Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

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Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchMOSCOW, October 19, 1891.What a splendid little letter has come from you! It is warmly andeloquently written, and every thought in it is true. To talk now oflaziness and drunkenness, and so on, is as strange and tactless as tolecture a man on the conduct of life at a moment when he is beingsick or lying ill of typhus. There is always a certain element of insolencein being well-fed, as in every kind of force, and that elementfinds expression chiefly in the well-fed man preaching to the hungry.If consolation is revolting at a time of real sorrow, what must bethe effect of preaching morality; and how stupid and insulting thatpreaching must seem. These moral people imagine that if a man isfifteen roubles in arrears with his taxes he must be a wastrel, andought not to drink; but they ought to reckon up how much statesare in debt, and prime ministers, and what the debts of all the marshalsof nobility and all the bishops taken together come to. Whatdo the Guards owe! Only their tailors could tell us that ….You have told them to send me four hundred? Vivat dominusSuvorin! So I have already received from your firm 400 + 100 +400. Altogether I shall get for “The Duel” as I calculated, aboutfourteen hundred, so five hundred will go towards my debt. Well,and for that thank God! By the spring I must pay off all my debt orI shall go into a decline, for in the spring I want another advancefrom all my editors. I shall take it and escape to Java ….Ah, my friends, how bored I am! If I am a doctor I ought to havepatients and a hospital; if I am a literary man I ought to live amongpeople instead of in a flat with a mongoose, I ought to have at leasta scrap of social and political life—but this life between four walls,without nature, without people, without a country, without healthand appetite, is not life, but some sort of … and nothing more.For the sake of all the perch and pike you are going to catch onyour Zaraish estate, I entreat you to publish the English humoristBernard.* …*Translator’s Note: ? Bernard Shaw.270
Anton ChekhovTO MADAME LINTVARYOV.MOSCOW, October 25, 1891.HONOURED NATALYA MIHAILOVNA,I have not gone to Nizhni as I meant to, but am sitting at home,writing and sneezing. Madame Morozov has seen the Minister, hehas absolutely prohibited private initiative in the work of faminerelief, and actually waved her out of his presence. This has reducedme to apathy at once. Add to that, complete lack of money, sneezing,a mass of work, the illness of my aunt who died to-day, theindefiniteness, the uncertainty in fact—everything has come togetherto hinder a lazy person like me. I have put off my going away till thefirst of December.We felt dull without you for a long time, and when the Shah ofPersia* went away it was duller still. I have given orders that no oneis to be admitted, and sit in my room like a heron in the reeds; I seeno one, and no one sees me. And it is better so, or the public wouldpull the bell off, and my study would be turned into a smoking andtalking room. It’s dull to live like this, but what am I to do? I shallwait till the summer and then let myself go.I shall sell the mongoose by auction. I should be glad to sell N.and his poems too, but no one would buy him. He dashes in to seeme almost every evening as he used to do, and bores me with hisdoubts, his struggles, his volcanoes, slit nostrils, atamans, the life ofthe free, and such tosh, for which God forgive him.Russkiya Vyedomosti is printing a Sbornik for the famine fund.With your permission, I shall send you a copy.Well, good health and happiness to you; respects and greetings toall yours fromthe Geographer,A. CHEKHOV.P. S.—All my family send their regards.*A. I. Smagin.271
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