Well, that will be enough for the first time. There is nothing new, my health is not bad. What's with Lika? Does she want to go to Milan?
Keep well. Kindest regards to all.
Yes, one more observation: Russians are recognized here by their frequent use of "donc" and "deja." It sounds bad, trite. They also say "ce n'est pas vrai"—"that is not true." But for a Frenchman such an expression is too coarse, not an expression of doubt or incredulity, as it is with us, but opprobrious. If you wish to express doubt or incredulity you must say, "C'est im- possible, monsieur."
I am doing a little writing.
Did Mama get the cards? If you wish me to bring or send any cosmetics or artists' supplies when the opportunity presents, write me what you need. I can bring in a whole box full of paints duty free and here all of this material is first-rate and not expensive.
Agreez l'assurance de rna parfaite consideration.
Antoine Tchekhoff
To ANNA SUVORINA
November /o, /897, Nice
Dear Anna Ivanovna,
Thank you very much for the letter, which I am answering immediately upon reading. You ask about my health. I feel ex- tremely fit, outwardly (I believe) I am completely well, my mis- fortune is that I cough blood. I don't cough it in any quantity, but it persists for a long time and my last attack, which is still upon me, began about three weeks ago. Because of it I must subject myself to various deprivations; I don't leave the house after three in the afternoon, don't drink, don't eat anything hot, don't walk fast, am never anywhere except on the street, in short, I am not living but vegetating. This naturally annoys me and puts me in a bad temper; and it seems to me that at dinner the Russians here speak nonsense and banalities, and I have to control myself not to answer impertinently.
But for the Lord's sake, don't tell anyone about the coughing, this is between ourselves. I write home that I am entirely well; declaring anything to the contrary would not make sense, since I do feel fine—and if they find out at home about my losing blood, there will be loud outcries.
Now you want to know about that little affair of mine. In
Biarritz I picked up a young lady of nineteen, named Margot, to teach me French; when we bade each other farewell she said she would be in Nice without fail. She probably is here, but I just cannot find her and so—I am not speaking French.
The weather here is heavenly. It is hot, calm, charming. The musical competitions are under way. Bands march along the streets, which are full of excitement, dancing and laughter. I look at all this and think to myself how silly I was not to have lived abroad more. I now believe, if I remain alive, I will no longer spend winters in Moscow, no matter what the induce- ments. The minute October comes around, out I go from Rus- sia. I am not inspired by the natural beauty hereabouts, which I find alien, but I passionately love warmth, and I love culture. . . . And culture here oozes out of every shop window, every willow basket; every dog has the odor of civilization.
. . . Don't be so proud and majestic, write me as often as you can. I need letters. I kiss your hand a hundred hundred times, wish you happiness and again thank you.
Yours heart and soul,
A. Chekhov
To ALEXEI SUVORIN
January 4, 1898, Nice
This is my program: the end of January (old style) or, more likely, the beginning of February, I am going to Algeria, Tunis, etc., then return to Nice, where I will expect you (you wrote you were coming to Nice), then after a stay here we will go to Paris together, if you like, whence on the "lightning" to Russia in time to usher in Easter. Your last letter arrived here un- sealed.
I am very rarely in Monte Carlo, say once in three or four weeks. The first days, when Sobolevski and Nemirovich were here, I played a very moderate game (rouge et noir) and would return home occasionally with fifty or a hundred francs, but then I had to give it up, as it exhausts me—physically.
The Dreyfus affair has seethed and died down, but hasn't yet got back onto the right track. Zola is a noble spirit and I (a member of the syndicate and in the pay of Jews to the extent of a hundred francs) am in raptures over this outburst. France is a wonderful country, and its writers are wonderful. . . .
\Ve have with us Hirshman, the Kharkov oculist, the well- knowra philanthropist and friend of Koni, a saintly man who is on a visit to his tuberculous son. I have been seeing him and talking with him, but his wife is a nuisance, a fussy dim-witted woman, as tedious as forty thousand wives. There is a Russian woman artist here who draws me in caricature about ten or fifteen times a day.
Judging from the extract published in "New Times," Leo Tolstoy's article on art doesn't sound interesting. It is all old stuff. Saying of art that it has grown decrepit, drifted into a blind alley, that it isn't what it ought to be, and so forth and so on, is the same as saying that the desire to eat and drink has grown obsolete, seen its day and isn't what it ought to be. Of course hunger is an old story, and in our desire to eat we have entered a blind alley, but still we have to do it and we will keep on eating, whatever the philosophers and angry old men may go to the trouble of saying.
Keep well.
Yours,
A. Chekhov
To ALEXEI SUVORIN
February 6, i8g8, Nice
A few days ago I saw a striking announcement on the first page of "New Times" on the forthcoming issue of "Cosmopolis," which will contain my story, "On A Visit." To begin with, my story isn't called "On A Visit" but "Visiting with Friends." In the second place, this sort of publicity goes against the grain; let alone the fact that the story itself is far from unusual, being one of those things you grind out one per day.
You write you are provoked with Zola, while here the gen- eral feeling is as though a new, better Zola had come into being. In this trial oЈ his he has cleaned off all his external grease spots with turpentine, as it were, and now gleams before the French in his true brilliance. He has a purity and moral elevation which no one had suspected. Just trace the whole scandal from the very beginning. The degradation of Dreyfus, whether just or otherwise, had a depressing, dismal effect on everyone (among others on you, too, as I recall). At the time of his sentencing Dreyfus conducted himself like an honorable, well-disciplined officer, while others present, the journalists, for instance, yelled at him, "Shut up, you Judas!" i.e., behaved scandalously. Everybody came away dissatisfied and left the courtroom with a troubled conscience. Particularly dissatisfied was Dreyfus' defense attorney, Demange, an honest man, who even during the preliminary hearing had felt something was wrong behind the scenes; then there were the experts, who, to convince them- selves that they were not mistaken, spoke only of Dreyfus, of his guilt, and kept roaming through Paris, roaming. . . . Of the experts, one turned out to be crazy, the author of a gro- tesque, absurd scheme, two were eccentrics. The logic of the situation was such that one was bound to question the intelli- gence bureau of the War Ministry, that military consistory de- voted to spy hunting and reading other people's letters; then people started saying that Sandher, the bureau chief, was aficted with progressive paralysis; Paty de Clam turned out to be almost a counterpart of the Berliner, Tausch; and Picquart resigned, suddenly and mysteriously. A regular series of gross errors of justice came to light, as though purposely arranged. People became convinced, little by little, that Dreyfus had really been condemned on the basis of a secret document which had not been shown either to the defendant or to his attorney— and law-abiding people looked upon this as a basic breach of justice; had that letter been written even by the sun itself, not to speak of Wilhelm, it still should have been shown to Demange. Everyone had wild guesses as to the contents of this letter and cock-and-bull stories were current. Dreyfus was an officer, and so the military expected the worst; Dreyfus was a Jew—the Jews expected the worst. . . . All the talk was of mili- tarism, of the yids. . . . Such profoundly distrusted people as Drumont held their heads high; an evil plant began g.-owing in the soil of anti-Semitism, in a soil stinking of the slaughter- house. \Vhen something does not go well with us, we look for reasons outside of us and have no trouble finding them: "It's the French who are ruining us, the yids, Wilhelm. . . . Capital, bogeymen, Masons, the syndicate, the Jesuits—these are all spectres, but hmv they do assuage our uneasy minds! These things are a bad sign, of course. Once the French started talking about yids, or the syndicate, it was an indication that they felt all was not well, that some worm was gnawing underneath, that they needed such spectres to appease their troubled consciences. Then this Esterhazy, a brawler out of Turgenev, an insolent, doubtful character, a man despised by his comrades, the striking similarity of his handwriting with that of the document, the letters of the Uhlan, the threats he chose not to carry out for reasons of his own, finally the strange decision, made in absolute secrecy, that the document was written in Esterhazy's handwrit- ing but not by his hand. . . . The gases were accumulating, and people began feeling acute tension, an oppressive closeness in the air. The scuffle in the court was a pure manifestation of nerves, simply a hysterical consequence of this tension. Zola's letter and his trial are also aspects of this same situation. \Vhat would you want? It is for the best people, always ahead of their nations, to be the first to sound the alarm—and this is just what happened. First to speak up was Scherer-Koestner, whom the French, knowing him, call (in Kovalevski'sl words) a "Caucas- ian dagger"—he is so shiningly clean and flawless. Zola was the second. And now he is on trial.