your hand. Keep well, happy and cheerful. Write!!

Yours, A. Chekhov

Dr. Ivan Orlov was a zemstvo physician in a district that adjoined the Serpukhov zemstvo where Chekhov had been active throughout his stay at Melikhovo. He and Chekhov began a lively correspondence after Chekhov moved to Yalta.

The horticulturist Vsevolod Krutovsky came to Yalta with a letter of introduction from Dr. Orlov, addressed to Chekhov. In his letter, Orlov asked Chekhov to introduce Krutovsky into the circle of his Yalta friends.

This was Chekhov's nickname for the wife and sister-in-law of the writer Sergei Yelpatyevsky, who were Chekhov's Yalta neighbors. The nick­name is a pun on the Russian word for hurdy-gurdy (sharmanka) and the French adjective charmante.

4. Suvorin's failure to take a serious interest in Chekhov's project to publish a complete collected edition of his works made Chekhov receptive to the offer he received at the beginning of 1899 from the German-Russian publisher Adolf Marx to purchase the rights to his already published writings and to bring them out in one multivolume edition. Marx owned the most popular illustrated magazine in Russia, The Cornfield, and his publishing house rivaled Suvorin's in bringing out reasonably priced editions of major Russian writers. The negotiations between Marx and Chekhov were carried out by Pyotr Sergeyenko, Chekhov's one-time acquaintance from his Taganrog school days and now a disciple and factotum of Tolstoy; but the initiative for the entire transaction came from Tolstoy himself. Tolstoy considered Chekhov a moral, edifying writer, and he believed that Marx's inexpensive editions would make Chekhov's stories easily available to large masses of Russian people. Tolstoy was not concerned with the financial aspects of the arrange­ment, and when he urged Chekhov to accept Marx's terms it apparently never occurred to him what this would do to Chekhov's financial situation.

For seventy-five thousand rubles Chekhov sold Marx all rights in perpetuity to everything he had written up to 1899—both the widely popular early humorous stories and the great stories of his maturity, which were read and discussed with ever greater avidity throughout Russia. The future prof­its, which Chekhov enumerates in such sanguine tone in this letter, were to apply only to Chekhov's future fiction, works which Marx was to include in later editions after Chekhov had published them for a fee in periodicals. But, as Chekhov was to write only eight more stories between the time the contract was signed and the time of his death, this part of the contract turned out to be meaningless. By selling his lifetime's work to Marx, Chekhov in effect cut himself off from his most important source of earnings. Marx had originally insisted on getting all the rights to Chekhov's plays as well, but fortunately Chekhov held out and reserved the rights to the plays for himself and for his heirs after his death and thus saved himself and his family from certain penury.

The seventy-five thousand which Marx agreed to pay Chekhov came in three installments spread over a two-year period. The first installment was spent immediately to pay the debts that Chekhov had incurred in connection with his illness and the need to live abroad. The other two installments barely covered the expenses of building Chekhov's Autka home and relocating his mother and sister to the Crimea. The terms of the contract also required Chekhov to provide Marx with copies of all his early humorous stories. This necessitated many months of research in order to find the hundreds of little stories and sketches that Chekhov had published in his youth in dozens of ephemeral humor magazines^ that had become bibliographical rarities. Chekhov did a part of this work himself, and he was also obliged to hire researchers in Moscow and St. Petersburg, among them Lydia Avilova. Be­cause Chekhov was dissatisfied with the stylistic aspects of some of his early work, he embarked on an extensive project of editing much of his early output. The research and editing that Chekhov had to do without any extra pay as a result of his deal with Marx can be said to have robbed him of something like two years of creative writing. As for Marx, he recouped more than twice his initial investment after the very first printing of his edition of Chekhov's collected works. During the next five years (by an irony of fate Chekhov and Marx both died the same year), numerous subsequent printings kept increasing Marx's already considerable fortune by hundreds of thousands of rubles without bringing Chekhov a penny.

Even before the contract was signed, people close to Chekhov advised him against it. Maria Chekhova, who usually bowed to her brother's judg­ment, strongly urged him not to sign and so did Alexei Suvorin, who wired Chekhov an offer of a twenty-thousand-ruble loan in an effort to save him from selling Marx "his past and future." But Tolstoy's intervention and urging were decisive and Chekhov signed the contract despite the warnings of others and his own misgivings. In the next two years, Maxim Gorky re­peatedly urged him to break the contract or to change its terms. In 1903 a large group of writers and lawyers, including Bunin, Gorky and Leonid Andreyev, drafted a petition addressed to Marx that urged him to release Chekhov from his contract and to restore to him the rights to his own life's work; but Chekhov found out about the petition and asked that it not be submitted to Marx since he could see no valid reason for backing out of an agreement into which he had entered of his own free will and in full aware­ness of its consequences.

Chekhov uses a bit of Russian baby talk at this point to describe the quick disappearance of the money. The expression, tyu-tyu, means "vanished" or "quickly disappeared" in baby talk (and not "already on hand" as the translator of the Lillian Hellman edition wrongly guessed).

Chekhov had still hoped to get Uncle Vanya staged at the Maly, rather than at the Moscow Art Theater.

This pun involving gastronomy and realty replaces an analogous one in the original (mayonez and mayorat).

In response to Nemirovich-Danchenko's telegram about the triumphant opening of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theater on December 17, 1898, Chekhov wired back: "Convey to everyone my heartfelt gratitude. Am stuck in Yalta like Dreyfus on Devil's Island. Regret I'm not with you. Your tele­gram made me healthy and happy." Nemirovich published this telegram two days later in the newspaper News of the Day.

On Nikodim Kondakov, see Letter 119.

Dr. Isaak Altschuller, Chekhov's doctor in Yalta and his close personal friend. Altschuller's two memoirs of Chekhov are important sources for un­derstanding the depth of Chekhov's commitment to medicine and to the biological sciences.

Orlov's letter, which Chekhov is here answering, described an attempt by a group of physicians from Orlov's zemstvo to organize a society dedicated to improving the sanitary and economic conditions of the local populace. The project was submitted to the local governor, who passed it on to the Ministry of the Interior, where the entire undertaking was prohibited. Orlov suspected that the veto was the governor's idea and wrote: "Oh, how much we could get done, if we only had a little bit of freedom."

The citation of Psalm 146 that we already saw in Chekhov's letter to Korolenko (see Letter 16, note 4) is again garbled.

A trio of repressive and reactionary political thinkers. On Mikhail Katkov, see Letter 14, note 5. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, was mentioned in Letter 101, in connection with his persecution of Tolstoy's followers. Ivan Vyshnegradsky was at that time the Minister of Finance.

Quoted by Chekhov in the Russianized Church Slavic of the Russian Bible; the wording used is closer to Matthew 13:57 and Mark 6:4 than to the analogous passages in Luke 4:24 and John 4:44.

This idea about the civilizing role of cultivated individuals was later to be expressed with greater eloquence in Vershinin's speech on the same subject in the first act of Three Sisters.

On Witte and Kovreyn, see Letter 114, note 6. Koltsov was a Yalta physician.

119. To Alexei Suvorin

Yalta, March 4, 1899

Professor Kondakov¹ and I are staging the monastery scene from Boris Godunov as a benefit for the Pushkin School. Pimen will be played by Kondakov himself. Could you do me a great favor and for the holy cause of art write to Feodosia and have them send me the gong you have hanging there, the Chinese gong? We need it for the church bells. I'll return it to you safely. If you can't, write me quickly. In that case well have to bang a washbasin.

That's not all. I have favors, favors and more favors to ask of you. If photographs or any kind of reproductions of Vasnetsov's² latest paintings are available, please have them sent to me C.O.D. Here as everywhere there is much talk about the student disturbances and much clamor over the newspapers lack of coverage.³ According to the letters people have been receiving from Petersburg, general sentiment is in the students' favor. Your columns on the disturbances were unsatisfactory, and could not be otherwise, because no one can pass judgment in print on the disturbances when all mention of the facts is prohibited.⁴ The state forbade you to write, it forbids the truth to be told, that is arbitrary rule, and you talk lightheartedly about the rights and prerogatives of the state in connection with this arbitrary rule. The mind refuses to ac­cept this combination as logical. You talk about the rights of the state, but you're disregarding what is legal. Rights and justice are the same for the state as for any juridical person. If the state wrongfully alienates a piece of my land, I can bring an action against it and the court will re-establish my right to that land. Shouldn't the same rules apply when the state beats me with a riding crop? Shouldn't I raise a hue and cry over my violated rights if it commits violence upon me? The concept of the state should be founded on definite legal relationships. If it is not, it is a bogeyman, an empty sound that produces an imaginary fright.

Sluchevsky has written me about the Pushkin miscellany, and I have answered. I don't know why, but I somehow feel sorry for him at times.⁵ Have you read Michel Deline's open letter? I saw him several times in Nice; he used to come visit me. He is a Deroulede despite his Judaism.⁶

I've been invited to go to Paris, but we're starting to have good weather here as well. Are you coming? Come toward the end of Lent and we'll go back together. If there's no way of my getting the gong, send me a telegram. Our performance is the week after next. Greetings to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya and Borya. Keep well and happy.

Yours,

A. Chekhov

i. Professor Nikodim Kondakov (1844-1925) was a famous and highly influential scholar of remarkable versatility. Historian, archeologist and the­ologian, he left his mark primarily on the study of Russian icon painting, the artistic value of which he was one of the first to assert (see Letter 142). Of serf origin, he had risen very high in the Russian academic hierarchy by the time he and Chekhov became friends in Yalta. A selection of Kondakov's letters to Chekhov, dealing for the most part with the crisis at the Imperial Academy caused by the annulment of Gorky's election (see Letters 153, 154 and 158), was published in the Bulletin of the Language and Literature Sec­tion of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences Publications, Volume 19, Number 1, Moscow, i960. After the Revolution, Kondakov moved to Prague, where he taught at Charles University and was the founder of an important institute devoted to Byzantine studies (Seminarium Kondakovianum); there he trained a whole generation of eminent Byzantine historians, who were subsequently active in various Western countries.

Chekhov took the amateur performance of Pushkin's tragedy, in which Professor Kondakov was to play the old chronicler Pimen, quite seriously and tried to invite several professional actor friends to come from Moscow and participate in it.

The painter Viktor Vasnetsov was having a particularly successful ex­hibit at the Art Academy in St. Petersburg at the time.

Student disturbances at Russian universities were a more or less con­stant occurrence throughout Chekhov's adult life. He ignored them during his own university years and he showed no particular sympathy toward the student strike he described in the letter he wrote to Suvorin on the eve of his departure for Sakhalin (Letter 41). However, the wave of student unrest that swept the entire country in February and March of 1899 attracted Chek­hov's interest and engaged his sympathy both because of the government's brutality in putting it down and because a number of sons and daughters of his personal friends were among the striking students.

It all began at the University of St. Petersburg on February 8, when a group of students who were celebrating the university anniversary was dis­persed by mounted police, who attacked them with riding crops. A protest strike was called by the students and suppressed by the police so brutally that sympathy strikes were called in numerous other Russian universities, including such traditionally nonradicalized establishments as teachers' col­leges, religious seminaries and the Naval Academy. Chekhov was informed of the progress of the student strike in St. Petersburg through a series of detailed letters from his brother Alexander. Like the majority of the Russian intelligentsia, Alexander Chekhov sympathized with the students' situation, and he had a hard time reconciling his feelings with the anti-strike position taken, predictably enough, by his employer, New Times. Early in March, a total news blackout on the events connected with the strike was imposed on the Russian press by the government. On March 17, both the Moscow and St. Petersburg universities were temporarily closed and the buildings were occupied by the police. To resume their studies, students were required to supply evidence of their political reliability, and those who refused were dismissed.

In his widely read column, Suvorin praised the government for its handling of the strike and complimented Nicholas II for his wisdom in appointing a commission to investigate the causes of the student unrest.

The poet Konstantin Sluchevsky (1837-1904), a sort of Russian Swin­burne, was indeed one of the most pitiable casualties of the radical-utilitarian dictatorship in Russian criticism. As an aristocratic young army officer, he published a few fantastic and mystical poems in one of the leading journals in 1859. A war of literary annihilation was declared against Sluchevsky by the Chernyshevsky circle for daring to treat such irrelevant themes, and during the next year the press campaign against him was conducted in such a slanderous manner that he was forced to resign his army commission and go into exile abroad. Turgenev, who was a friend and admirer of Sluchevsky, did not dare to speak in his defense. A poet of genuine talent and imagina­tion, greatly admired by Dostoyevsky, Sluchevsky was not able to get a single poem published anywhere in Russia for the next two decades. He resumed publication in the eighties and he lived long enough to see Symbolist poets such as Valery Bryusov and Konstantin Balmont publish and receive praise for the kind of poems for which he had once been crucified. The Symbolists recognized him as their precursor, but he never really matured as a poet and never became the important writer he could have been had the leading literary critics in his homeland not rejected him with such brutality.

6. Michel Deline was the pen name of a Russian Jew named Mikhail Ashkenazi, who lived in France and Switzerland, where he worked as a journalist and published novels and books on Russian literature in French. He was repeatedly attacked by New Times, which accused him of hating the Russian people and of having been bribed by the sinister Jewish syndicate to whitewash Dreyfus. Deline defended himself in an open letter addressed to Suvorin, which New Times refused to print but which appeared in two other Russian newspapers and in the literary journal Life, where it was ac­companied by an open letter to Suvorin by Maxim Gorky, who compared Suvorin's pro-reform position in the sixties with his present siding with the government against the striking students. The last two of the numbered paragraphs of Deline's letter, quoted below, were of personal concern to Chekhov:

It is not my attitude toward the Dreyfus case that is disgraceful, but yours. I would like to refer you to a man you love and respect, if indeed you are capable of love and respect. I would like to refer you to that sensitive literary artist Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. He was in France during Zola's trial. Ask him what he thinks of the culpability of Dreyfus and about the vile tricks to which Esterhazy's defenders resorted. Ask him what he thinks about your attitude toward this case and about the Jewish problem in general. Neither you nor New Times will look very good after you learn his opinion.

In conclusion, I will make you an offer, Mr. Suvorin: let us ask the great writer of the Russian land Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy to^be our judge. You will tell him the story of your life and I'll tell him mine and he will then say which of us loves the Russian people more—you, the publisher of a major newspaper which never ceases sowing racial hatred, anti-Semitism, Anglophobia, hatred for the Finns, the Ar­menians, and contempt for the good—or I, a contributor to French and Russian newspapers, who never wrote a single line directed against the truly Christian principle of brotherly love, truth and peacemaking.

Chekhov had met Deline in Nice through Alexandra Khotyaintseva the previous year. He must have expressed some opinions in Deline's presence which were not meant for publication. When he read the open letter in the newspaper The Courier, he became quite angry and wrote to his sister: "They've printed the letter of that charlatan Deline, a vile letter, in which Deline tries to prove what a scoundrel and bastard Suvorin is and quotes my opinion as evidence. Damn it all, this is an unprecedented piece of tactless­ness" (Letter of March 2, 1899). The same anger made Chekhov compare Deline to the French rightist leader Paul Deroulede in the present letter. At a time when Suvorin was going through the worst crisis of his life and was being attacked by everyone and from all sides, Chekhov felt he simply could not add his voice to the general chorus, no matter how much he came to despise Suvorin's paper and to disagree with his views (see Letters 122 and 123).

120. To Ivan Orlov

Yalta, March 18, 1899

Dear Ivan Ivanovich,

Altschuller has probably written you by now—Koltsov¹ died, and we buried him on a warm, clear day in the Autka cemetery.

Spring has already come to Yalta. Everything is verdant and in bloom, and there are new faces along the embankment. Mirolyubov² and Gorky are coming today, the season is about to begin, and in two or two and a half weeks I'll be merrily on my way north to be closer to you. My house is all set, but my muse is upset:³ I'm not doing any writing and I have no desire to work. I need to breathe another sort of air; I feel so indolent here in the south! I'm in bad spirits most of the time; it's the letters my friends and acquaintances send me. My letters keep having to console people or lecture them or snarl like fighting dogs. I get many letters about the student events—from students and adults.⁴ I even got three letters from Suvorin. What's more, I have visits from students who have been expelled. The way I see it, the adults, that is the fathers and men in power, have made an awful blunder; they've acted the way the Turkish pashas acted with the Young Turks and Sufis, and for once public opinion has very eloquently proven that Russia, thank God, is no longer Turkey. I'll show you some of the letters when we get together.⁵ But now let's talk about you. How have you been? Are you thinking of coming to Yalta? When? Will I find you in Podsolnechnoe this summer if I go there?

In my opinion Koltsov died of embolism. Shortly before his death he had a pulmonary infarction. He probably had endocarditis, but what could have caused it? I didn't ask the doctors who treated him. I heard in passing that they'd found a large quantity of albumen. Apparently the man was utterly exhausted from his numerous troubles and died as a result.

Altschuller is well, but moping. The Most Reverent Elpatius⁶ is erecting a building and strutting around energetically. He is cheerful, indefatigable and witty. I've been spending less time at the girls' school.⁷ Everything is fine there; they are as hospitable and nice as ever. Sinani is the same as always.

I firmly clasp your hand. Keep well and cheerful, and have a good appetite, don't be ill or bored, and most important of all—come visit us every year.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Dr. A. I. Koltsov, a friend and associate of Dr. Orlov, who was mentioned in Chekhov's previous letter to him.

Viktor Mirolyubov was an opera singer and a journalist. Because of incipient tuberculosis, he had to abandon his musical career and move to Yalta. He became the publisher of the monthly Everyone's Magazine, in which some of Chekhov's last stories were published. Mirolyubov frequently ac­companied Chekhov on his strolls around Yalta, where he was known, be­cause of his gigantic build, as the "pyramidal water buffalo."

This reproduces the equally feeble pun in the original.

The letters that Alexander Chekhov wrote from St. Petersburg to his brother in Yalta in February and March of 1899 contain detailed, specific and highly knowledgeable accounts of the student strike's progress. Alexander had contacts in the press and at the university and he also had a reliable in­formant at the imperial court, thanks to whom he relayed to Anton the reactions and attitudes of Nicholas II, of his ministers and of the Dowager Empress. The letters that Chekhov received about this event from various other quarters are described, analyzed and quoted at length in A. N. Dubov- nikov's article "Letters Written to Chekhov About the Student Movement of ¹899-1902," which appeared in Literary Heritage, Volume 68, i960. The following excerpt from a student's letter to Chekhov is quoted at length from Dubovnikov's article both because it helps us understand Chekhov's frame of mind and because its tone and content are so unmistakably recognizable in our present-day America. The letter was written by Vukol Lavrov's student son Mikhail (who also preserved for posterity Chekhov's description of Mik- hailovsky as a sociologist who was deaf to literature). The letter was written one day after the universities were closed and occupied by the police in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Moscow, March 18, 1899 The strike at Moscow University began on Saturday the 13th. Everyone was expelled and is now signing statements of repentance. As soon as the university is reopened, the strike will resume, and this will keep up until the students' demands have been satisfied. Dis­turbances have also resumed in Petersburg. The students are happy: the authorities are in total confusion, a new form of struggle has been introduced, a new weapon has become available, and the Marxists are hailing the triumph of the implementation of a practical Marxist program. The facts are not yet known; the police break into student meetings and take down everybody's name, but an imperial edict proscribing intervention in academic affairs puts them in the position of a cat looking longingly at a sparrow. The general result is an un­holy mess. With the appearance of comic, trumped-up appeals from the rector, a spirit of mockery has been invading the university. Everyone is laughing heartily and without the slightest malice at the Moscow News. The general mood is gay and cheerful. Of course, the fathers are gloomy and, as always, judicious. There is no sign of sympathy on the part of society at large, nor is there any need for it; no one is asking for any. It's time to abandon the crutches of benevolent guardianship! It is time to set up a boundary between practical wisdom and faith in broad theories of the future. It is time to recognize the necessity of human sacrifice, for only by so doing can we live for the distant future, glorifying and idealizing those who sacrifice themselves. There are very few students with a clear under­standing of the full import of the present events, and you will find even fewer people outside the university who understand them. But that only serves to bolster our confidence, enthusiasm and sense of invincibility. This is a time when life is on its way to becoming pure pleasure. This is what the new age is like.

Orlov's reply to this letter expressed sympathy for the students' position and compared the spreading of student unrest to provincial schools and universities to a tidal wave. Orlov was especially concerned because his daughter was a student at the Bestuzhev courses in Moscow and had been expelled because of her participation in the strike.

The writer Yelpatyevsky.

Very soon after he settled in Yalta, Chekhov was nominated honorary superintendent of the local girls' school. He spent much time in the next few years helping out with school affairs and getting support for its projects.

121. To Georgy Chekhov¹

Yalta, March 26, 1899

Dear Georges,

I was all set to go to fhe ship to see you off when along came three numbskulls to invite me to a literary soiree. They sat around for a half hour, and by the time I got to the pier, your ship was gone.

How was your trip? Please write me all the details. After you left yesterday, I had guests who stayed all evening. Tonight I have to go to a meeting of the commission, and so I'm kept constantly on the run, like a squirrel on a treadmill.²

Let me know as soon as Iordanov³ gets back. I have some business with him.

Give my best to your mother, Sanya, Lyolya and Volodya.⁴ I clasp your hand. Keep well.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Chekhov's Taganrog cousin, the son of his Uncle Mitrofan. Cousin "Georges" had just departed after a three-day visit to Yalta.

This message on a postcard testifies to Chekhov's inability, despite his worsening physical condition, to curtail his civic and social activities. In the first three months of 1899, he was not only appointed honorary superinten­dent of the local girls' school, but he initiated a campaign to raise funds to help the victims of the recent famine in Samara Province, and was nomin­ated by the municipal administration to a commission for organizing the commemoration of the centenary of Pushkin's birth.

Pavel Iordanov was the mayor of Taganrog. Chekhov carried on an extensive correspondence with him that dealt mainly with the endowment of the Taganrog municipal library and other matters of a similar nature.

Sanya and Lyolya are Georgy Chekhov's sisters Alexandra and Yelena; Volodya is his brother Vladimir.

122. To Anna Suvorina¹

Yalta, March 29, 1899

Dear Anna Ivanovna,

If Petersburg weren't so far away and so cold, I'd go there and attempt to abduct Alexei Sergeyevich. I receive many letters and listen morning, noon and night to people talking, and I have some idea of what's happening to you both.² You accuse me of perfidy, you write that Alexei Sergeyevich is goodhearted and altruistic and that I am not responding in kind. But as a person who sincerely wishes him well, what else could I have done? Tell me. Today's mood did not materialize all of a sudden; it took shape over a period of many years. The things being said now were said long ago, everywhere, and you and Alexei Sergeyevich have been kept in ignorance of the truth much the way royalty is. I am not speculating; I am telling you what I know. New Times is going through a difficult period, but it has remained a force and will continue to remain a force. After some time has gone by, everything will go back

to normal, and nothing will have changed; everything will be as it was.

I am more interested in whether Alexei Sergeyevich should stay in Petersburg or leave, and I'd be very glad to hear that he'd drop every­thing for at least a week and leave. I've written him to that effect and asked him to wire me, but he hasn't sent me a word, and I don't know what to do with myself now—stay in Yalta and wait for him or go north. Come what may, I'll be off for Moscow by April ioth or 15th, and it seems to me that the best thing for Alexei Sergeyevich to do would be to go to Moscow for the holidays too. Spring can be beautiful in Moscow. The surrounding countryside is interesting, and there are many places to visit. I'll be writing Alexei Sergeyevich, but you have a talk with him too, and have him send me a wire.

Where will you be this summer? Where are you going? It's spring here, and my health is tolerable, but I'm bored, I'm tired of all this rigmarole.

How is Nastya? And Borya? Please give them my regards. I often think of them and superpraise them to everyone.

My sincere thanks for thinking of me and sending me a letter. Keep well and happy. I kiss your hand and wish you the very, very best.

Yours, A. Chekhov

1. Anna Suvorina was the second wife of Alexei Suvorin, the mother of his two youngest children, Anastasia and Boris (the Nastya and Borya to whom Chekhov so frequently sends his regards in his letters to Suvorin). There is an interesting portrait of her in Chekhov's letter to his sister of July 22, 1888, from the Crimea, in which he described his visit to Aivazovsky's estate:

There are a lot of women here; Suvorina is the best among them. She is every bit as original as her husband; her way of thinking is not feminine. She talks a great deal of nonsense, but when she wants to speak seriously, she says intelligent and independent things. She is enamored of Tolstoy and therefore cordially detests contemporary literature. When you discuss literature with her, you get the feeling that Korolenko, Bezhetsky, myself and all the rest of us are her per­sonal enemies. She has an extraordinary talent for chattering nonsense for hours on end, chattering with so much talent and inspiration that you can listen to her all day long without being bored, as you would to a canary. All in all, she is an interesting, intelligent and good person. . . .

This letter to Anna Suvorina appears in only one of the three Russian editions of Chekhov's letters, that of 1944-51. It was not available for publication at the time of Maria Chekhova's edition and it was omitted from the 1963-64 one, clearly because the warm solicitude for Suvorin that Chek­hov expresses in it is too much at odds with the annotators' picture of Chekhov's angry final break with Suvorin in 1898.

2. After the government imposed a total ban on all the news pertaining to the student strike, it was generally assumed throughout Russia that this had been done at Suvorin's request. We know now from Suvorin's published journals and from Alexander Chekhov's letters to his brother that this was not true. Nevertheless, the practical result was that while the rest of the Russian press could write nothing about the situation, New Times kept print­ing Suvorin's column, in which he went on complimenting the government for its handling of the developments which neither he nor anyone else was allowed to state and describe. The outcome was a wave of public indignation and revulsion against New Times and against Suvorin that took on unpre­cedented dimensions. Subscriptions were canceled by the thousands, students kept breaking the windows of the editorial office, private banks and other firms canceled their advertisements, two of the paper's most popular con­tributors, Ignaty Potapenko and Alexander Amfiteatrov, withdrew demonstra­tively, and dozens of editorials all over Russia screamed, as Alexander Chek­hov put it, "Crucify him!" (after which Alexander added: "And they just might").

Suvorin appealed to the government, desperately pleading for it to an­nounce that he had not been responsible for the news blackout, but to no avail. On March 26, he wrote in his journal: "This month I've lived through has been like years. Never in my life was I so anxious. It seemed to me that everyone had turned against me and that it was the end."

123. To Alexei Suvorin

Moscow,¹ April 24, 1899

The first thing I did after arriving in Moscow was change apart­ments. My address is The Sheshkov House, Malaya Dmitrovka, Moscow. I've rented this apartment for the whole year with the vague hope I may be allowed to live here a month or two next winter.

Your last letter (with the Court of Honor² correspondence) was forwarded to me from Lopasnya; it arrived yesterday. I can't for the life of me understand why and for whom this Court of Honor was considered necessary or why you felt it necessary to appear before a court you don't recognize (as you have stated in print more than once). A Court of Honor for writers and critics, who do not form a separate corporation as do officers or attorneys, for example, is nonsensical, ab­surd. In a backward country where there is no freedom of the press or of conscience, where the government and nine-tenths of society considers journalists their enemies, where life is so oppressive and foul and there is so little hope for better days ahead, pastimes like slinging mud at one another, courts of honor, etc. put writers in the ludicrous and pitiful position of helpless little animals biting off one another's tails when locked together in a cage. Even if you agree with the position of the Alliance, which recognizes the Court, can you tell me what the Alliance wants? What is it after? Putting you on trial for openly expressing your own opinion (whatever it may be) is a risky business; it's an attempt to jeopardize freedom of speech, it's a step toward making the position of the journalist intolerable, because after your trial not a single journalist could be certain that sooner or later he wouldn't stand trial in that strange court. I'm not talking about student disturbances or about your column. Your column may serve as a pretext for pointed polemics, hostile demonstrations against you and letters of abuse, but never for court action. The charges seem to be formulated almost deliberately for the purpose of covering up the principal cause of the scandal; they deliberately blame everything on the disturbances and your column so as to avoid the main issue. And what the point of all this business is I simply cannot understand, I'm at a loss. If some people feel the need or desire to wage war on you unto death, then why don't they come right out and say so? Our society (not the intelligentsia alone, Russian society as a whole) has felt hostile toward New Times for the past few years. People have come to believe that New Times receives a subsidy from the government and from the French general staff. And New Times did everything in its power to maintain this undeserved reputation; and it was hard to understand why, in the name of what god. No one, for instance, understands your exaggerated attitude toward Finland³ lately. No one understands your denunciation of the newspapers that were banned and supposedly started reappearing under different names; perhaps it can be justified by the goals of "national policy," but it has no place in literature. No one understands why New Times ascribed to Deschanel and General Bilderling words they never said,⁴ etc., etc. In most people's opinion you are a man who has great influence on the government, a cruel and implacable man. And once again New Times has done everything in its power to preserve that misapprehension in our society as long as possible. The public puts New Times in the same category as other government organs it finds objectionable, and while it complained and waxed indignant, misapprehension increased, legends materialized, and soon the snowball had grown into an avalanche that has started to roll and will keep rolling and getting larger and larger. But there's not a word in the charges about this "avalanche," even though the avalanche is the real reason they want to bring you to court. Such lack of sincerity upsets me violently.

I'm leaving for Melikhovo some time after the first of May, and

until then I'll be in Moscow receiving visitors, of whom there is no end. I'm exhausted. Yesterday I went to see Lev Tolstoy. He and Tatyana⁵ talked about you warmly; they very much liked your reaction to Resur­rection. Yesterday I had supper at Fedotova's.⁶ She's a real actress, an authentic actress. I am well. Are you coming to Moscow?

Yours, A. Chekhov

Chekhov was in Moscow to discuss the plans for the production of Uncle Vanya at the Maly Theater. It was during this visit that he was in­formed of the recommendation of the government-appointed committee of scholars that he rewrite the play.

As the public indignation against Suvorin began to assume quasi- hysterical proportions, the Alliance of Russian Writers for Mutual Assistance, of which Suvorin was a founding member, arranged a Court of Honor, at which it directed that he appear and justify the contents of his column on student disturbances. Chekhov totally disagreed with these columns (cf. Letter 119), but the idea of putting a writer on any kind of trial for the mere expression of his opinion was abhorrent to him.

Finland had been an autonomous grand duchy within the Russian Empire, with its own laws and customs, since 1809. In line with the ultra- nationalistic policy that Nicholas II embarked on at the beginning of his reign, it was decided in 1898 to extend Russian laws and customs to Finland by force. This generated considerable resentment and hostility on the part of the Finns. New Times ran a series of chauvinistic, anti-Finnish articles in 1899, accusing the Finns of ingratitude for refusing to become Russians.

New Times published an article that quoted verbatim a conversation that supposedly took place between the President of the Chamber of Deputies Paul Deschanel and General Bilderling at the funeral of President Felix Faure of France. General Bilderling sent a letter to New Times denying that any such conversation ever occurred.

Tolstoy visited Chekhov on April 22, and on April 23 Chekhov had dinner at Tolstoy's. Tatyana was Tolstoy's eldest daughter, with whom Chek­hov corresponded.

Glykeria Fedotova was, like Maria Savina and Maria Yermolova, one of Russia's most celebrated actresses of the period.

124. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)

Moscow, April 25, 1899

You've vanished without a trace, my dearest Alexei Maximovich. Where are you? What have you been up to? Do you have any travel plans?

The day before yesterday I went to see Lev Tolstoy. He praised you highly and called you "a remarkable writer." He likes your "Fair" and "In the Steppe" and doesn't like "Malva." He said: "A writer can invent whatever he pleases, but he can't invent psychology, and Gorky occasionally goes in for psychological inventions. He describes things he's never felt." So there. I told him that when you come to Moscow the two of us would pay him a visit.

When will you be in Moscow? There is going to be a private performance of Seagull especially for me on Thursday. If you come, I'll get you in. My address is The Sheshkov House, Apt. 14, Malaya Dmitrovka (you enter from Degtyarny Lane), Moscow. Some time after the first of May I'm going to the country (Lopasnya, Moscow Province).

I've been receiving depressing, almost penitent letters from Petersburg, and it's hard on me because I don't know how to reply or what attitude to take.¹ Yes, when it's not a psychological invention, life's a tricky business.

Drop me a line or two. Tolstoy questioned me about you at great length. You have aroused his curiosity. He seems to be moved.

Keep well now. I clasp your hand. Regards to your Maximka.²

Yours, A. Chekhov

1. Lillian Hellman's edition appends this note: "From Suvorin. Chekhov very probably meant that Suvorin was repentant over his anti-Zola attitude in the Dreyfus Affair." Suvorin's journal shows that he sincerely believed until the end of his life that Dreyfus was guilty. Unbeknownst to Miss Hell- man, Suvorin had many other things to be repentant about by April of 1899.

Gorky replied to this portion of Chekhov's letter with a long sympathetic letter of his own that showed his concern for Chekhov's position in connection with Suvorin's plight. With greater clarity and compassion than many of Chekhov's later biographers, Gorky realized the full difficulty of Chekhov's situation. The man to whom he had been enormously obligated and who for many years had been his closest friend was currently the most-hated man in Russia. It was unthinkable for Chekhov to join the general attack, but he also could not defend Suvorin, since he totally disagreed with him on all the issues involved. Gorky wrote: "I would very much like to say something to you that would ease your situation in his regard. I would have paid dearly to be able to say it,—but I don't know what to say. What can one say? You see more in him than anyone else can. He is probably precious to you. I can imagine that you might feel his pain—but forgive me. . . . This may be cruel, but leave him. Leave him to himself. You have to look after your own self. He is after all, a rotten tree, so how could you help him? Such people as he can be helped only by a word of kindness, but if you have to force yourself to say it, it is better to remain silent" (Gorky's letter to Chekhov of April 29, 1899). In the remainder of that letter, Gorky told Chekhov about the climactic event of the student strike wave, the self-immolation in the Nizhny Novgorod jail of a student named Hermann Lieven, who poured kero­sene over himself and set himself on fire to protest the suppression of the student strike.

2. Gorky's little son Maxim.

125. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)

Melikhovo, May 9, 1899

My dearest Alexei Maximovich,

I'm sending you Strindberg's play Miss Julie. Read it and return it when you're finished to Yelena Mikhailovna Just, Panteleimonovskaya 13/15, Peterbsurg.¹

I used to enjoy hunting small game, but it doesn't attract me any more.² I saw Seagull without any sets. I can't judge the play with equanimity, because the seagull herself gave such an abominable per­formance—she blubbered loudly throughout—and the Trigorin (the writer) walked around the stage and spoke like a paralytic. He is not supposed to have "a will of his own," but the way the actor conveyed it was nauseating to behold.³ It wasn't bad on the whole, though, quite gripping in fact. There were moments when I found it hard to believe I had written it.

I'll be very happy to meet Father Petrov.⁴ I've already read about him. If he's in Alushta in early July, it won't be hard to arrange for us to get together. I haven't seen his book.

I'm living on my estate in Melikhovo. It's hot, the rooks are cawing, and the peasants keep coming. For the time being things aren't too boring.

I've bought myself a watch. It's gold, but commonplace.

When are you coming to Lopasnya?

Keep well, happy and cheerful. And don't forget to write every once in a while.

If you decide to write a play, go ahead and write it and then send it to me. Don't let anyone know you're working on a play until you finish. Otherwise they'll disrupt your train of thought and break your mood.

I firmly clasp your hand.

Yours,

A. Chekhov

Yelena Just was the married name of Yelena Shavrova. She had done a new translation into Russian of August Strindberg's famous play. Gorky read Miss Julie with great enthusiasm. On May 12 or 13, he wrote Chekhov: "That is some audacious Swede! Never in my life have I seen the aristocracy of flunkeys depicted so vividly. I see some shortcomings in the dramatic technique; I believe that Julie's and the butlers accounts of their families are superfluous—but this is a trifling matter. The essence of the play struck me and the author's power aroused my envy and admiration and also pity for myself and many sad thoughts about our own literature."

Chekhov himself had read Miss Julie in another translation some ten years earlier and had liked it very much even then, as he informed Yelena Shavrova in his letter to her written on the same day as the present letter to Gorky. "If you would only translate Strindberg's short stories and publish a little volume of them!" he wrote Shavrova. "He is a remarkable writer. His power is quite out of the ordinary." But Chekhov had little sympathy for what he took to be Strindberg's misogyny. In Chapter XI of The Island of Sakhalin, after describing the many attractive qualities he found in the Gilyak people— their absence of warlike traits, their painfully scrupulous honesty—Chekhov admitted that he was disgusted by the Gilyak treatment of their women, whom they had reduced almost to the level of domestic animals. Chekhov cited several examples of inhuman treatment of Gilyak women by their men­folk that he had witnessed and then added: "The Swedish writer Strindberg, well known for his misogyny, who would like to see women enslaved and made to serve men's whims, is actually a spiritual ally of the Gilyaks; should he ever visit the north of Sakhalin, they would squeeze him in their arms for hours."

This is a reply to Gorky's offer to give Chekhov a hunting rifle.

Chekhov saw some of the early rehearsals of The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theater in the fall of 1898, but he was in Yalta when the play opened in December and he had not seen the finished production. During his April visit to Moscow, Nemirovich arranged a private performance so that Chekhov could see the production that was the greatest theatrical event of the year and that had been playing to full houses throughout the season. Gorky was unable to accept the invitation Chekhov had extended to him in his previous letter to attend that private performance, since he was barred from Moscow by order of the police. Chekhov is sharing his impressions of the performance with Gorky at Gorky's request.

While generally satisfied, Chekhov thought Stanislavsky's elaborate scen­ario of sound effects and group scenes gimmicky and distracting. He felt that the slow tempo of the last act distorted the play and suggested jokingly that the play be ended with Act Three. But above all he disliked the interpretations of the two key roles: Nina's by Maria Roxanova and Trigorin's by Stanis­lavsky.

By ⁱ899, the old Mikhailovskian cliche of a cold and indifferent Chekhov had been largely superseded in the popular mind by the image of Chekhov as the poet of spineless and frustrated intellectuals. Chekhov always thought that it was absurd to reduce the entire meaning of his work to this one dimension. But Stanislavsky, who in comparison with his partner Nemirovich- Danchenko and his disciples Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, was always some­what deficient in literary understanding and judgment and who inevitably took the simplifications of Russian criticism at face value (his discussions of Hamlet with Edward Gordon Craig, published in the Moscow Art Theater Yearbook for 1944, in which he tries to convince Craig that their production of Hamlet must not deviate from Vissarion Belinsky's understanding of this play, are quite telling in this respect), saw in the new critical cliche the key to his interpretation of Trigorin. Roxanova's weepy and neurotic Nina also fit this popular stereotype, again to Chekhov's displeasure. At a later date, Chekhov lost patience with her excesses and demanded that Nemirovich re­place her with another actress. This presented Nemirovich with a hard dilemma—Roxanova gave exactly the kind of tearful performance that the turn-of-the-century critics had led the public to expect in a work by Chekhov; changing her characterization could conceivably jeopardize the company's newly won success.

4. Father Grigory Petrov, the author of the popular book The Gospel as the Foundation of Life, was a unique example of a revolutionary-minded Ortho­dox priest in nineteenth-century Russia. His appeal to return to the original teachings of the New Testament in their social as well as religious aspects brought him many radical young followers. The government became alarmed and insisted that he be defrocked by the Church. Gorky was a great admirer of Father Petrov and his teachings, and Chekhov wrote Suvorin of Father Petrov's book with excitement and enthusiasm.

126. To Olga Knipper¹

Yalta,

September 3, 1899

Dear Actress,

Let me answer all your questions. I arrived safely.² My traveling companions let me have a lower berth, and then the way things worked out there were only two of us left in the compartment: a young Armenian and I. I drank tea several times a day and had three glasses each time, with lemon, sedately, taking my time. I ate up everything that was in the basket. But the way I look at it, fussing around with a basket and running to the station for boiling water is undignified and under­mines the prestige of the Art Theater. It was cold until we got to Kursk, then it began to warm up, and by the time we got to Sevastopol it was quite hot. I had my own house to go to in Yalta, and this is where Fm now living, guarded by my faithful Mustafa.³ I don't have dinner every day because it's too far to walk to town, and fussing around with a kerosene burner is also very bad for prestige. In the evening I eat cheese. I see Sinani now and then. I've been to the Sredins'⁴ twice. They examined your photograph with obvious emotion and ate up all the candy. Leonid Valentinovich is feeling tolerably well. Im not drinking any Narzan⁵ water. What else? I spend almost no time in the garden; I stay inside and think of you. Riding past Bakhchisarai⁶ I thought of you and recalled our trip. Dear, extraordinary actress, wonderful woman, if only you knew how happy your letter made me. I send you my humble regards and bow so low that my forehead touches the bottom of my well, which is already eight sazhens deep. I've grown used to you, I miss you, and I can in no way reconcile myself to the idea that I won't be seeing you until spring. In other words, I'm upset. If Nadenka⁷ knew what was going on in my heart, we'd never hear the end of it.

The weather in Yalta is marvelous, but for no reason at all it's been raining these last two days; everything is muddy, and I have to put on my galoshes. There are centipedes creeping all over the walls as a result of the dampness, and in my garden toads and young crocodiles are leaping about. Your gift, the green reptile in the flower pot, is now sitting in the garden soaking up the sun.⁸ It took the journey quite well.

The fleet has arrived. I'm watching it through my binoculars.

They are doing an operetta in the theater. Trained fleas are continuing to serve sacred art. I have no money. I have frequent visitors. All in all, I'm bored, and my boredom is idle and meaningless.

Well, I firmly clasp and kiss your hand. Keep well, cheerful, happy, work, leap, let yourself be carried away, sing and, if possible, don't forget a provincial writer, your zealous admirer,

A. Chekhov

i. Olga Leonardovna Knipper (1868-1959) came from a cultivated Ger­man-Russian family. She studied drama with Alexander Fedotov and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who entrusted her with leading roles in the first season of the Moscow Art Theater even though she lacked any previous stage experience. Chekhov first saw her on September 14, 1898, when he attended a rehearsal of Alexei Tolstoy's verse drama Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, in which she played the tsar's wife Irina. He wrote to Suvorin: "I was agreeably touched by the intelligence of their tone; there was a breath of true art wafting from the stage, although none of them have great talents. I thought Irina magnificent. Her voice, her nobility, her sincerity—it's all so fine it brings a spasm to your throat [. . .]. Were I to stay in Moscow, I would fall in love with this Irina" (Letter of October 8, 1898). During his visit to Moscow in April of 1899, Chekhov quite unexpectedly paid an Easter Sunday call on Olga Knipper's family and invited her to attend an exhibit of Isaak Levitan's paintings with him. On May 1, he saw her play Arkadina in the private performance of The Seagull that he describes to Gorky in Letter 125.

Early in May she came to Melikhovo for a three-day visit and met his mother. In July she stayed for several weeks with mutual friends in Yalta while Chek­hov was also there. By the fall of 1899 they were in love.

This letter is the first authentic love letter by Chekhov that we have. Its tender, affectionate tone is light years away from the chatty, humorous and defensive letters he once wrote (and went on writing even after his marriage) to Lika Mizinova or Lydia Avilova, which his gullible biographers in their desperate search for romance managed to see as some kind of amorous epistles. Nor is there any reason to suppose that had Chekhov's letters to Olga Kundasova and Lydia Yavorskaya been preserved we would have found in them this kind of lyrical tenderness. We know of a number of affairs that Chekhov had had before this time with various women, but this is the first affair of his life that is also a love affair.

Chekhov returned to Yalta from Moscow on August 27.

On February 10, 1899, Chekhov wrote to his sister from Yalta: "I've hired a Turk named Mustafa. He's trying very hard. Sleeps in the little shed. A kindly face; tremendously strong; penury, sobriety, noble principles. I've bought for him a shovel, a pick and an axe. We'll dig up the ground and then plant trees."

Dr. Leonid Valentinovich Sredin and his wife Sofya were Yalta ac­quaintances of Chekhov's; they were also friends of Olga Knipper's family and of Maxim Gorky. She stayed with them in July when she came to see Chekhov in Yalta.

To this day the most popular brand of mineral water in the Soviet Union. Thus far, the letter answers, point by point, a set of detailed questions in Olga Knipper's letter of August 29, 1899.

The palace of the former rulers of the Crimea, made famous in Russian literature by Pushkin's verse tale "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai."

This imaginary person kept popping up in Chekhov's correspondence with Olga Knipper. She was supposedly Chekhov's jealous wife or fiancee, who resented Olga's presence in his life.

It was a cactus and its name (and species) was Queen of the Night.

127. To Alexei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky)

Yalta,

September 3, 1899

Greetings again, dearest Alexei Maximovich! Here is my answer to your letter.

In the first place, I am generally opposed to dedicating anything whatsoever to people who are still alive. A long time ago I used to dedi­cate things, and now I feel that perhaps I shouldn't have. Such is my general sentiment. In particular, however, I will be only too happy and honored to accept your dedication of Foma Gordeyev.¹ But what have I done to deserve it? Of course, that is for you to judge; all I can do is bow and offer my thanks. Make the dedication with as few surplus words as possible, I mean, write no more than "This is dedicated to . . ." and let it go at that. Only Volynsky² likes long dedications. Here's another piece of practical advice if you want it: arrange for larger printings, no less than five or six thousand copies. The book is sure to sell fast. You can have the second printing done simultaneously with the first. Another piece of advice: when you read proof, cross out as many modifiers of nouns and verbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has a hard time figuring out what deserves his attention, and it tires him out. If I write, "A man sat down on the grass," it is understandable because it is clear and doesn't require a second reading. But it would be hard to follow and brain-taxing were I to write, "A tall, narrow-chested, red-bearded man of medium height sat down noiselessly, looking around timidly and in fright, on a patch of green grass that had been trampled by pedestrians." The brain can't grasp all of this at once, and the art of fiction ought to be immediately, instantaneously grasp- able. Here is something else: You are lyrical by nature, the timbre of your soul is gentle. If you had been a composer, you'd have avoided writing marches. Deliberately offensive language, loudness, causticity and frenzied denunciations are not characteristic of your talent. There­fore you should understand why I advise you not to spare, as you proof­read, the sons of bitches and other assorted curs and mutts that keep reappearing here and there in the pages of Life.

Shall I expect you at the end of September? Why so late? Win­ter's going to start early this year; fall's going to be short. You'll have to hurry.

Keep well now. Stay nicely alive and healthy.

Yours, A. Chekhov

Performances begin at the Art Theater on September 30th. Uncle Vanya is scheduled for October 14th.

Your best story is "In the Steppe."

1. Gorky had asked for Chekhov's permission to dedicate to him his novel Foma Gordeyev, a story of a young merchant who revolts against the values of his class and is crushed by it. Foma Gordeyev enjoyed an enormous inter­national success at the time of its publication and was quickly translated into many languages. On December 3, 1901, Chekhov received the American edi­tion of the book and quoted the English text of the dedication in his letter of that date to his wife. It was from Gorky's dedication that many foreign liter­ary critics and readers first learned of Chekhov's existence. When in 1902 the two pioneers of American Chekhov criticism, Abraham Cahan writing in

The Bookman and R. E. C. Long in The Living Age, tried to get American readers interested in Chekhov, they had to introduce him as "the man to whom Gorky dedicated Foma Gordeyev' (Cahan). Both Long and Cahan were perfectly aware that the reason "Western critics have tumbled over one an­other to acclaim Gorky" (Long) was that he was "of the people" and "a bitter enemy of the present regime" and that the lack of interest in Chekhov abroad was due to the assumption (believed even by the generally well-informed Cahan) that he was "a nobleman by birth and education" (Cahan). In actual fact, of course, Gorky's father was a cabinetmaker and his maternal grand­father the prosperous owner of a dyer's shop, while both of Chekhov's grand­fathers were serfs.

2. Akim Volynsky, the literary critic who at the end of the nineteenth century was one of the first to challenge the monopoly of utilitarian criticism and to question its ethics.

128. To Anastasy Govallo¹

Yalta,

September 26, 1899

Dear Sir,

May I express my sincere gratitude to the Autka community for the water I used while building.² Please accept a contribution of twenty- five rubles for the Autka mosque.³ I respectfully remain

Yours, A. Chekhov

Govallo was a member of the Yalta municipal administration.

There was no water outlet on the lot which Chekhov had purchased at the time he built his home; water was connected only after the construc­tion was completed.

The building of his home brought Chekhov into close contact with the Crimean Tatar community in Autka. The contractor who built the house, a Tatar named Babakai Kalfa, remained Chekhov's factotum and personal friend for the rest of his life. On March 12, 1900, Chekhov wrote to his brother Ivan, describing the visit he had received from the Autka mullah, who came to discuss the situation of the local Moslem school. Chekhov sent Ivan an extensive list of school supplies which he asked him to purchase in Moscow for the school. The letter to Govallo and the cited letter to Ivan Chekhov appeared in the 1944-51 edition, but were both excluded from the ¹963-64 one, since this evidence of Chekhov's sympathy for the Crimean Tatars was not a convenient subject to bring up during their post-Stalinist ordeal.

The Crimean Tatars are descendants of the Mongols who invaded Russia repeatedly in the Middle Ages. They were the indigenous population of the

Crimean peninsula prior to its conquest by the Russians in 1783. After the Revolution, they made an attempt to form an independent Crimean nation, which was quickly put down. In 1944, after the German occupation of the Crimea, the entire Crimean Tatar people were declared guilty of treason by Stalin's fiat and something like a quarter of a million men, women and children were deported to the arid regions of Central Asia, where almost half of them died of privation in the next two years. In the post-Stalin years, there began a desperate effort by the Tatars, helped by a few Russian sym­pathizers, to get the accusation of treason, which extended by Soviet law to persons who were not even born at the time of the German occupation, rescinded. This was done officially in 1967, but the government order that canceled the original charges also barred the Crimean Tatars from residence in their ancestral homeland. Two of the most courageous Soviet dissenters of the older generation, the old Communist writer Alexei Kosterin and General Pyotr Grigorenko, acting in the great traditions of Tolstoy's and Korolenko's aid to persecuted minorities, have tried to bring the plight of the Crimean Tatars to the attention of the Soviet and world press in recent years. But Kosterin died and Grigorenko ended in a mental institution. The Tatars, as a collection of documents on their situation published in New York in 1969 shows, are still barred from living in the Crimea, and the ban on expressions of sympathy for them in the press is still so tight that it extends even to the pre-revolutionary writings of Anton Chekhov.

129. To Olga Knipper

Yalta, October 4, 1899

My dear actress,

It's clear you greatly exaggerated everything in your gloomy letter, because the papers were most civil about your opening-night performance.¹ Be that as it may, one or two unsuccessful performances are insufficient cause for being crestfallen and spending a sleepless night. Art, and especially the stage, is an endeavor in which stumbling is unavoidable. There will be many unsuccessful days ahead, many entirely unsuccessful seasons, there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments and you have to be ready for all that, you have to expect it, and despite it all you must stubbornly, fanatically do what you think is right.

And of course you're right: Alexeyev had no business playing Ivan the Terrible. That's not his job. When he directs, he's an artist, but when he acts he's a rich young merchant who has taken it into his head to dabble a bit in art.²

I was sick for three or four days, and I've been staying at home. The number of visitors is unbearable. I'm so bored by the chatter of

those idle provincial tongues that I seethe with anger and I envy the rat that lives under the floor of your theater.

You wrote your last letter at four in the morning. If you should feel that Uncle Vanya isn't as successful as you want it to be, please go to bed and have a good night's sleep. Success has very much spoiled you; you can no longer tolerate everyday existence.

It looks as if Davydov is going to play Uncle Vanya in Petersburg. He'll do a good job of it too, but the play will most likely flop.

How have you been? Write more. As you see, I write you nearly every day. An author writing an actress that often—before you know it my pride will begin to suffer. Actresses should be kept under strict supervision and not written to. I keep forgetting I'm the inspector of the actresses.³

Keep well, little angel.

Yours, A. Chekhov

In addition to The Seagull, the biggest other hit of the Moscow Art Theater's first season was Tsar Fyodor loannovich, the second play of Alexei Tolstoy's trilogy of verse plays about the troubled period that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible. Encouraged by that play's success, Nemirovich- Danchenko and Stanislavsky staged the first play of the trilogy, The Death of Ivan the Terrible, in their next season. Olga Knipper thought this produc­tion a failure and wrote Chekhov a despondent letter about it.

In the 1944-51 edition, this sentence reads: "When he directs, he's an artist [. . .]." In the late 1930s, Stanislavsky's style of directing and the method of acting he had devised were proclaimed the only ones compatible with Socialist Realism and all other styles of directing and acting were con­demned as "formalist." To criticize Stanislavsky for anything whatsoever be­came unthinkable. Chekhov's reference to Stanislavsky's merchant-class origin and to his personal wealth (both perfectly true) was even more shocking to the Stalinist censor than the disrespectful gibe at his dabbling in art. The deleted portion of the sentence was restored in the 1963-64 edition.

"Inspector of the actresses" was a nickname given to Chekhov by some of the company's actors because of his close relationship with Olga Knipper.

130. To Grigory Rossolimo¹

Yalta,

October 11, 1899

Dear Grigory Ivanovich,

I sent Dr. Raltsevich eight rubles fifty for the photograph and five rubles for dues today.² I'm sending a photograph of myself (a pretty poor one, taken when my enteritis was at its worst) to your address, registered mail. My autobiography? I have a malady called autobio- graphophobia. It is real torture for me to read any details whatsoever about myself, to say nothing of writing them up for the press. I am en­closing several dates entirely unadorned on a separate sheet of paper. That's the best I can do. If you like, you may add that on my application to the rector for admission to the university I wrote: The School of Medacine.

You ask when we're going to see one another. Not before spring, probably. I'm in Yalta, in exile, a beautiful exile perhaps, but exile just the same. Life goes by drearily. My health is tolerable, but I'm well only on certain days. In addition to everything else I have hemorrhoidal piles and catarrh recti, and there are days when frequent bowel move­ments leave me utterly exhausted. I'll have to have an operation.

I'm very sorry to have missed the dinner and the chance to see all my old friends. An Alumnal Aid Society for members of our graduat­ing class is a fine idea, but it would be more practical and more practi­cable to have a "mutual aid fund," something like our writers' fund. Whenever a member died, his family would receive the benefits; new payments would be collected only when a member died.

Why don't you come to the Crimea in the summer or fall? It's a pleasant place to relax. By the way, the southern coast has become the favorite vacation spot for Moscow Province zemstvo doctors. They find the accommodations here cheap and good and always leave de­lighted.

If something interesting comes up, please write me about it. I'm really bored here, and if I don't get any letters, I may hang myself, learn to drink bad Crimean wine, or start an affair with a plain and stupid woman.

Keep well. I firmly clasp your hand and send my most cordial regards to you and your family.

Yours, A. Chekhov

I, A. P. Chekhov, was born on January 17, i860, in Taganrog. I was educated first at the Greek school of the Church of the Emperor Constantine and then at the Taganrog gymnasium. In 1879 I entered the Medical School of Moscow University. I had a very dim idea of the university at the time, and I do not remember exactly what prompted me to choose medical school, but I have had no reason to regret the choice. During my first year of studies, I began publishing in weekly magazines and newspapers, and by the early eighties these literary ac­tivities had taken on a permanent, professional character. In 1888 I was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1890 I traveled to the Island of Sakhalin and wrote a book about our penal colony and hard labor. Not counting trial reporting, reviews, miscellaneous articles, short news items and the columns I wrote from day to day for the press and which would be difficult to locate and collect, during the twenty years I have been active in literature I have written and published more than forty- eight hundred pages of novellas and stories. I have written plays as well.

There is no doubt in my mind that my study of medicine has had a serious impact on my literary activities. It significantly broadened the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a doctor can appreciate. It also served as a guiding influence; my intimacy with medicine probably helped me to avoid many mistakes. My familiarity with the natural sciences and the scientific method has always kept me on my guard; I have tried where- ever possible to take scientific data into account, and where it has not been possible I have preferred not writing at all. Let me note in this connection that the principles of creative art do not always admit of full accord with scientific data; death by poison cannot be represented on stage as it actually happens. But some accord with scientific data should be felt even within the boundaries of artistic convention, that is, the reader or spectator should be made to realize that convention is in­volved but that the author is also well versed in the reality of the situa­tion. I am not one of those writers who negate the value of science and would not wish to be one of those who believe they can figure out every­thing for themselves.

As for my medical practice, I worked as a student in the Vos- kresensk Zemstvo Hospital (near the New Jerusalem Monastery) with the well-known zemstvo doctor Pavel Arkhangelsky and spent a brief period as a doctor in the Zvenigorod Hospital. During the years of the cholera epidemic (1892 and 1893) I headed the Melikhovo Region of the Serpukhov District.

Dr. Grigory Rossolimo was Chekhov's fellow student at the Medical School of Moscow University and he eventually returned there as a professor of medicine. At the class reunion held in 1899 which Chekhov attended, it was decided to publish an album containing the photographs and auto­biographies of all the alumni of the 1884 class. Rossolimo and Dr. Raltsevich were put in charge of editing the volume and collecting the materials for it.

Chekhov and Rossolimo became particularly friendly during Chekhov's Yalta years. Rossolimo's memoir of Chekhov is another nonliterary memoir that, like Altschuller's, shows us Chekhov the physician and scientist.

The money was in payment for alumni association dues and for the photograph of the class reunion.

131. To Vsevolod Meyerhold¹

Yalta, October, 1899

Dear Vsevolod Emilyevich,

I don't have the text handy and can therefore talk about the role of Johannes only in the most general terms. If you send me the role, I'll read it to freshen my memory and then write you in more detail.² For the time being all I will say is what may be of the most direct, practical interest to you. To begin with, Johannes is an intel­lectual through and through. He is a young scholar who has grown up in a university town. He lacks all bourgeois characteristics and has the manners of a well-bred young man who is accustomed to the society of decent people (such as Anna). His movements and appearance are gentle and full of youth, like those of a man who has been brought up in a family and pampered by that family and is still living under mamma's wing. Johannes is a German scholar and is therefore dignified in dealing with men. When left alone with women, on the other hand, he becomes tender in a feminine manner. The scene where he cannot keep from caressing his wife even though he already loves or is begin­ning to love Anna illustrates this point nicely. Now about his nerves. Don't stress his nervousness to the point of allowing his neuropatholo- gical nature to obstruct or subjugate what is more important: his lone­liness, the sort of loneliness that only lofty, yet healthy (in the highest sense) personalities experience. Project a lonely man, and show his nervousness only insofar as the script indicates. Don't interpret his nervousness as an individual phenomenon. Keep in mind that nowadays almost every civilized person, no matter how healthy he may be, never feels so irritated as when he is at home among his own family because the discord between past and present is felt primarily within the family. The irritation is chronic; it has no pathos, no convulsive outbursts. It is an irritation that guests fail to notice, because its entire burden falls primarily on the people he is closest to—his mother or wife. It is an intimate, family irritation, so to speak. Don't dwell on it, show it as only one of his typical traits, and don't overdo it, or you'll make him an irritable young man rather than a lonely one. I know, Konstantin Sergeyevich³ will insist on playing up his excessive nervousness; he'll take an exaggerated view of it. But don't give in, don't sacrifice the beauty and power of your voice and delivery for something as trivial as a highlight. Don't sacrifice them, because the irritation is in fact only a detail, a triviality.⁴

Many thanks for having thought about me. Please write again. It will be very magnanimous on your part because I'm bored. The weather here is magnificent and warm, but that's only gravy, and what good is gravy without the meat?

Keep well. I firmly clasp your hand and wish you all the best.

Yours, A. Chekhov

My regards to Olga Leonardovna, Alexander Leonidovich, Burdzhalov and Luzhsky.⁵ Thank you once again for the telegram.

1. If Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko were the original pioneers of the great flowering of Russian theater at the beginning of our century, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) was the most creative and innovative theatrical genius that age produced. He began as an actor with the original Moscow Art Theater company after studying drama with Nemirovich-Dan­chenko. Chekhov was highly pleased with Meyerhold's tense and sensitive interpretation of Treplyov in The Seagull and he later wrote the role of Tusenbach in Three Sisters with him in mind. After the first few seasons, Meyerhold left the Moscow Art Theater, since it no longer satisfied his urge for theatrical innovation and his growing political radicalism. He worked in the provinces as a director, staging some memorable productions of Chek­hov's plays, until in 1906 he was invited to join Vera Kommissarzhevskaya's company, where for a while he was given a free hand to be as inventive and experimental as he liked. In the years preceding the Revolution, Meyerhold became the leading director at the Imperial Theaters, where he was allowed to do some highly innovative productions of drama at the previously con­vention-bound Empress Alexandra Theater and of opera at the Empress Maria (Mariinsky) Theater in St. Petersburg.

Unlike Stanislavsky, who mistrusted too much modernism, Meyerhold had a Diaghilev-like knack for sensing new and interesting developments in the arts. In his Kommissarzhevskaya and Imperial Theater period, he did memo­rable productions of poetic dramas by Alexander Blok, Fyodor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius and Alexei Remizov (whom he encouraged to write for the theater and in whose prose he had tried earlier to interest Chekhov), plays that were far more original and profound as literature than the plays by Gorky and Andreyev, in which Stanislavsky specialized after Chekhov's death.

The October Revolution opened a dazzlingly creative new period in Meyerhold's career. Once more he made common cause with the finest new playwright of the age, Mayakovsky. The specifically theatrical and highly imaginative concept of the theater that Meyerhold had devised before the Revolution now underwent a series of spectacular transformations, with the result that, as another important director of the period remarked, each new production of Meyerhold could become a source for a whole new school of stagecraft. In addition to his productions of Mayakovsky, the highlights of

Meyerhold's post-revolutionary achievement were his drastically modernistic reinterpretations of nineteenth-century Russian playwrights: Griboyedov, Ostrovsky, Sukhovo-Kobylin and especially Gogol. It was Meyerhold's produc­tion of The Inspector General that returned to this play its true surrealistic, dreamlike essence after a century of simplistically reducing it to mere photographic realism. In the 1920s and '30s, Meyerhold's company was one of the Soviet Union's principal cultural exports; its influence on theaters in other countries had an impact that is still with us today.