You have only one failing, the cause of the lie you've been living, your troubles, and your intestinal catarrh. It's your extreme ill breeding. Please forgive me, but Veritas magis amicitiae. The thing is, life lays down certain conditions. If you want to feel at home among intellectuals, to fit in and not find their presence burdensome, you have to have a certain amount of breeding. Your talent has brought you into their midst. You belong there, but . . . you seem to yearn to escape and feel compelled to waver between the cultured set and your next-door neighbors. It's the bourgeois side of you coming out, the side raised on birch thrashings beside the wine cellar and handouts, and it's hard to overcome, terribly hard.
To my mind, well-bred people ought to satisfy the following conditions:
They respect the individual and are therefore always indulgent, gentle, polite and compliant. They do not throw a tantrum over a hammer or a lost eraser. When they move in with somebody, they do not act as if they were doing him a favor, and when they move out, they do not say, "How can anyone live with you!" They excuse noise and cold and overdone meat and witticisms and the presence of others in their homes.
Their compassion extends beyond beggars and cats. They are hurt even by things the naked eye can't see. If for instance, Pyotr knows that his father and mother are turning gray and losing sleep over seeing their Pyotr so rarely ( and seeing him drunk when he does turn up ), then he rushes home to them and sends his vodka to the devil. They do not sleep nights the better to help the Polevayevs,8 help pay their brothers' tuition, and keep their mother decently dressed.
They respect the property of others and therefore pay their
debts.
They are candid and fear lies like the plague. They do not lie even about the most trivial matters. A lie insults the listener and debases him in the liar's eyes. They don't put on airs, they behave in the street as they do at home, and they do not try to dazzle their inferiors. They know how to keep their mouths shut and they do not force uninvited confidences on people. Out of respect for the ears of others they are more often silent than not.
They do not belittle themselves merely to arouse sympathy. They do not play on people's heartstrings to get them to sigh and fuss over them. They do not say, "No one understands me!" or "I've squandered my talent on trifles! I am [. . .1" because this smacks of a cheap effect and is vulgar, false and out-of-date.
They are not preoccupied with vain things. They are not taken in by such false jewels as friendships with celebrities, handshakes with drunken Plevako,9 ecstasy over the first person they happen to meet at the Salon de Varietes,10 popularity among the tavern crowd. They laugh when they hear, "I represent the press," a phrase befitting only Rod- zeviches and Levenbergs.11 When they have done a penny's worth of work, they don't try to make a hundred rubles out of it, and they don't boast over being admitted to places closed to others. True talents always seek obscurity. They try to merge with the crowd and shun all ostentation. Krylov himself said that an empty barrel has more chance of being heard than a full one.12
If they have talent, they respect it. They sacrifice comfort, women, wine and vanity to it. They are proud of their talent, and so they do not go out carousing with trade-school employees or Skvort- sov's13 guests, realizing that their calling lies in exerting an uplifting influence on them, not in living with them. What is more, they are fastidious.
They cultivate their aesthetic sensibilities. They cannot stand to fall asleep fully dressed, see a slit in the wall teeming with bedbugs, breathe rotten air, walk on a spittle-laden floor or eat off a kerosene stove. They try their best to tame and ennoble their sexual instinct . . . [. . .] to endure her logic and never stray from her. What's the point of it all? People with good breeding are not as coarse as that. What they look for in a woman is not a bed partner or horse sweat, [. . .] not the kind of intelligence that expresses itself in the ability to stage a fake pregnancy and tirelessly reel off lies. They—and especially the artists among them—require spontaneity, elegance, compassion, a woman who will be a mother, not a [. . .]. They don't guzzle vodka on any old occasion, nor do they go around sniffing cupboards, for they know they are not swine. They drink only when they are free, if the opportunity happens to present itself. For they require a mens sana in corpore sano.
And so on. That's how well-bred people act. If you want to be well-bred and not fall below the level of the milieu you belong to, it is not enough to read The Pickwick Papers and memorize a soliloquy from Faust. It is not enough to hail a cab and drive off to Yakimanka Street if all you're going to do is bolt out again a week later.
You must work at it constantly, day and night. You must never stop reading, studying in depth, exercising your will. Every hour is precious.
Trips back and forth to Yakimanka Street won't help. You've got to drop your old way of life and make a clean break. Come home. Smash your vodka bottle, lie down on the couch and pick up a book. You might even give Turgenev a try. You've never read him.
You must swallow your [. . .] pride. You're no longer a child. You'll be thirty soon. It's high time!
I'm waiting. . . . We're all waiting. . . .
Yours, A. Chekhov
Nikolai Pavlovich Chekhov (1858-89) was the second son of Pavel and Yevgenia Chekhov. As a child he showed talents for both art and music and was considered the most gifted of the Chekhov children. He was later a student at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he associated with some of the most promising young Russian artists of the time. However, he never completed his studies owing to chronic alcoholism and a fatal attraction for the Moscow equivalent of skid row, where he would disappear for weeks on end. Nikolai died at thirty-one of tuberculosis aggravated by alcoholism.
Zabelin was the name of the Zvenigorod town drunk.
The flutist Alexander Ivanenko was for many years a close friend of the entire Chekhov family; Mishka is Chekhov's brother Mikhail, according to whose memoirs Nelly (her full name was Yelena Markova) was a pretty girl with whom Nikolai was once involved romantically, the niece of a hospitable lady to whose villa in the city of Zvenigorod all Chekhov brothers were frequently invited.
Nicholas Voutsina was an ex-pirate who operated a Greek school in Taganrog which Nikolai and Anton attended for one year in their childhood, with rather disastrous results.
The pianist Niktopoleon Dolgov was Ivanenko's usual accompanist.
A Moscow journalist.
The Chekhov family resided on Yakimanka Street at the time; "the man who bolts" from there is Nikolai Chekhov.
At the time of publication of the twenty-volume edition of Chekhov's works in 1944-51, Maria Chekhov informed the editors that she remembered the Polevayevs as a family which had "played a negative role" in the lives of her brothers Alexander and Nikolai.
Fyodor Plevako was a celebrated trial lawyer of the period.
A Moscow night club, which also functioned as a pickup point for ladies of the night. Chekhov described it in a memorable piece of journalism that appeared in Spectator in October of 1881 with illustrations by Nikolai Chekhov.