I sent Khudekov a story for a hundred rubles which I ask you not to read. I'm ashamed of it. Last night I sat down to write a tale for "New Times," but some dame appeared and bore me off to Pluschikha to see Palmin the poet, who in a state of drunk- enness fell and fractured his forehead. I fooled around with this drunken character for a good one-and-a-half to two hours, wore myself out, stank of iodoform, got into a bad temper and re- turned home tired to death. Today it would be too late to do the story. On the whole I lead a tedious life and am beginning to feel hatred from time to time, something that has never hap- pened to me before. Long, silly conversations, guests, people asking for help, to the tune of one-, two- and three-ruble con- tributions, money spent on cabs to visit patients who don't pay me a kopek—in short, everything is in such a muddle that one feels like running out of the house. People get loans and don't repay them, take away my books, have no regard for my time. . . . All I lack is an unhappy love affair. . . .
You will get this letter on the first day of Christmas, and may I wish you a merry one. Have a good rest. My sister sends her compliments to you, Anna Ivanovna and the children. I also salute you most humbly and remain your bored
A. Chekhov
To ALEXEI SUVORIN
December 26, /888, l\1oscow . . . You write that one should work not for criticism but for the public, and that it's too soon for me to complain. It is pleasant to think that one works for the public, of course, but how do I know that I am actually doing so? What with its scantiness and some other qualities, I myself do not feel any satisfaction in my work; the public, though (I did not call it ignoble), is unscrupulous and insincere in its attitude toward us; you will never hear the truth from it and so you can't figure out whether or not it needs me. It may be early for me to com- plain, but never too early to ask myself whether I am engaged in serious business or nonsense. Criticism is silent, the public lies and my own instinct tells me I am busying myself with trash. Do I complain? I don't recall the tone of my letter, but if I did so, I complained not on my own behalf but for all our writing fraternity, whom I pity infinitely.
All week I have been as mean as a son of a bitch. Hemorr- hoids accompanied by itching and bleeding, visitors, Palmin and his fractured skull, tedium. On the first evening of the holiday I hovered over a sick man who died before my eyes. On the whole, there have been plenty of morbid motifs. Spite- fulness is a type of pusillanimity. I confess it and curse myself. Above all I am vexed with myself for letting you into the secrets of my melancholy, very uninteresting and shameful for one of my years, which the poets have exalted as a time of bloom.
I will try to do a story for you by the New Year, and soon after the first will send "The Princess."
You should print one-act plays in the summertime only, not in winter.
You wish me to turn Sasha loose at all costs. But surely "Ivanov" can hardly be put on in that form. If it can be done, then by all means I will do as you wish, but please excuse me if I give it to her properly, the nasty creature! (You say that women love out of compassion and marry out of compassion. And how about men? I don't care to have realistic novelists slander women, but I don't like it either when people like Yuzhin lift womankind onto their shoulders and attempt to show that even when she is worse than a man, the man is nevertheless a scoundrel and the woman an angel. Both men and women are a dime a dozen, except that man is more intel- ligent and just.)
. . . My painter continues in the same condition.
In the autumn I am moving to Petersburg and am taking
my mother and sister along. I have to do some serious work . . . .
Don't be angry with me and forgive my melancholy, which I don't find attractive either. It has been evoked in me by cir- cumstances over which I had no control.
Read me a moral lecture and don't apologize. If you knew how often I read moral lectures to young people in my letters! I have even made a habit of it. I have long, redundant, over- fancy phrases, while you have short ones. Yours come out better .
. . . Goodbye. My greetings to Anna Ivanovna and all your family.
Heartily yours,
A. Chekhov
To ALEXEI SUVORIN
December 30, 1888, Moscow . . . The producer considers Ivanov1 a superfluous man in the Turgenev tradition; and Savina asks why Ivanov is a scoundrel. You write: "You have to endow Ivanov with some sort of quality which will make it apparent why he has two women hanging onto him and why he is a scoundrel, and why the doc- tor is a great man." IE you three people have understood me in this fashion, it means that my play is no good. My wit and reason have probably deserted me and I have not put down on paper what I have wished to write. If Ivanov emerges as a rogue or superfluous man, and the doctor as a great person, Sara's and Sasha's love for Ivanov is incomprehensible, obviously my play hasn't been properly realized and there can be no question of producing it.
I Ivanov. The main character of this play is a well-educated, liberal, humane man who, in spite of his excellent intentions, brings ruin on himself and those who love him. His wife, a Jewess, has given up her family and her fortune to marry him and, as the play opens, she is dying. Ivanov is in love with Sasha, a young girl who lives in the neighborhood. As Chekhov says, Sasha "is a woman who loves men in the period of their decline," and she loves the romantic chance to redeem a lost man. But he is a lost man, and in the end of the play he commits suicide.
This is how I understand my characters. Ivanov, an upper- class gentleman and a university man, was not remarkable in any way; he had an easily excitable nature, was fervent, with a strong bent for distractions, and honest and straightforward, like the majority of the educated upper class. He has been liv- ing in his country home and serving in the district council. What he has been doing and how he has been behaving, what has engrossed and fascinated him, is evident from these follow- ing words of his, addressed to the doctor (Act I, scene 5), "Don't marry a Jewess, or a psychopath, or a bluestocking . . . don't battle alone against thousands, don't tilt against windmills, don't knock your head against a wall . . . and may God save you from all kinds of scientific farming, progressive schools, im- passioned talk. ..." That's his past. Sara, who was witness to his scientific farming and other such ventures, speaks of him to the doctor: "He is a remarkable man, Doctor, and I am sorry you did not know him as he was two or three years ago. Now he is depressed and silent, he doesn't do anything, but . . . what a charmer he was then!" (Act I, scene 7). His past was admirable, as is the case with the majority of Russian intellec- tuals. There is scarcely a Russian gentleman or university grad- uate who could not boast of his past. The present is always worse than the past; and why? Because our excitability has one specific quality: it quickly gives way to exhaustion. A man who has hardly clambered off the school bench, rashly takes on a burden beyond his powers, simultaneously takes up schools, peasants, scientific farming and the "Herald of Europe," makes speeches, writes to the minister, struggles with evil, applauds the good, does not fall in love simply and any old way, but in- evitably with either bluestockings or psychopaths . . . or even prostitutes whom he tries to save from their fate, and so on and so forth. But hardly has he reached the age of thirty or thirty- five when he begins to feel weariness and ennui. He hasn't even cultivated decent moustaches but he says in a tone of authority, "Don't get married, old man. You'd better trust my experience." Or, "After all, in essence what is liberalism?" . . . Such is the tone of these prematurely exhausted people. Fur- ther, sighing very positively, he advises, "Don't marry thus and so (see one of the passages above), but choose something run-of- the-mill, grayish, without bright colors, without extra flour- ishes. . . . On the whole, try to plan a quiet life for yourself. The grayer, the more monotonous the background, the better. . . . But the life I have been leading, how wearing it has been!— how wearing!"