Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends

TO O. L. KNIPPER

YALTA, February 14, 1900.

DEAR ACTRESS,

The photographs are very, very good, especially the one in which you are leaning in dejection with your elbows on the back of a chair, which gives you a discreetly mournful, gentle expression under which there lies hid a little demon. The other is good too, but it looks a little like a Jewess, a very musical person who attends a conservatoire, but at the same time is studying dentistry on the sly as a second string, and is engaged to be married to a young man in Mogilev, and whose fiance is a person like M – . Are you angry? Really, really angry? It’s my revenge for your not signing them.

Of the seventy roses I planted in the autumn only three have not taken root. Lilies, irises, tulips, tuberoses, hyacinths, are all pushing out of the ground. The willow is already green. By the little seat in the corner the grass is luxuriant already. The almond-tree is in blossom. I have put little seats all over the garden, not grand ones with iron legs, but wooden ones which I paint green. I have made three bridges over the stream. I am planting palms. In fact, there are all sorts of novelties, so much so that you won’t know the house, or the garden, or the street. Only the owner has not changed, he is just the same moping creature and devoted worshipper of the talents that reside at Nikitsky Gate. [Footnote: O. L. Knipper was living at Nikitsky Gate.] I have heard no music nor singing since the autumn, I have not seen one interesting woman. How can I help being melancholy?

I had made up my mind not to write to you, but since you have sent the photographs I have taken off the ban, and here you see I am writing. I will even come to Sevastopol, only I repeat, don’t tell that to anyone, especially not to Vishnevsky. I shall be there incognito, I shall put myself down in the hotel-book Count Blackphiz.

I was joking when I said that you were like a Jewess in your photograph. Don’t be angry, precious one. Well, herewith I kiss your little hand, and remain unalterably yours.

TO GORKY

YALTA, February 15, 1900.

DEAR ALEXEY MAXIMOVITCH,

Your article in the Nizhni-Novgorod Listok was balm to my soul. What a talented person you are! I can’t write anything but belles-lettres, you possess the pen of a journalist as well. I thought at first I liked the article so much because you praise me in it; afterwards it came out that Sredin and his family and Yartsev were all delighted with it. So peg away at journalism. God bless you!

Why don’t they send me “Foma Gordeyev”? I have read it only in bits, and one ought to read it straight through at a sitting as I have just read “Resurrection.” Except the relations of Nehludov and Katusha, which are somewhat obscure and made up, everything in the novel made the impression of strength, richness, and breadth, and the insincerity of a man afraid of death and refusing to admit it and clutching at texts and holy Scripture.

Write to them to send me “Foma.”

“Twenty-six Men and a Girl” is a good story. There is a strong feeling of the environment. One smells the hot rolls.

They have just brought your letter. So you don’t want to go to India? That’s a pity. When India is in the past, a long sea voyage, you have something to think about when you can’t get to sleep. And a tour abroad takes very little time, it need not prevent your going about in Russia on foot.

I am bored, not in the sense of weltschmerz, not in the sense of being weary of existence, but simply bored from want of people, from want of music which I love, and from want of women, of whom there are none in Yalta. I am bored without caviare and pickled cabbage.

I am very sorry that apparently you have given up the idea of coming to Yalta. The Art Theatre from Moscow will be here in May. It will give five performances and then remain for rehearsals. So you come, study the stage at the rehearsals, and then in five to eight days write a play, which I should welcome joyfully with my whole heart.

Yes, I have the right now to insist on the fact that I am forty, that I am a man no longer young. I used to be the youngest literary man, but you have appeared on the scene and I became more dignified at once, and no one calls me the youngest now.

TO V. A. POSSE

YALTA, February 15, 1900.

MUCH RESPECTED VLADIMIR ALEXANDROVITCH,

“Foma Gordeyev” and in a superb binding too is a precious and touching present; I thank you from the bottom of my heart. A thousand thanks! I have read “Foma” only in bits, now I shall read it properly. Gorky should not be published in parts; either he must write more briefly, or you must put him in whole as the Vyestnik Evropy does with Boborykin. “Foma,” by the way, is very successful, but only with intelligent well-read people – with the young also. I once overheard in a garden the conversation of a lady (from Petersburg) with her daughter: the mother was abusing the book, the daughter was praising it…

YALTA,

February 29, 1900.

“Foma Gordeyev” is written all in one tone like a dissertation. All the characters speak alike, and their way of thinking is alike too. They all speak not simply but intentionally; they all have some idea in the background; as though there is something they know they don’t speak out: but in reality there is nothing they know, and it is simply their facon de parler.

There are wonderful passages in “Foma.” Gorky will make a very great writer if only he does not weary, does not grow cold and lazy.

TO A. S. SUVORIN,

YALTA, March 10, 1900.

No winter has ever dragged on so long for me as this one, and time merely drags and does not move, and now I realize how stupid it was of me to leave Moscow. I have lost touch with the north without getting into touch with the south, and one can think of nothing in my position but to go abroad. After the spring, winter has begun here again in Yalta – snow, rain, cold, mud – simply disgusting.

The Moscow Art Theatre will be in Yalta in April; it will bring its scenery and decorations. All the tickets for the four days advertised were sold in one day, although the prices have been considerably raised. They will give among other things Hauptmann’s “Lonely Lives,” a magnificent play in my opinion. I read it with great pleasure, although I am not fond of plays, and the production at the Art Theatre they say is marvellous.

There is no news. There is one great event, though: N.‘s “Socrates” is printed in the Neva Supplement. I have read it, but with great effort. It is not Socrates but a dull-witted, captious, opinionated man, the whole of whose wisdom and interest is confined to tripping people up over words. There is not a trace or vestige of talent in it, but it is quite possible that the play might be successful because there are words in it such as “amphora,” and Karpov says it would stage well.

How many consumptives there are here! What poverty, and how worried one is with them! The hotels and lodging-houses here won’t take in those who are seriously ill. You can imagine the awful cases that may be seen here. People are dying from exhaustion, from their surroundings, from complete neglect, and this in blessed Taurida!

One loses all relish for the sun and the sea…

TO O. L. KNIPPER

YALTA, March 26, 1900.

There is a feeling of black melancholy about your letter, dear actress; you are gloomy, you are fearfully unhappy – but not for long, one may imagine, as soon, very soon, you will be sitting in the train, eating your lunch with a very good appetite. It is very nice that you are coming first with Masha before all the others; we shall at least have time to talk a little, walk a little, see things, drink and eat. But please don’t bring with you …

I haven’t a new play, it’s a lie of the newspapers. The newspapers never do tell the truth about me. If I did begin a play, of course the first thing I should do would be to inform you of the fact.

There is a great wind here; the spring has not begun properly yet, but we go about without our goloshes and fur caps. The tulips will soon be out. I have a nice garden but it is untidy, moss-grown – a dilettante garden.

Gorky is here. He is warm in his praises of you and your theatre. I will introduce you to him.

Oh dear! Someone has arrived. A visitor has come in. Good-bye for now, actress!

TO HIS SISTER

YALTA, March 26, 1900.

DEAR MASHA,

… There is no news, there is no water in the pipes either. I am sick to death of visitors. Yesterday, March 25, they came in an incessant stream all day; doctors keep sending people from Moscow and the provinces with letters asking me to find lodgings, to “make arrangements,” as though I were a house-agent! Mother is well. Mind you keep well too, and make haste and come home.

TO O. L. KNIPPER

YALTA, May 20, 1900.

Greetings to you, dear enchanting actress! How are you? How are you feeling? I was very unwell on the way back to Yalta. [Footnote: Chekhov went to Moscow with the Art Theatre Company on their return from Yalta.] I had a bad headache and temperature before I left Moscow. I was wicked enough to conceal it from you, now I am all right.

How is Levitan? I feel dreadfully worried at not knowing. If you have heard, please write to me.

Keep well and be happy. I heard Masha was sending you a letter, and so I hasten to write these few lines. [Footnote: Chekhov’s later letters to O. L. Knipper have not been published.]

TO HIS SISTER

YALTA, September 9, 1900.

DEAR MASHA,

I answer the letter in which you write about Mother. To my thinking it would be better for her to go to Moscow now in the autumn and not after December. She will be tired of Moscow and pining for Yalta in a month, you know, and if you take her to Moscow in the autumn she will be back in Yalta before Christmas. That’s how it seems to me, but possibly I am mistaken; in any case you must take into consideration that it is much drearier in Yalta before Christmas than it is after – infinitely drearier.

Most likely I will be in Moscow after the 20th of September, and then we will decide. From Moscow I shall go I don’t know where – first to Paris, and then probably to Nice, from Nice to Africa. I shall hang on somehow to the spring, all April or May, when I shall come to Moscow again.

There is no news. There’s no rain either, everything is dried up. At home here it is quiet, peaceful, satisfactory, and of course dull.

“Three Sisters” is very difficult to write, more difficult than my other plays. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, perhaps something will come of it, next season if not this. It’s very hard to write in Yalta, by the way: I am interrupted, and I feel as though I had no object in writing; what I wrote yesterday I don’t like to-day…

Well, take care of yourself.

My humblest greetings to Olga Leonardovna, to Vishnevsky, and all the rest of them too.

If Gorky is in Moscow, tell him that I have sent a letter to him in Nizhni-Novgorod.

TO GORKY

YALTA, October 16, 1900.

DEAR ALEXEY MAXIMOVITCH,

… On the 21st of this month I am going to Moscow, and from there abroad. Can you imagine – I have written a play; but as it will be produced not now, but next season, I have not made a fair copy of it yet. It can lie as it is. It was very difficult to write “Three Sisters.” Three heroines, you see, each a separate type and all the daughters of a general. The action is laid in a provincial town, as it might be Perm, the surroundings military, artillery.

The weather in Yalta is exquisite and fresh, my health is improving. I don’t even want to go away to Moscow. I am working so well, and it is so pleasant to be free from the irritation I suffered from all the summer. I am not coughing, and am even eating meat. I am living alone, quite alone. My mother is in Moscow.

Thanks for your letters, my dear fellow, thanks very much. I read them over twice. My warmest greetings to your wife and Maxim. And so, till we meet in Moscow. I hope you won’t play me false, and we shall see each other.

God keep you.

MOSCOW,

October 22, 1901.

Five days have passed since I read your play (“The Petty Bourgeois”). I have not written to you till now because I could not get hold of the fourth act; I have kept waiting for it, and – I still have not got it. And so I have only read three acts, but that I think is enough to judge of the play. It is, as I expected, very good, written a la Gorky, original, very interesting; and, to begin by talking of the defects, I have noticed only one, a defect incorrigible as red hair in a red-haired man – the conservatism of the form. You make new and original people sing new songs to an accompaniment that looks second-hand, you have four acts, the characters deliver edifying discourses, there is a feeling of alarm before long speeches, and so on, and so on. But all that is not important, and it is all, so to speak, drowned in the good points of the play. Pertchihin – how living! His daughter is enchanting, Tatyana and Pyotr are also, and their mother is a splendid old woman. The central figure of the play, Nil, is vigorously drawn and extremely interesting! In fact, the play takes hold of one from the first act. Only God preserve you from letting anyone act Pertchihin except Artyom, while Alexeyev-Stanislavsky must certainly play Nil. Those two figures will do just what’s needed; Pyotr – Meierhold. Only Nil’s part, a wonderful part, must be made two or three times as long. You ought to end the play with it, to make it the leading part. Only do not contrast him with Pyotr and Tatyana, let him be by himself and them by themselves, all wonderful, splendid people independently of each other. When Nil tries to seem superior to Pyotr and Tatyana, and says of himself that he is a fine fellow, the element so characteristic of our decent working man, the element of modesty, is lost. He boasts, he argues, but you know one can see what sort of man he is without that. Let him be merry, let him play pranks through the whole four acts, let him eat a great deal after his work – and that will be enough for him to conquer the audience with. Pyotr, I repeat, is good. Most likely you don’t even suspect how good he is. Tatyana, too, is a finished figure, only (a) she ought really to be a schoolmistress, ought to be teaching children, ought to come home from school, ought to be taken up with her pupils and exercise-books, and (b) it ought to be mentioned in the first or second act that she has attempted to poison herself; then, after that hint, the poisoning in the third act will not seem so startling and will be more in place. Telerev talks too much: such characters ought to be shown bit by bit between others, for in any case such people are everywhere merely incidental – both in life and on the stage. Make Elena dine with all the rest in the first act, let her sit and make jokes, or else there is very little of her, and she is not clear. Her avowal to Pyotr is too abrupt, on the stage it would come out in too high relief. Make her a passionate woman, if not loving at least apt to fall in love…

July 29, 1902

I have read your play. [Footnote: “In the Depths.”] It is new and unmistakably fine. The second act is very good, it is the best, the strongest, and when I was reading it, especially the end, I almost danced with joy. The tone is gloomy, oppressive; the audience unaccustomed to such subjects will walk out of the theatre, and you may well say good-bye to your reputation as an optimist in any case. My wife will play Vassilisa, the immoral and spiteful woman; Vishnevsky walks about the house and imagines himself the Tatar – he is convinced that it is the part for him. Luka, alas! you must not give to Artyom. He will repeat himself in that part and be exhausted; but he would do the policeman wonderfully, it is his part. The part of the actor, in which you have been very successful (it is a magnificent part), should be given to an experienced actor, Stanislavsky perhaps. Katchalev will play the baron.

You have left out of the fourth act all the most interesting characters (except the actor), and you must mind now that there is no ill effect from it. The act may seem boring and unnecessary, especially if, with the exit of the strongest and most interesting actors, there are left only the mediocrities. The death of the actor is awful; it is as though you gave the spectator a sudden box on the ear apropos of nothing without preparing him in any way. How the baron got into the doss-house and why he is a baron is also not sufficiently clear.

Andreyev’s “Thought” is something pretentious, difficult to understand, and apparently no good, but it is worked out with talent. Andreyev has no simplicity, and his talent reminds me of an artificial nightingale. Skitalets now is a sparrow, but he is a real living sparrow…

TO S. P. DYAGILEV

YALTA, December 30, 1902.

… You write that we talked of a serious religious movement in Russia. We talked of a movement not in Russia but in the intellectual class. I won’t say anything about Russia; the intellectuals so far are only playing at religion, and for the most part from having nothing to do. One may say of the cultured part of our public that it has moved away from religion, and is moving further and further away from it, whatever people may say and however many philosophical and religious societies may be formed. Whether it is a good or a bad thing I cannot undertake to decide; I will only say that the religious movement of which you write is one thing, and the whole trend of modern culture is another, and one cannot place the second in any causal connection with the first. Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a great future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of years, in order that man may if only in the remote future come to know the truth of the real God – that is not, I conjecture, by seeking in Dostoevsky, but by clear knowledge, as one knows twice two are four. Modern culture is the first beginning of the work, while the religious movement of which we talked is a survival, almost the end of what has ceased, or is ceasing to exist. But it is a long story, one can’t put it all into a letter…

TO A. S. SUVORIN

MOSCOW, June 29, 1903.

… One feels a warm sympathy, of course, for Gorky’s letter about the Kishinev pogrom, as one does for everything he writes; the letter is not written though, but put together, there is neither youthfulness in it nor confidence, like Tolstoy’s.

July 1, 1903

You are reading belles-lettres now, so read Veresaev’s stories. Begin with a little story in the second volume called “Lizar.” I think you will be very much pleased with it. Veresaev is a doctor; I have got to know him lately. He makes a very good impression…

TO S. P. DYAGILEV

YALTA, July 12, 1903.

… I have been thinking over your letter for a long time, and alluring as your suggestion or offer is, yet in the end I must answer it as neither you nor I would wish.

I cannot be the editor of The World of Art, as I cannot live in Petersburg, … that’s the first point. And the second is that just as a picture must be painted by one artist and a speech delivered by one orator, so a magazine must be edited by one man. Of course I am not a critic, and I dare say I shouldn’t make a very good job of the reviews; but on the other hand, how could I get on in the same boat with Merezhkovsky, who definitely believes, didactically believes, while I lost my faith years ago and can only look with perplexity at any “intellectual” who does believe? I respect Merezhkovsky, and think highly of him both as a man and as a writer, but we should be pulling in opposite directions…

Don’t be cross with me, dear Sergey Pavlovitch: it seems to me that if you go on editing the magazine for another five years you will come to agree with me. A magazine, like a picture or a poem, must bear the stamp of one personality and one will must be felt in it. This has been hitherto the case in the World of Art, and it was a good thing. And it must be kept up…

TO K. S. STANISLAVSKY

YALTA, July 28, 1903.

… My play “The Cherry Orchard” is not yet finished; it makes slow progress, which I put down to laziness, fine weather, and the difficulty of the subject…

I think your part [Translator’s Note: Stanislavsky acted Lopahin.] is all right, though I can’t undertake to decide, as I can judge very little of a play by reading it…