Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

My God! What a glorious thing “Fathers and Children” is! It is positively terrifying. Bazarov’s illness is so powerfully done that I felt ill and had a sensation as though I had caught the infection from him. And the end of Bazarov? And the old men? And Kukshina? It’s beyond words. It’s simply a work of genius. I don’t like the whole of “On the Eve,” only Elena’s father and the end. The end is full of tragedy. “The Dog” is very good, the language is wonderful in it. Please read it if you have forgotten it. “Acia” is charming, “A Quiet Backwater” is too compressed and not satisfactory. I don’t like “Smoke” at all. “The House of Gentlefolk” is weaker than “Fathers and Children,” but the end is like a miracle, too. Except for the old woman in “Fathers and Children” — that is, Bazarov’s mother — and the mothers as a rule, especially the society ladies, who are, however, all alike (Liza’s mother, Elena’s mother), and Lavretsky’s mother, who had been a serf, and the humble peasant woman, all Turgenev’s girls and women are insufferable in their artificiality, and — forgive my saying it — falsity. Liza and Elena are not Russian girls, but some sort of Pythian prophetesses, full of extravagant pretensions. Irina in “Smoke,” Madame Odintsov in “Fathers and Children,” all the lionesses, in fact, fiery, alluring, insatiable creatures for ever craving for something, are all nonsensical. When one thinks of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenin,” all these young ladies of Turgenev’s, with their seductive shoulders, fade away into nothing. The negative types of women where Turgenev is slightly caricaturing (Kukshina) or jesting (the descriptions of balls) are wonderfully drawn, and so successful, that, as the saying is, you can’t pick a hole in it.

The descriptions of nature are fine, but … I feel that we have already got out of the way of such descriptions and that we need something different….

April 26, 1893.

… I am reading Pisemsky. His is a great, very great talent! The best of his works is “The Carpenters’ Guild.” His novels are exhausting in their minute detail. Everything in him that has a temporary character, all his digs at the critics and liberals of the period, all his critical observations with their assumption of smartness and modernity, and all the so-called profound reflections scattered here and there — how petty and naive it all is to our modern ideas! The fact of the matter is this: a novelist, an artist, ought to pass by everything that has only a temporary value. Pisemsky’s people are living, his temperament is vigorous. Skabitchevsky in his history attacks him for obscurantism and treachery, but, my God! of all contemporary writers I don’t know a single one so passionately and earnestly liberal as Pisemsky. All his priests, officials, and generals are regular blackguards. No one was so down on the old legal and military set as he.

By the way, I have read also Bourget’s “Cosmopolis.” Rome and the Pope and Correggio and Michael Angelo and Titian and doges and a fifty-year-old beauty and Russians and Poles are all in Bourget, but how thin and strained and mawkish and false it is in comparison even with our coarse and simple Pisemsky! …

What a good thing I gave up the town! Tell all the Fofanovs, Tchermnys, et tutti quanti who live by literature, that living in the country is immensely cheaper than living in the town. I experience this now every day. My family costs me nothing now, for lodging, bread, vegetables, milk, butter, horses, are all our own. And there is so much to do, there is not time to get through it all. Of the whole family of Chekhovs, I am the only one to lie down, or sit at the table: all the rest are working from morning till night. Drive the poets and literary men into the country. Why should they live in starvation and beggary? Town life cannot give a poor man rich material in the sense of poetry and art. He lives within four walls and sees people only at the editors’ offices and in eating-shops….

MELIHOVO,

January 25, 1894.

I believe I am mentally sound. It is true I have no special desire to live, but that is not, so far, disease, but something probably passing and natural. It does not follow every time that an author describes someone mentally deranged, that he is himself deranged. I wrote “The Black Monk” without any melancholy ideas, through cool reflection. I simply had a desire to describe megalomania. The monk floating across the country was a dream, and when I woke I told Misha about it. So you can tell Anna Ivanovna that poor Anton Pavlovitch, thank God! has not gone out of his mind yet, but that he eats a great deal at supper and so he dreams of monks.

I keep forgetting to write to you: read Ertel’s story “The Seers” in “Russkaya Mysl.” There is poetry and something terrible in the old-fashioned fairy-tale style about it. It is one of the best new things that has come out in Moscow….

YALTA,

March 27, 1894.