Letter to Nikolai Leykin, Moscow, December 24,1886 I have read the story by the new contributor Kulakov.15 I think he can write and has gotten the kinks out of his system. However, I do not like the fact that he makes his debut with alcoholism. Tell him that describing drunks just for the sake of using some drunken expressions is a kind of cynicism. There's no easier way of breaking into writing than on the backs of drunks.
Napoleon
Letter to Alexei Suvorin, Moscow, October 25, 1891
Every night I wake up and read War and Peace. I read with such curiosity and such naive astonishment that it is as if I had never read anything before. It is remarkably fine. Only, I do not like the passages where he writes about Napoleon. As soon as Napoleon makes an appearance, something strained creeps into the writing, along with all sorts of tricks to prove that he was much more stupid than in reality. Everything that Pierre, Prince Andrei, or even the utterly insignificant Nikolai Rostov say or do is good, intelligent, natural, and touching; everything Napoleon thinks and does is not natural, not intelligent, but inflated, and lacking in significance.
emotions
Cry but Without Letting the Reader Know You're Crying
Letter to Lydia Avilova, Melikhovo, April 29,1892
Yes, I did write you once that one should be unemotional when writing sad stories. And you did not understand me correctly. One may weep and moan over one's stories, one may suffer right along with one's protagonists, but I suggest, one must do so in a way the reader will not notice. The more objectivity you can muster, the more powerful will be the effect you produce. This is what I meant to say.
Knowing How to Suffer
Letter to Dmitry Grigorovich, Moscow, January 12, 1888 The suicide of a seventeen-year-old boy is a most intriguing and tempting topic, but one I find terrifying to tackle. Such a painful problem demands a painfully powerful response, but does "yours truly" really have the necessary inner resources to deal with it? No. When you promise success for this project, you are judging by your own resources. You overlook the fact that your generation can fall back not only on talent, but also on erudition, schooling, on "phosphorus and iron," while our generation has nothing of the sort, and, truth be told, one should rejoice that we steer clear of such serious subjects. Put your teenage suicide in their hands, and I'm sure that X, absolutely oblivious and with the most generous of intentions, will churn out a pile of slander, lies, and blasphemy; Y will throw in some vapid, pale moralizing; and Z will explain the suicide away as a psychosis. Your teenager is sweet, pure, and gentle by nature, searching for God, loving, sensitive, and hurt to the core of his being. To have a feel for this kind of person one must oneself know how to suffer, but our contemporary bards know only how to whine and snivel. As for me, I am all of the above, plus lazy and dim-witted.
Write with Emotional Restraint
Letter to Lydia Avilova, Moscow, March 1, 1893
You are making great progress, but allow me to repeat my advice: write with more self-restraint. The more emotionally charged a situation, the more emotional restraint one must use in writing, and then the result will be emotionally powerful. There is no need for laying it on thick.
Like a Strainer
Letter to Fyodor Batyushkov, Nice, December 15, 1897 You expressed a desire in one of your letters for me to send you an international story drawn from life in this part of the world. I can write such a story only in Russia, from memory. I can only write from memory and have never written directly from nature. I need to use my memory like a strainer so that it filters out everything that is unimportant and not specific.
The Topic Must Be New
Letter to Alexander Chekhov, Moscow, April 11, 1889 Keep in mind, by the way, that professions of love, spousal infidelities, and the tears of widows, orphans, and every other species have already been described. The topic must be new, even if there is no plot.
what to avoid
We Will Not Play the Quack
Letter to Ivan Leontyev (Shcheglov), Sumy, June 9, 1888
Apropos the ending of my "Fires," permit me to disagree with you.16 It is not the job of the psychologist to understand what he does not understand. Moreover, it is not the job of the psychologist to pretend that he understands what no one else in fact understands. We will not play the quack; instead, we will openly declare that one cannot make sense of anything in this world. Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand everything.
Don't Preach
Letter to AleXei Suvorin, Moscow, April 1,1890 You scold me for my objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideals and ideas, and so forth. When I am writing about horse thieves, you want me to say that it is evil to steal horses. However, everyone knows this already without my having to say so. Let the members of the jury pass their judgment. My job is merely to show what sort of people these horse thieves are. Here is what I write: we are dealing with horse thieves here, so bear in mind that they are not beggars but well-fed men, that they are members of a cult, and that for them stealing horses is not just thieving, but a passion. Certainly, it might be nice to combine art with preaching, but for me personally this is exceptionally difficult and technically next to impossible. After all, if I want to describe horse thieves in seven hundred lines, I have to talk and think and feel as they talk and think and feel; otherwise, if I let myself get subjective, my characters will fall apart and the story will not be as concise as all very short stories need to be. When I am writing, I rely entirely on my readers, and I trust them to fill in any subjective elements that might be missing.
Don't Teach
Letter to Alexei Suvorin, Melikhovo, July 28,1893 I did not end up writing a play based on life in Siberia and, in fact, forgot all about it, but I have gone ahead and submitted my "Sakhalin" for publication. I recommend it to your attention. Forget what you have already read of my work, because it is false. I have been writing for a long time, and I have been suspecting for a long time that I have been off course, but I have now finally figured out where I went wrong. The falseness is in my apparent desire to teach my reader something with my "Sakhalin" and, at the same time, in my hiding something and holding myself back. But as soon as I let myself describe how much of an eccentric I felt myself to be in Sakhalin and what swine those people are, then, at that point, I felt better and my work took off, even though it did turn out a touch humorous.
Ignore the Incidental
Letter to Alexei Suvorin, Melikhovo, April 26, 1893 Everything time-pegged in the work—all those digs at trendy critics and liberals, all those barbs trying to be pointed and timely, and all those allegedly profound insights scattered here and there—how shallow and naive they all are with respect to our present moment! This is what it all boils down to: the novelist who wants to be an artist must ignore everything that has a merely transitory significance.