Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends Part 44

I wish you all happiness in the New Year. I really do wish you happiness and bow down to your little feet. Be happy, wealthy, healthy, and gay.

We are getting on pretty well, we eat a great deal, chatter a great deal, laugh a great deal, and often talk of you. Masha will tell you when she goes back to Moscow how we spent Christmas.

I have not congratulated you on the success of "Lonely Lives." I still dream that you will all come to Yalta, that I shall see "Lonely Lives" on the stage, and congratulate you really from my heart. I wrote to Meierhold, [Footnote: An actor at the Art Theatre at that time playing Johannes in Hauptmann's "Lonely Lives."] and urged him in my letter not to be too violent in the part of a nervous man. The immense majority of people are nervous, you know: the greater number suffer, and a small proportion feel acute pain; but where--in streets and in houses--do you see people tearing about, leaping up, and clutching at their heads? Suffering ought to be expressed as it is expressed in life--that is, not by the arms and legs, but by the tone and expression; not by gesticulation, but by grace. Subtle emotions of the soul in educated people must be subtly expressed in an external way. You will say--stage conditions. No conditions allow falsity.

My sister tells me that you played "Anna" exquisitely. Ah, if only the Art Theatre would come to Yalta! _Novoye Vremya_ highly praised your company.

There is a change of tactics in that quarter; evidently they are going to praise you all even in Lent. My story, a very queer one, will be in the February number of _Zhizn_. There are a great number of characters, there is scenery too, there's a crescent moon, there's a bittern that cries far, far away: "Boo-oo! boo-oo!" like a cow shut up in a shed. There's everything in it.

Levitan is with us. Over my fireplace he has painted a moonlight night in the hayfield, c.o.c.ks of hay, forest in the distance, a moon reigning on high above it all.

Well, the best of health to you, dear, wonderful actress. I have been pining for you.

And when are you going to send me your photograph? What treachery!

TO A. S. SUVORIN.

YALTA, January 8, 1900.

... My health is not so bad. I feel better than I did last year, but yet the doctors won't let me leave Yalta. I am as tired and sick of this charming town as of a disagreeable wife. It's curing me of tuberculosis, but it's making me ten years older. If I go to Nice it won't be before February. I am writing a little; not long ago I sent a long story to _Zhizn_. Money is short, all I have received so far from Marks for the plays is gone by now....

If Prince Baryatinsky is to be judged by his paper, I must own I was unjust to him, for I imagined him very different from what he is. They will shut up his paper, of course, but he will long maintain his reputation as a good journalist. You ask me why the _Syeverny Kurier_ is successful? Because our society is exhausted, hatred has turned it as rank and rotten as gra.s.s in a bog, and it has a longing for something fresh, free, light--a desperate longing.

I often see the academician Kondakov here. We talk of the Pushkin section of belles-lettres. As Kondakov will take part in the elections of future academicians, I am trying to hypnotize him, and suggest that they should elect Barantsevitch and Mihailovsky. The former is broken down and worn out. He is unquestionably a literary man, is poverty-stricken in his old age.... An income and rest would be the very thing for him. The latter--that is Mihailovsky--would make a good foundation for the new section, and his election would satisfy three-quarters of the brotherhood.

But my hypnotism failed, my efforts came to nothing. The supplementary clauses to the statute are like Tolstoy's After-word to the Kreutzer Sonata. The academicians have done all they can to protect themselves from literary men, whose society shocks them as the society of the Russian academicians shocked the Germans. Literary men can only be honorary academicians, and that means nothing--it is just the same as being an honorary citizen of the town of Vyazma or Tcherepovets, there is no salary and no vote attached. A clever way out of it! The professors will be elected real academicians, and those of the writers will be elected honorary academicians who do not live in Petersburg, and so cannot be present at the sittings and abuse the professors.

I hear the muezzin calling in the minaret. The Turks are very religious; it's their fast now, they eat nothing the whole day. They have no religious ladies, that element which makes religion shallow as the sand does the Volga.

You do well to print the martyrology of Russian towns avoided by the extortionate railway contractors. Here is what the famous author Chekhov wrote on the subject in his story "My Life." [Footnote: Appended to the letter was a printed cutting.] Railway contractors are revengeful people; refuse them a trifle, and they will punish you for it all your life--and it's their tradition.

Thanks for your letter, thanks for your indulgence.

TO P. I. KURKIN.

YALTA, January 18, 1900.

DEAR PYOTR IVANOVITCH,

Thank you for your letter. I have long been wanting to write to you, but have never had time, under the load of business and official correspondence. Yesterday was the 17th of January--my name-day, and the day of my election to the Academy. What a lot of telegrams! And what a lot of letters still to come! And I must answer all of them, or posterity will accuse me of not knowing the laws of good manners.

There is news, but I won't tell you it now (no time), but later on. I am not very well. I was ailing all yesterday. I press your hand heartily. Keep well.

TO V. M. SOBOLEVSKY.

YALTA, January 19, 1900.

DEAR Va.s.sILY MIHAILOVITCH,

In November I wrote a story [Footnote: "In the Ravine."] fully intending to send it to _Russkiya Vyedomosti_, but the story lengthened out beyond the sixteen pages, and I had to send it elsewhere. Then Elpatyevsky and I decided to send you a telegram on New Year's Eve, but there was such a rush and a whirl that we let the right moment slip, and now I send you my New Year wishes. Forgive me my many transgressions. You know how deeply I love and respect you, and if the intervals in our correspondence are prolonged it's merely external causes that are to blame.

I am alive and almost well. I am often ill, but not for long at a time; and I haven't once been kept in bed this winter, I keep about though I am ill.

I am working harder than I did last year, and I am more bored. It's bad being without Russia in every way.... All the evergreen trees look as though they were made of tin, and one gets no joy out of them. And one sees nothing interesting, as one has no taste for the local life.

Elpatyevsky and Kondakov are here. The former has run up a huge house for himself which towers above all Yalta; the latter is going to Petersburg to take his seat in the Academy--and is glad to go. Elpatyevsky is cheerful and hearty, always in good spirits, goes out in all weathers, in a summer overcoat; Kondakov is irritably sarcastic, and goes about in a fur coat.

Both often come and see me and we speak of you.

V. A. wrote that she had bought a piece of land in Tuapse. Oy-oy! but the boredom there is awful, you know. There are Tchetchentsi and scorpions, and worst of all there are no roads, and there won't be any for a long time. Of all warm places in Russia the best are on the south coast of the Crimea, there is no doubt of that, whatever they may say about the natural beauties of the Caucasus. I have been lately to Gurzufa, near Pushkin's rock, and admired the view, although it rained and although I am sick to death of views. In the Crimea it is snugger and nearer to Russia. Let V. A. sell her place in Tuapse or make a present of it to someone, and I will find her a bit of the sea-front with bathing, and a bay, in the Crimea.

When you are in Vosdvizhenka give my respects and greetings to Varvara Alexyevna, Varya, Natasha, and Glyeb. I can fancy how Glyeb and Natasha have grown. Now if only you would all come here for Easter, I could have a look at you all. Don't forget me, please, and don't be angry with me. I send you my warmest good wishes. I press your hand heartily and embrace you.

TO G. I. ROSSOLIMO.

YALTA, January 21, 1900.

DEAR GRIGORY IVANOVITCH,

... I send you in a registered parcel what I have that seems suitable for children--two stories of the life of a dog. And I think I have nothing else of the sort. I don't know how to write for children; I write for them once in ten years, and so-called children's books I don't like and don't believe in. Children ought only to be given what is suitable also for grown-up people. Andersen, "The Frigate Pallada," Gogol, are easily read by children and also by grown-up people. Books should not be written for children, but one ought to know how to choose from what has been written for grown-up people--that is, from real works of art. To be able to select among drugs, and to administer them in suitable doses, is more direct and consistent than trying to invent a special remedy for the patient because he is a child. Forgive the medical comparison. It's in keeping with the moment, perhaps, as for the last four days I have been occupied with medicine, doctoring my mother and myself. Influenza no doubt. Fever and headache.

If I write anything, I will let you know in due time, but anything I write can only be published by one man--Marks! For anything published by anyone else I have to pay a fine of 5,000 roubles (per signature)....

TO O. L. KNIPPER.

YALTA, January 22, 1900.

DEAR ACTRESS,

On January 17th I had telegrams from your mother and your brother, from your uncle Alexandr Ivanovitch (signed Uncle Sasha), and from N. N.

Sokolovsky. Be so good as to give them my warm thanks and the expression of my sincere feeling for them.