Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends Part 42

Your last letter has given me great pleasure. I thank you with all my heart. "Uncle Vanya" was written long, long ago; I have never seen it on the stage. Of late years it has often been produced at provincial theatres.

I feel cold about my plays as a rule; I gave up the theatre long ago, and feel no desire now to write for the stage.

You ask what is my opinion of your stories. My opinion? The talent is unmistakable and it is a real, great talent. For instance, in the story "In the Steppe" it is expressed with extraordinary vigour, and I actually felt a pang of envy that it was not I who had written it. You are an artist, a clever man, you feel superbly, you are plastic--that is, when you describe a thing you see it and you touch it with your hands. That is real art.

There is my opinion for you, and I am very glad I can express it to you. I am, I repeat, very glad, and if we could meet and talk for an hour or two you would be convinced of my high appreciation of you and of the hopes I am building on your gifts.

Shall I speak now of defects? But that is not so easy. To speak of the defects of a talent is like speaking of the defects of a great tree growing in the garden; what is chiefly in question, you see, is not the tree itself but the tastes of the man who is looking at it. Is not that so?

I will begin by saying that to my mind you have not enough restraint. You are like a spectator at the theatre who expresses his transports with so little restraint that he prevents himself and other people from listening.

This lack of restraint is particularly felt in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt your dialogues; when one reads those descriptions one wishes they were more compact, shorter, put into two or three lines.

The frequent mention of tenderness, whispering, velvetiness, and so on, give those descriptions a rhetorical and monotonous character--and they make one feel cold and almost exhaust one. The lack of restraint is felt also in the descriptions of women ("Malva," "On the Raft") and love scenes.

It is not vigour, not breadth of touch, but just lack of restraint. Then there is the frequent use of words quite unsuitable in stories of your type. "Accompaniment," "disc," "harmony," such words spoil the effect. You often talk of waves. There is a strained feeling and a sort of circ.u.mspection in your descriptions of educated people; that is not because you have not observed educated people sufficiently, you know them, but you don't seem to know from what side to approach them.

How old are you? I don't know you, I don't know where you came from or who you are, but it seems to me that while you are still young you ought to leave Nizhni and spend two or three years rubbing shoulders with literature and literary people; not to learn to crow like the rest of us and to sharpen your wits, but to take the final plunge head first into literature and to grow to love it. Besides, the provinces age a man early. Korolenko, Potapenko, Mamin, Ertel, are first-rate men; you would perhaps at first feel their company rather boring, but in a year or two you would grow used to them and appreciate them as they deserve, and their society would more than repay you for the disagreeableness and inconvenience of life in the capital....

YALTA, January 3, 1899.

... Apparently you have misunderstood me a little. I did not write to you of coa.r.s.eness of style, but only of the incongruity of foreign, not genuinely Russian, or rarely used words. In other authors such words as, for instance, "fatalistically," pa.s.s unnoticed, but your things are musical, harmonious, and every crude touch jars fearfully. Of course it is a question of taste, and perhaps this is only a sign of excessive fastidiousness in me, or the conservatism of a man who has adopted definite habits for himself long ago. I am resigned to "a _collegiate a.s.sessor_,"

and "a _captain_ of the second _rank_" in descriptions, but "_flirt_" and "_champion_" when they occur in descriptions excite repulsion in me.

Are you self-educated? In your stories you are completely an artist and at the same time an "educated" man in the truest sense.

Nothing is less characteristic of you than coa.r.s.eness, you are clever and subtle and delicate in your feelings. Your best things are "In the Steppe,"

and "On the Raft,"--did I write to you about that? They are splendid things, masterpieces, they show the artist who has pa.s.sed through a very good school. I don't think that I am mistaken. The only defect is the lack of restraint, the lack of grace. When a man spends the least possible number of movements over some definite action, that is grace. One is conscious of superfluity in your expenditure.

The descriptions of nature are the work of an artist; you are a real landscape painter. Only the frequent personification (anthropomorphism) when the sea breathes, the sky gazes, the steppe barks, nature whispers, speaks, mourns, and so on--such metaphors make your descriptions somewhat monotonous, sometimes sweetish, sometimes not clear; beauty and expressiveness in nature are attained only by simplicity, by such simple phrases as "The sun set," "It was dark," "It began to rain," and so on--and that simplicity is characteristic of you in the highest degree, more so perhaps than of any other writer....

TO A. S. SUVORIN.

YALTA, January 17, 1899.

... I have been reading Tolstoy's son's story: "The Folly of the Mir." The construction of the story is poor, indeed it would have been better to write it simply as an article, but the thought is treated with justice and pa.s.sion. I am against the Commune myself. There is sense in the Commune when one has to deal with external enemies who make frequent invasions, and with wild animals; but now it is a crowd artificially held together, like a crowd of convicts. They will tell us Russia is an agricultural country.

That is so, but the Commune has nothing to do with that, at any rate at the present time. The commune exists by husbandry, but once husbandry begins to pa.s.s into scientific agriculture the commune begins to crack at every seam, as the commune and culture are not compatible ideas. Our national drunkenness and profound ignorance are, by the way, sins of the commune system....

TO HIS BROTHER MIHAIL.

YALTA, February 6, 1899.

... Being bored, I am reading "The Book of my Life" by Bishop Porfiry. This pa.s.sage about war occurs in it:

"Standing armies in time of peace are locusts devouring the people's bread and leaving a vile stench in society, while in time of war they are artificial fighting machines, and when they grow and develop, farewell to freedom, security, and national glory! ... They are the lawless defenders of unjust and partial laws, of privilege and of tyranny." ...

That was written in the forties....

TO I. I. ORLOV.

YALTA, February 22, 1899.

... In your letter there is a text from Scripture. To your complaint in regard to the tutor and failures of all sorts I will reply by another text: "Put not thy trust in princes nor in any sons of man" ... and I recall another expression in regard to the sons of man, those in particular who so annoy you: they are the sons of their age.

Not the tutor but the whole educated cla.s.s--that is to blame, my dear sir.

While the young men and women are students they are a good honest set, they are our hope, they are the future of Russia, but no sooner do those students enter upon independent life and become grown up than our hope and the future of Russia vanishes in smoke, and all that is left in the filter is doctors owning house property, hungry government clerks, and thieving engineers. Remember that Katkov, Pobyedonostsev, Vishnegradsky, were nurselings of the Universities, that they were our Professors--not military despots, but professors, luminaries.... I don't believe in our educated cla.s.s, which is hypocritical, false, hysterical, badly educated and indolent. I don't believe in it even when it's suffering and complaining, for its oppressors come from its own entrails. I believe in individual people, I see salvation in individual personalities scattered here and there all over Russia--educated people or peasants--they have strength though they are few. No prophet is honoured in his own country, but the individual personalities of whom I am speaking play an unnoticed part in society, they are not domineering, but their work can be seen; anyway, science is advancing and advancing, social self-consciousness is growing, moral questions begin to take an uneasy character, and so on, and so on-and all this is being done in spite of the prosecutors, the engineers, and the tutors, in spite of the intellectual cla.s.s en ma.s.se and in spite of everything....

TO MADAME AVILOV.

YALTA, March 9, 1899.

I shall not be at the writers' congress. In the autumn I shall be in the Crimea or abroad--that is, of course, if I am alive and free. I am going to spend the whole summer on my own place in the Serpuhov district. [Footnote: Melihovo.]

By the way, in what district of the Tula province have you bought your estate? For the first two years after buying an estate one has a hard time, at moments it is very bad indeed, but by degrees one is led to Nirvana, by sweet habit. I bought an estate and mortgaged it, I had a very hard time the first years (famine, cholera). Afterwards everything went well, and now it is pleasant to remember that I have somewhere near the Oka a nook of my own. I live in peace with the peasants, they never steal anything from me, and when I walk through the village the old women smile and cross themselves. I use the formal address to all except children, and never shout at them; but what has done most to build up our good relations is medicine. You will be happy on your estate, only please don't listen to anyone's advice and gloomy prognostications, and don't at first be disappointed, or form an opinion about the peasants. The peasants behave sullenly and not genuinely to all new-comers, and especially so in the Tula province. There is indeed a saying: "He's a good man though he is from Tula."

So here's something like a sermon for you, you see, madam. Are you satisfied?

Do you know L. N. Tolstoy? Will your estate be far from Tolstoy's? If it is near I shall envy you. I like Tolstoy very much.

Speaking of new writers, you throw Melshin in with a whole lot. That's not right. Melshin stands apart. He is a great and unappreciated writer, an intelligent, powerful writer, though perhaps he will not write more than he has written already. Kuprin I have not read at all. Gorky I like, but of late he has taken to writing rubbish, revolting rubbish, so that I shall soon give up reading him. "Humble People" is good, though one could have done without Buhvostov, whose presence brings into the story an element of strain, of tiresomeness and even falsity. Korolenko is a delightful writer.

He is loved--and with good reason. Apart from all the rest there is sobriety and purity in him.

You ask whether I am sorry for Suvorin. Of course I am. He is paying heavily for his mistakes. But I'm not at all sorry for those who are surrounding him....

TO GORKY.

MOSCOW, April 25, 1899.

... The day before yesterday I was at L. N. Tolstoy's; he praised you very highly and said that you were "a remarkable writer." He likes your "The Fair" and "In the Steppe" and does not like "Malva." He said: "You can invent anything you like, but you can't invent psychology, and in Gorky one comes across just psychological inventions: he describes what he has never felt." So much for you! I said that when you were next in Moscow we would go together to see him.