THE SELECTED LETTERS OF
ANTON CHEKHOV
THE
SELECTED LETTERS OF
ANTON CHEKHOV
EDITED BY LILLIAN HELLMAN TRANSLATED BY SIDONIE LEDERER
NEW YORK
FARRAR, STRAUS AND COMPANY
©
First printing, 1955
Copyright 1955 by Lillian Hellman
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book in any form
Library of Congress catalog card number 55-5563
Manufactured in the United States of America American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., New York
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
For the most part the translator has used the excellent and definitive text of the new edition of Chekhov's works, in twenty volumes, published in the USSR from 1944 to 1951, of which volumes 13 through 20 are devoted to his letters. These eight volumes contain 4,200 communications (mostly letters, plus a few postcards and telegrams), a number of which are pub- lished here for the first time in English, along with many pre- viously known letters that contain passages not previously printed.
In a few letters appearing in the Soviet edition, certain pas- sages found in earlier editions have been deleted; in such cases the translator has, of course, used the older edition and has restored the omitted words. On the whole, however, the new Soviet edition returns to the letters much that older texts had left out. \Vhere brackets occur, they contain explanatory re- marks on the part of the editor, or indicate by [. . .] omissions common to both old and new texts. Sometimes, from their con- text, it is plain that these brackets refer to deletions of "four letter" words; at other times it is not possible to determine whether words, sentences or even paragraphs have been sup- pressed.
CONTENTS
Translator's Note v
Introduction by Lillian Hellman
Biographical Notes XXIX
The Selected Letters
1885-1890
3
1890-1897
87
1897-1904
201
Index 327
INTRODUCTION
When I was young we used to play a game called what-famous- writer-would-you-most-like-to-have-dinner-with? and a lot of our choices seem surprising to me now, though we stuck pretty close to serious writers as a rule and had sense enough to limit our visiting time to the dinner table. Maybe we knew even then that writers are often difficult people and a Tolstoy—on too big a scale—might become tiresome, and a Dickens unpleasant, and a Stendhal—with his nervous posturing—hard to stand, and a Proust too special, and a Dostoevski too complex. You can argue that greatness and simplicity often go hand in hand, but simple people can be difficult too and by and large the quality of a man's work seems to have little to do with the pleasure of his company. There are exceptions to this—thank God—and Anton Chekhov seems to have been one of them. I'd like to think I had picked him for dinner back in those young days. Or, better still, for many, many dinners.
Chekhov was a pleasant man, witty and wise and tolerant and kind, with nothing wishywashy in his kindness nor self righteous in his tolerance, and his wit was not ill-humored. He would have seen through you, of course, as he did through everybody, but being seen through doesn't hurt too much if it's done with affection. He was neurotic, but unlike most neurotic men he had few crotchets and no nuisance irritabilities, nor pride, nor side, nor aimless vanity, was unlikely to mistake scorched potatoes for high tragedy, didn't boast, had fine manners and was generous and gay. It is true that he complained a lot about his ailments and his lack of money, but if you had laughed at him he would have laughed with you. Such a nature is rare at all times, but it is particularly remarkable in a period when maudlin soul-searching was the intellectual fashion. Chekhov lived in the time that gave us our comic-strip picture of the Russian. 'Vhile many of his contemporaries were jabbering out the dark days and boozing away the white nights, turning revolutionary for Christmas and police spy for Easter, attacking too loudly here and worshiping too loudly there, wasting youth and talent in futile revolt against anything and everything with little thought and no selection, Anton Chekhov was a man of balance, a man of sense.
This is probably the most important thing to know about Chekhov. He was a man of sense, of common sense, in a place and time where only the bourgeoisie were proud of having com- mon sense, and they, of course, for the wrong reasons. To them the words meant the sense to conform, the sense to concur, the sense to reject all other ways of thinking as inferior or comic or dangerous. This wasn't Chekhov's kind of common sense— he tried to see things as they were and to deal with them as he saw them—but it was the kind of common sense that most nineteenth century intellectuals were in revolt against, and in revolting they did a lot of good. In Russia they helped get rid of serfdom and in America of slavery, in England they were changing life and laws and in France they were coping with a more difficult enemy than their eighteenth century parents had had to face. They were valuable men and fools; heroes and clowns; for every five sincere competent idealists there were five incompetent sick children. Together, good and bad, they floun- dered through the heavy seas they themselves had helped stir up, sometimes trying to meet new waves with a new twist of the body, sometimes deciding the waves had become too dangerous and it was time to make for shore. Conscience was their only guide and conscience is not a scientific instrument, at least not in the hands of intellectuals who are inclined to think their own consciences superior to others. The high-minded are often ad- mirable people but they are too often messy and noisy and confused, and this was their big day: a day of noble acts and silly high jinks, all at once, in the same group, in the same man.
The winds and waters of the nineteenth century social hurri- cane blew especially high in Russia and the scenery had gone hog wild. There was the magnificent side where the cliffs rose straight to Tolstoy and there were ugly places where men lay preaching gibberish to each other in the mud. Men screamed men down in Moscow and St. Petersburg with anti-Orthodox reason that sounded very like Orthodox prayers. Students were in an uproar, society in a dither, dandies contradicted each other in French so elegant that it would not have been understood in the Boulevard St. Germain. Priests led their villages in angry revolt, rich young men gave their property to the poor, men threw bombs in the belief that murder solved tyranny. The reaction was as violent as the uproar: universities cruelly pun- ished their students, the government sent even the mildest protestants into exile and penal colonies.
It is not easy to understand nineteenth century Russia. Few of us know the language or have roots in it. Nor do many of us know much Russian history, and our schools teach us very little. There were few good observers or critics or historians; and few casual travelers, like a grandmother who might have visited Florence or Athens, or been born in Frankfort or Dublin, and lived to tell us a little of what she saw. Even late in the century —a period close to us everywhere else in the \Vestern world— Russian life and Russian thought seemed to spring from sources more mysterious than seventeenth century England or France or Italy. Hamlet is closer to us than Papa Karamazov. \Ve walk through the doors of Elsinore, but we have to be shoved into the Karamazov house, even though the doors were put into place by a man no older than our own grandfather. The agony of Othello could be our agony, but the agony of Raskolnikov is not ours and we give ourselves over to it with an effort. The space between America-Europe and Russia has always been wide. It is probably no wider now than it was seventy-five years ago.