Five or Six Days
Letter to AleXander Lazarev-Gruzinsky,25 Moscow, March 13, 1890
To write a story you need five or six days, during which time you must be thinking about it every moment, otherwise you will never be able to frame good sentences. Before it reaches the page, every sentence must spend two days in the brain, lying perfectly still and putting on weight. It goes without saying, of course, that I am too lazy to mind my own rule, but I do recommend it to you young writers, all the more so because I have experienced its beneficent results firsthand and know that the rough drafts of all true artists are a mess of deletions and corrections, marked up from top to bottom in a patchwork of cuts and insertions that are themselves re- crossed out and mangled.
A Year and Six Months
Letter to Lydia Avilova, St. Petersburg, February 15, 1895 Write your novel. Work on writing it for one year. Then spend half a month cutting it, and only after that should you have it published. As it is, you spend too little time detailing your work, whereas a writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.
Deadlines
Letter to Alexei Suvorin, Moscow, February 21, 1886 I write relatively little: no more than two or three very short stories per week. I will find a way to make time for writing for the New Times, but am glad that meeting deadlines is not one of your preconditions for my publishing in your paper. Deadlines produce haste and the feeling of a great weight pressing down on my neck, and both of these get in the way of writing.. Personally, deadlines do not work for me for the simple reason that I am a physician and am practicing medicine. . I cannot promise that tomorrow I might not have to spend the entire day away from my writing desk.. This is why there is always a danger that I will miss a deadline and fall behind schedule.
Never Rush
Letter to Alexei Pleshcheyev, Moscow, April 9, 1888
In any case, please let Anna Mikhailovna [Evreinova]26 know that if I am in no rush to deliver on my promise, it is only because I am not pleased with my work. I will send it just as
soon as I am satisfied or almost satisfied I would send her
the story now, but I really do not think it would be wise to rush. I am by nature cautious and suspicious; I am afraid to rush, and in general I am afraid to publish. I am always worrying that people will tire of me and I will turn into one of those ballast generators on the order of a Yasinsky, or Mamin, or Bazhin, etc., who, like myself, "had once inspired great hopes."27 This fear of mine is well founded: I have been publishing for a long time now, with around two hundred pounds of stories in print, but even at this late date I really cannot say I know my strengths and weaknesses.
SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
truth
Six Conditions
Letter to Alexander Chekhov, Moscow, May 10,1886
"The City of the Future" is a magnificent theme, new and interesting. If you do not get lazy, I think you will write a decent story, but damn it, you are such a lazybones! "The City of the Future" will be a work of art only on the condition that it have: (1) no politico-socio-economic logorrheic eruptions; (2) absolute objectivity; (3) truthful representation of characters and objects; (4) maximal conciseness; (5) boldness and originality; no clichкs; (6) sincerity.
Neither Cosmetician nor Entertainer
Letter to Maria Kiselyova, Moscow, January 14,1887 Your observation that the world "swarms with villains and villainesses" is correct. Human nature is imperfect, so it would be odd to show only the righteous elements. And to imagine that literature has the charge of picking the "pearls" out of a heap of scoundrels is tantamount to negating literature altogether. Literature is included among the arts because it depicts life as it actually exists. Its aim is truth— unconditional and honest. It would be as perilous to restrict its function to something so specialized as digging for "pearls" as it would be to require Levitan1 to paint a tree without including its dirty bark or yellowing leaves. I agree that a "pearl" is a very fine thing, but a writer, after all, is not a confectioner, nor a cosmetician, nor an entertainer. He is a human being who is contractually bound to honor his sense of duty and to follow the dictates of his conscience. Once in, he cannot back out; no matter how appalled he might be, he must overcome his squeamishness and be willing to dirty his imagination in the muck of life He is just like any ordinary journalist. What would you say if out of squeamishness or a desire to please his readers a journalist were to write only about honest politicians, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroad men?
To a chemist nothing in the world is impure. The writer must be just as objective as the chemist; he must free himself of everyday subjectivity, and he must know that manure plays a most respectable role in nature and that evil passions are just as much a part of life as virtues.
Facts and Artistic Conventions
Letter to Grigory Rossolimo, Yalta, October 11, 1899
There is no doubt in my mind that my medical work has had a serious impact on my writing; it has significantly broadened the scope of my observations and enriched me with knowledge whose value for me as a writer only a fellow physician can appreciate. It has also served as a guiding principle in my art; my intimacy with medicine has probably helped me avoid many mistakes. My familiarity with the natural sciences and the scientific method has always kept me on my guard. I have tried to be consistent with scientific data wherever possible—and where this was impossible, I have preferred not writing at all. Let me note, in this regard, that art does not always allow for total agreement with scientific data; death by poison cannot be represented onstage as it actually occurs in real life. However, some conformity with scientific facts should be perceptible even within the framework of artistic conventions. In other words, the reader or the spectator should be able to perceive that an artistic convention is at work, but also that the author is fully aware of the reality of the situation he is representing.
An Example
Letter to AleXei Suvorin, Moscow, October 25,1891 Had I been treating Prince Andrei,21 would have cured him. I find it bizarre to read that the wound of the Prince, a wealthy man in the constant care of a physician and nursed by Natasha and Sonya, should have given off the stench of a corpse. What a nasty business medicine was in those days. While writing his tremendous novel, Tolstoy must certainly have been filled with an unconscious hatred for medicine.