Trips to Yakimanka and back will not help. You must make a clean break. Come to us; smash the vodka bottle; lie down and read—Turgenev, if you like, whom you have not read. Give up your conceit, you are not a child. You will soon be thirty. It is time!
I am waiting . . . We are all waiting . . .
Yours,
A. CHEKHOV
TO ids sister maria
(This, Chekhov's only sister, a schoolteacher, was the member of his family closest to him. Mter his death she edited a six-volume collection of his letters and as recently as 1934 was in charge of the Chekhov Museum at Yalta. In the spring of 1887 Chekhov revisited his birthplace, Taganrog, and a few neighboring to^s. This letter is written from one of them.)
[Novocherkassk,] April 25, [1887]
I am now on my way from Novocherkassk to Zverevo. There was a wedding yesterday that had been going on since the day before, a real Cossack wedding, with music, women caterwauling, and a loathsome drinking bout. I got so many discordant impressions that it is im- possible to set them down on paper, and I must put it off till I return to Moscow. The bride is sixteen. The wedding took place in the local cathedral. I acted as best man, in a borrowed frock-coat, wide pantaloons and without a single stud—in Moscow such a best man would get it in the neck, but here I was the greatest swell.
I saw a lot of wealthy marriageable girls. There was an enormous selection, but I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles. Apparently, thanks to my drunken condition, the local maidens decided that I was witty and wag." The girls here are a flock of sheep: if one gets up and leaves the ballroom, all the others file after her. One of them, the smartest and the most daring, wishing to show that she knew something about fine manners and diplomacy, kept striking me on the hand with her fan and saying, "Oh, you naughty man!" But all the time her face wore an expression of fear. I taught her to say to her swains, "How naive you are!"
Apparently in obedience to a local custom, the newly- weds kissed every minute, kissed so vehemently that every time their lips made an explosive noise, and I had a taste of oversweet raisins in my mouth, and got a spasm in my left calf. Their kisses did the varicose vein in my left leg no good.
I can't tell you how much fresh caviar I ate and how much local red wine I drank. It's a wonder I didn't burst! * * *
At Zverevo I'll have to wait for the train from nine in the evening till five in the morning. Last time I had to sleep in a second-class car on a spur. At night I went out of the car to relieve myself and it was miraculous out there: the moon, the boundless steppe—a desert with ancient grave-mounds—the silence of the tomb, and the cars and rails standing out boldly against the dim sky— a dead world, It was an unforgettable picture. It is a pity Mishka [his brother Mikhail] couldn't come with
me. He would have gone mad with all these impres-
sions. * * *
Good-by. I hope everybody is well.
A. CHEKHOV
(In the course of his trip to Taganrog Chekhov visited a monastery on the Donetz river.)
Taganrog, May 11, [1887]
The monks, very pleasant people, gave me a very un- pleasant room with a mattress like a pancake. I spent two nights at the monastery and got no end of impres- sions. On aocount of St. Nicholas's Feast, 15,000 pilgrims flocked to the place, 8/9 of them old women. I didn't know that there were so many old women in the world, or I should have shot myself a long time ago . . . The services are endless: at midnight they ring the bells for matins, at 5 a.m. for early Mass, at 9 for late Mass, at 3 for nones, at 5 for vespers, at 6 for compline. Before each service you hear the weeping sound of a bell in the corridors, and a monk runs along crying in the voice of a creditor who implores his debtor to pay at least five kopecks on the ruble, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us! Pray come to matins!"
It is awkward to remain in your room, so you get up and go . . . I found a nice spot for myself on the bank of the Donetz and stayed there all the time that the services were going on.
I've bought an icon for Aunt F. Y.
All of the 15,000 pilgrims get monastic grub free: shchi[11] with dried gudgeon and gruel. Both are delicious and so is the rye bread.
The bell-ringing is remarkable. The singers are poor. I took part in a church procession carried by rowboats.
TO ALEXEY N. PLESHCHEYEV
(The recipient of this letter, an elderly poet whom Chek- hov called his literary godfather, was fiction editor of the monthly which was the first to publish his work. Osip Noto- vich and Grigory Gradovsky wcre liberal journalists.)
Moscow, October 4, 1888
I am afraid of those who look for a tendency between the lines and who insist on seeing me as necessarily either a liberal or a conservative. I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a gradualist, not a monk, not an in- differentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence, whatever form they take, and I am equally repelled by secretaries of con- sistories and by Notovich and Gradovsky. Pharisaism, stupidity, and tyranny reign not in shopkeepers' homes and in lock-ups alone; I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation . . . That is why I have no partiality either for gendarmes, or butchers, or scholars, or writers, or young people. I regard trade-marks and labels as a kind of prejudice. My holy of holies is the hu- man body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and false- hood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves. This is the program I would follow if I were a great artist.
TO ALEXEY S. SUVORlN
(The addressee was a playwright as well as an influential conservative journalist and editor, who achieved wealth as a publisher and bookseller. He was Chekhov's close friend and his chief correspondent, the recipient of some 300 letters from him. The letter below and five subsequent ones have to do with Chekhov's trip to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, where he spent a little over three months, be- ginning July 11, 1890. At the invitation of the Russian gov- ernment, Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist, explored Asiatic Russia in 1829; in the 1880's George Kennan made a thorough study of the Siberian penal system.)
Moscow, March 9 [1890]
(The feast of Forty Mar-
tyrs and of io,ooo Larks)
Both of us are mistaken about Sakhalin, but you prob- ably more than I. I am going there fully convinced that my trip will not result in any valuable contribution either to literature or science: I lack the knowledge, the time, and the ambition for that. My plans are not those of a Humboldt or a Kennan. I want to write 100 to 200 pages and thereby pay off some of my debt to medicine, towards which, as you know, I have behaved like a pig. Possibly I shall not be able to write anything, neverthe- less the journey does not lose its charm for me: by read- ing, looking around and listening, I shall get to know and to learn a great deal. I haven't left yet, but thanks to the books that I have been obliged to read, I have learned much of what everyone should know under penalty of forty lashes, and of which I was formerly ignorant. Besides, I believe that the trip will mean six months of incessant work, physical and mental, and this I need, for I am a Ukrainian[12] and have already begun to be lazy. One must keep in training. My trip may be a trifle, the result of obstinacy, a whim, but consider and teU me what I lose by going. Time? Money? Comfort? My time is worth nothing, money I never have anyway, as for privations, I shall travel by carriage not more than 25 to 30 days—and all the rest of the time I shall be sitting on the deck of a steamer or in a room and con- stantly bombard you with letters.