Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Anton ChekhovTO A. S. SUVORIN.MOSCOW, October 16, 1891.I congratulate you on your new cook, and wish you an excellentappetite. Wish me the same, for I am coming to see you soon—sooner than I had intended—and shall eat for three. I simply mustget away from home, if only for a fortnight. From morning till nightI am unpleasantly irritable, I feel as though someone were drawinga blunt knife over my soul, and this irritability finds external expressionin my hurrying off to bed early and avoiding conversation.Nothing I do succeeds. I began a story for the Sbornik; I wrote halfand threw it up, and then began another; I have been struggling formore than a week with this story, and the time when I shall finish itand when I shall set to work and finish the first story, for which Iam to be paid, seems to me far away. I have not been to the provinceof Nizhni Novgorod yet, for reasons not under my control, and Idon’t know when I shall go. In fact it’s a hopeless mess—a silly muddleand not life. And I desire nothing now so much as to win two hundredthousand ….Ah, I have such a subject for a novel! If I were in a tolerable humourI could begin it on the first of November and finish it on the first ofDecember. I would make five signatures of print. And I long towrite as I did at Bogimovo—i.e., from morning till night and in mysleep.Don’t tell anyone I am coming to Petersburg. I shall live incognito.In my letters I write vaguely that I am coming in November….Shall I remind you of Kashtanka, or forget about her? Won’t shelose her childhood and youth if we don’t print her? However, youknow best ….P. S.—If you see my brother Alexandr, tell him that our aunt isdying of consumption. Her days are numbered. She was a splendidwoman, a saint.If you want to visit the famine-stricken provinces, let us go togetherin January, it will be more conspicuous then ….269