Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

Captivated by the Circassian Levitan, you have completely forgotten that you promised my brother Ivan you would come on the 1st of June, and you do not answer my sister’s letter at all. I wrote to you from Moscow to invite you, but my letter, too, remained a voice crying in the wilderness. Though you are received in aristocratic society, you have been badly brought up all the same, and I don’t regret having once chastised you with a switch. You must understand that expecting your arrival from day to day not only wearies us, but puts us to expense. In an ordinary way we only have for dinner what is left of yesterday’s soup, but when we expect visitors we have also a dish of boiled beef, which we buy from the neighbouring cooks.

We have a magnificent garden, dark avenues, snug corners, a river, a mill, a boat, moonlight, nightingales, turkeys. In the pond and river there are very intelligent frogs. We often go for walks, during which I usually close my eyes and crook my right arm in the shape of a bread-ring, imagining that you are walking by my side.

… Give my greetings to Levitan. Please ask him not to write about you in every letter. In the first place it is not magnanimous on his part, and in the second, I have no interest whatever in his happiness.

Be well and happy and don’t forget us. I have just received your letter, it is filled from top to bottom with such charming expressions as: “The devil choke you!” “The devil flay you!” “Anathema!” “A good smack,” “rabble,” “overeaten myself.” Your friends — such as Trophim — with their cabmen’s talk certainly have an improving influence on you.

You may bathe and go for evening walks. That’s all nonsense. All my inside is full of coughs, wet and dry, but I bathe and walk about, and yet I am alive….

TO L. S. MIZINOV.

(Enclosing a photograph of a young man inscribed “To Lida from Petya.”)

PRECIOUS LIDA!

Why these reproaches! I send you my portrait. To-morrow we shall meet.

Do not forget your Petya. A thousand kisses!!!

I have bought Chekhov’s stories. How delightful! Mind you buy them.

Remember me to Masha Chekhov. What a darling you are!

TO THE SAME.

I love you passionately like a tiger, and I offer you my hand.

  Marshal of Nobility,

  GOLOVIN RTISHTCHEV.

P.S. — Answer me by signs. You do squint.

TO HIS SISTER.

BOGIMOVO,

June, 1891.

Masha! Make haste and come home, as without you our intensive culture is going to complete ruin. There is nothing to eat, the flies are sickening. The mongoose has broken a jar of jam, and so on, and so on.

All the summer visitors sigh and lament over your absence. There is no news…. The spiderman is busy from morning to night with his spiders. He has already described five of the spider’s legs, and has only three left to do. When he has finished with spiders he will begin upon fleas, which he will catch on his aunt. The K’s sit every evening at the club, and no hints from me will prevail on them to move from the spot.

It is hot, there are no mushrooms. Suvorin has not come yet….

Come soon for it is devilishly dull. We have just caught a frog and given it to the mongoose. It has eaten it.

TO MADAME KISELYOV.

ALEXIN,

July 20, 1891.

Greetings, honoured Marya Vladimirovna.

For God’s sake write what you are doing, whether you are all well and how things are in regard to mushrooms and gudgeon.

We are living at Bogimovo in the province of Kaluga…. It’s a huge house, a fine park, the inevitable views, at the sight of which I am for some reason expected to say “Ach!” A river, a pond with hungry carp who love to get on to the hook, a mass of sick people, a smell of iodoform, and walks in the evenings. I am busy with my Sahalin; and in the intervals, that I may not let my family starve, I cherish the muse and write stories. Everything goes on in the old way, there is nothing new. I get up every day at five o’clock, and prepare my coffee with my own hands — a sign that I have already got into old bachelor habits and am resigned to them. Masha is painting, Misha wears his cockade creditably, father talks about bishops, mother bustles about the house, Ivan fishes. On the same estate with us there is living a zoologist called Wagner and his family, and some Kisilyovs — not the Kisilyovs, but others, not the real ones.