Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Anton ChekhovFebruary, 1893.My God! What a glorious thing “Fathers and Children” is! It ispositively terrifying. Bazarov’s illness is so powerfully done that Ifelt ill and had a sensation as though I had caught the infectionfrom him. And the end of Bazarov? And the old men? And Kukshina?It’s beyond words. It’s simply a work of genius. I don’t like the wholeof “On the Eve,” only Elena’s father and the end. The end is full oftragedy. “The Dog” is very good, the language is wonderful in it.Please read it if you have forgotten it. “Acia” is charming, “A QuietBackwater” is too compressed and not satisfactory. I don’t like“Smoke” at all. “The House of Gentlefolk” is weaker than “Fathersand Children,” but the end is like a miracle, too. Except for the oldwoman in “Fathers and Children”—that is, Bazarov’s mother—andthe mothers as a rule, especially the society ladies, who are, however,all alike (Liza’s mother, Elena’s mother), and Lavretsky’s mother,who had been a serf, and the humble peasant woman, all Turgenev’sgirls and women are insufferable in their artificiality, and—forgivemy saying it—falsity. Liza and Elena are not Russian girls, but somesort of Pythian prophetesses, full of extravagant pretensions. Irinain “Smoke,” Madame Odintsov in “Fathers and Children,” all thelionesses, in fact, fiery, alluring, insatiable creatures for ever cravingfor something, are all nonsensical. When one thinks of Tolstoy’s“Anna Karenin,” all these young ladies of Turgenev’s, with their seductiveshoulders, fade away into nothing. The negative types ofwomen where Turgenev is slightly caricaturing (Kukshina) or jesting(the descriptions of balls) are wonderfully drawn, and so successful,that, as the saying is, you can’t pick a hole in it.The descriptions of nature are fine, but … I feel that we havealready got out of the way of such descriptions and that we needsomething different ….317