Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchTO A. S. SUVORIN.MELIHOVO, March, 1892.The cost of labour is almost nil, and so I am very well off. I beginto see the charms of capitalism. To pull down the stove in the servants’quarters and build up there a kitchen stove with all its accessories,then to pull down the kitchen stove in the house arid put upa Dutch stove instead, costs twenty roubles altogether. The price oftwo men to dig, twenty-five kopecks. To fill the ice cellar it coststhirty kopecks a day to the workmen. A young labourer who doesnot drink or smoke, and can read and write, whose duties are towork the land and clean the boots and look after the flower-garden,costs five roubles a month. Floors, partitions, papering walls—allthat is cheaper than mushrooms. And I am at ease. But if I were topay for labour a quarter of what I get for my leisure I should beruined in a month, as the number of stove-builders, carpenters, joiners,and so on, threatens to go for ever after the fashion of a recurringdecimal. A spacious life not cramped within four walls requiresa spacious pocket too. I have bored you already, but I must tell youone thing more: the clover seed costs one hundred roubles a pood,and the oats needed for seed cost more than a hundred. Think ofthat! They prophesy a harvest and wealth for me, but what is that tome! Better five kopecks in the present than a rouble in the future. Imust sit and work. I must earn at least five hundred roubles for allthese trifles. I have earned half already. And the snow is melting, itis warm, the birds are singing, the sky is bright and spring-like.I am reading a mass of things. I have read Lyeskov’s “LegendaryCharacters,” religious and piquant—a combination of virtue, piety,and lewdness, but very interesting. Read it if you haven’t read it. Ihave read again Pisarev’s “Criticism of Pushkin.” Awfully naive. Theman pulls Onyegin and Tatyana down from their pedestals, butPushkin remains unhurt. Pisarev is the grandfather and father of allthe critics of to-day, including Burenin—the same pettiness in disparagement,the same cold and conceited wit, and the same coarsenessand indelicacy in their attitude to people. It is not Pisarev’sideas that are brutalizing, for he has none, but his coarse tone. His298