However, I have let my tongue run away with me. God keep you!
Your A. Chekhov
To ALEXEI SUVORIN
May jo, 1888, Sumy
Lintvareva's summer place ... I am living on the banks of the Psel in the wing of an old feudal country home. I hired the place sight unseen, hoping for the best, and thus far have not regretted it. The river is wide, deep, teeming with islands, fish and crayfish, the banks are beautiful and there is much greenery. But its chief virtue is its sense of spaciousness, which is such that it seems to me my hundred rubles have given me the right to live amidst a limitless expanse. Nature and life hereabouts are of a pattern that editors are rejecting as old-fashioned, let alone the nightin- gales, which sing day and night, the distant barking of dogs. the old neglected gardens, the tightly boarded, very sad and poetic country places, where dwell the souls of beautiful women, the venerable, doddering feudal retainers and the young girls athirst for the most conventional type of love; not far from here we even have such a worn-out device of romance as a watermill (sixteen wheels), along with a miller and his daughter who keeps sitting at her window, obviously waiting for something to happen. Everything I see and hear about me seems like the an- cient tales and fairy stories I have known for so long. The only novelty is the presence of a mysterious bird—the water-bittern —that hides amongst the reeds in the distance and day and night utters a cry that is a cross between a blow on an empty barrel and the bellowing of a cow locked in a bam. Every Little Russian claims to have seen this bird during his lifetime, but each describes it differently, so actually no one has seen it. There is another novelty, too, but a superficial one, and maybe not so new, either.
Every day I row my boat to the mill, while evenings I make for the islands with fishermen fans from the Kharitonenko works to catch fish. The talk is interesting. \Vhitsunday Eve all the addicts are spending the night on the island to fish the night through: me too. There are some superb types.
My landlords have proved to be very fine, hospitable people. It is a family worth studying, and consists of six persons. The old mother is a very kind, rather faded and long-suffering woman; she reads Schopenhauer and goes to church to hear the Song of Praise, conscientiously cons every issue of the "Herald of Europe" and "Northern Herald," is acquainted with writers I never dreamed existed; considers it noteworthy that the artist Makovski once lived in the wing of her house and that now it houses a young man of letters; in conversing with Pleshcheyev feels a sacred tremor throughout her body and rejoices every instant that she has been "found worthy" to behold the great poet.
Her oldest daughter, a woman physician, is the pride of the whole household, and a saint, as the peasants call her, a truly unusual figure. She has a tumor on the brain which has ren- dered her completely blind; she suffers from epilepsy and con- stant headaches. She knows what awaits her, and speaks of her imminent death stoically in astounding cold blood. In my prac- tice I have become accustomed to see people near death and have always had a sort of queer feeling when those about to die speak, smile, or cry in my presence, but here, when I see this blind figure on the terrace laughing, joking or listening to my "In the Twilight" being read to her, I always have a queer feeling not about this good lady doctor's dying, but about our own unawareness of approaching death, and writing "In the Twilight" as though we would never die.
The second daughter is also a woman doctor and an old maid, a quiet, shy, infinitely good, tender and homely being. Sick people are an absolute torment to her, and she is practi- cally psychotic in her anxiety about them. At consultations we never agree: I am the messenger of cheer where she sees death, and I double the doses she gives. \Vhere death is indeed obvious and inevitable my lady doctor's reaction is quite undoctorlike. One day I took over the sick from her at the medical clinic; a young Little Russian woman appeared with a malignant tumor of the glands on her cheek and at the nape of her neck. The affliction had spread to so many areas that any treatment would have been futile. And because this farm woman now felt no pain, but would die six months hence in frightful torment, the lady doctor looked at her with such a guilty expression that she seemed to be apologizing for her own health, ashamed of the helplessness of medical science. She attends to the housekeeping conscientiously and understands it in all its smallest details. She even knows horses. For example, when the side horse won't pull or starts getting restless, she will advise the coachman how to take care of the matter. She dearly loves family life, which it has not been her fate to enjoy, and dreams of it, I think; on nights when there are games and songs in the big house, she strides up and down along the dark avenue of trees quickly and nervously like a caged animal. I don't believe she would ever harm a fly, and to my mind never has been or will be happy for a single minute.
The third daughter, who was graduated from the college in Bestuzhevka, is a young girl of masculine frame, strong, bony as a shad, well muscled, tanned and vociferous . . . . She laughs so loud you can hear her half a mile off. A super-Ukrainimaniac. She has built a school on the estate at her own expense and teaches little Little Russians Krylov's fables translated into Little Russian. . . . She hasn't cut her hair, wears a corset and a bustle, busies herself with domestic duties, loves to sing and roar with laughter and doesn't deny herself the most conven- tional sort of love, despite her having read Marx; but it's scarcely likely she'll get married, she is so homely.
The oldest son is a quiet, modest, bright, unlucky and hard- working young person, unpretentious and apparently satisfied with what life has given him. He does not boast of his being expelled for political activity during his fourth year at the university.! He says little, loves domestic life and the earth and
1 Undergraduate political activity, always radical, was considered, in those days, a mark of intellectual and moral distinction.
lives peaceably with his Little Russian neighbors.
The second son is a young man and a fanatic on the subject of Tchaikovski's genius. A pianist. He aspires to the Tolstoyan life. . . .
Pleshcheyev is my guest now. People regard him as a demi- god, envy the great good fortune of some bumpkin who hap- pens to attract his attention, bring him Howers, invite him everywhere and so on. Young Vata, a boarding school girl from Poltava who is visiting our landlady, is paying particular court to him. He "listens and eats" and smokes cigars which give his worshipers a headache. He is stiff in his movements and senilely indolent, but this does not deter the fair sex from taking boat- rides with him, bearing him off to neighboring estates and sing- ing him romantic ballads. He cuts the same figure here as he does in St. Petersburg, i.e., an icon which is worshipped because it happens to be old and once hung in the company of miracle- working icons. Personally I regard him as a receptacle full of traditions, interesting memoirs and platitudes, but at the same time a very kind, warm, sincere person . . . .
What you write about "The Lights" is perfectly true. Nikolai and Masha are overemphasized, but what can I do? Unaccus- tomcd as I am to writing lengthily I become overanxious; when I do, the thought that my talc is disproportionately long always scarcs mc and I attempt to writc as tersely as I can. Kisochka's last scene with the engineer seemed to me an insignificant detail encumbering the story, and so I threw it out, substituting Nikolai and Masha for it.