Figures and Background
Letter to AleXei Suvorin, Moscow, October 27, 1888 I start writing the story on September 10 with the idea of finishing by October 5 at the very latest. If I miss the deadline, I will have broken my word and end up with no money. I begin calmly, un-self-consciously, but somewhere along the middle, I start to get nervous and start worrying the story might be getting too long. I remember that the Northern Herald does not have a lot of money and that I am one of its more expensive contributors. This is why the beginning always seems more promising, as if I were writing a novel; the middle is a timid jumble, and the end is an explosion of fireworks, just like a brief sketch. Like it or not, when you're putting a story together, you first worry about the framework: from a crowd of heroes and quasi-heroes you pick out a single figure—a wife or a husband—and you place that figure against a background and then you develop and accentuate it. The rest of the characters you scatter across the background like so much small change, and then you end up with something like a night sky: one big moon in the center of a crowd of very tiny stars. But the moon does not work because it can only make sense if the stars make sense, and meanwhile the stars are not clearly enough worked out.. So what should I do? I do not know. I just do not know. I will just have to trust in the healing power of time.
Figures and Crowds
Letter to Maxim Gorky, Yalta, February 9, 1900 You need to see more, know more, and broaden the scope of what you know. You have an imagination with a long reach and a powerful grasp, but it is like a big oven that never gets enough kindling. This comes across in all your work, but especially so in your stories. You've got two or three characters in your story, but they stand apart from the rest of the crowd. What is obvious is that these characters—and only these characters—have come alive in your imagination, while the crowd somehow remains untouched. I make an exception for your Crimean pieces ("My Fellow Traveler," for instance), where one has a sense not only of the main figures, but also of the human crowd from which they emerge, and of the air, the background, in short—of the whole.
Mocking the Characters
Letter to Alexei Suvorin, Melikhovo, February 24, 1893 Aside from Bazarov's old mother.. .and mothers in general— and especially the society ladies who, incidentally, are all alike (Liza's mother, Elena's mother), and Lavretsky's mother, a former serf girl, and the simple peasant women—all of
Turgenev's women and girls are unbearably artificial and, forgive me, false.9 Liza and Elena are not Russian girls, but some sort of pontificating Pythian priestesses overflowing with pretensions entirely beyond their station in life. Irina in Smoke, Odintsova in Fathers and Sons, and all those torrid, appetizing, insatiable, eternally questing lionesses are total nonsense. Just recall Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and you will send all of Turgenev's young ladies, seductive shoulders and all, straight to hell. By contrast, Turgenev's negative female types—the ones he caricatures (Kukshina) or mocks (in his ballroom scenes)—are strikingly rendered and could not be more to the point.
Local Officials
Letter to Maxim Gorky, Yalta, January 3, 1899 Never write about zemstvo officials.10 Nothing is easier than writing about obnoxious officials. Readers just love this topic—but these are only the most disagreeable, the most untalented sorts of readers.
Female Characters
Letter to Vladimir Korolenko, Moscow, January 9,1888 Your "Sakhalin Fugitive,"11 I think, is the most outstanding work to appear of late.. In your book you are such a solid artist, such a powerhouse that even your most prominent shortcomings pass unnoticed, though they would be the undoing of any lesser artist. For instance, I only just recently nosed out the fact that in your entire book female characters are stubbornly missing.
Doctors and Patients
Letter to Elena Shavrova, Melikhovo, February 28, 1895 I also think that it is not the job of the artist to take people to task for being sick. After all, am I to blame if I have a migraine? Is Sidor to blame for coming down with S,12 for being more susceptible to it than Taras? Is Akulina to blame for the tuberculosis in her bones? No one is to blame, but even if someone were, then it would be the health officials and not the artists.
The physicians in your story behave abominably. You make them forget doctor-patient confidentiality; what's more, you have them force a seriously ill and paralyzed patient to travel to town And the ladies in your story regard
S as if it were the devil incarnate. That is not right. S is not a vice, it is not the result of malice: it is a disease, and those suffering from S need warm, compassionate care. It is wrong for a wife to desert her sick husband with the excuse that he has a contagious or revolting sickness. Of course, she can regard S any way she chooses, but the author is obliged to be humane to the very tips of his fingers.
Incidentally, do you know that influenza ravages the organism in ways that are far from insignificant? There are quite a few things in nature than are harmful and hereditary. Even breathing can be harmful. For myself personally I stand by the following rule: I write about patients only if they are characters or if they contribute something vivid to the description. I am afraid of scaring people with illnesses.
Successes and Failures
Letter to AleXei Suvorin, Moscow, November 3, 1888 Merezhkovsky calls my monk13—the one who composes hymns—a failure. How is he a failure? God grant everyone a life like his: he had faith in God, enough to eat, and the
gift of composing Classifying people into successes and
failures means looking at human nature from a narrow, biased point of view. . Are you a success or not? Am I? And what about Napoleon? And your Vasily?14 What is the criterion here? You have to be God to tell the successes from the failures without making a mistake.. I am off to the ball.
Drunks