Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

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Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchApril 26, 1893.… I am reading Pisemsky. His is a great, very great talent! Thebest of his works is “The Carpenters’ Guild.” His novels are exhaustingin their minute detail. Everything in him that has a temporarycharacter, all his digs at the critics and liberals of the period,all his critical observations with their assumption of smartness andmodernity, and all the so-called profound reflections scattered hereand there—how petty and naive it all is to our modern ideas! Thefact of the matter is this: a novelist, an artist, ought to pass by everythingthat has only a temporary value. Pisemsky’s people are living,his temperament is vigorous. Skabitchevsky in his history attackshim for obscurantism and treachery, but, my God! of all contemporarywriters I don’t know a single one so passionately and earnestlyliberal as Pisemsky. All his priests, officials, and generals are regularblackguards. No one was so down on the old legal and military setas he.By the way, I have read also Bourget’s “Cosmopolis.” Rome andthe Pope and Correggio and Michael Angelo and Titian and dogesand a fifty-year-old beauty and Russians and Poles are all in Bourget,but how thin and strained and mawkish and false it is in comparisoneven with our coarse and simple Pisemsky! …What a good thing I gave up the town! Tell all the Fofanovs,Tchermnys, et tutti quanti who live by literature, that living in thecountry is immensely cheaper than living in the town. I experiencethis now every day. My family costs me nothing now, for lodging,bread, vegetables, milk, butter, horses, are all our own. And there isso much to do, there is not time to get through it all. Of the wholefamily of Chekhovs, I am the only one to lie down, or sit at thetable: all the rest are working from morning till night. Drive thepoets and literary men into the country. Why should they live instarvation and beggary? Town life cannot give a poor man rich materialin the sense of poetry and art. He lives within four walls andsees people only at the editors’ offices and in eating-shops ….318
Anton ChekhovMELIHOVO, January 25, 1894.I believe I am mentally sound. It is true I have no special desire tolive, but that is not, so far, disease, but something probably passingand natural. It does not follow every time that an author describessomeone mentally deranged, that he is himself deranged. I wrote“The Black Monk” without any melancholy ideas, through coolreflection. I simply had a desire to describe megalomania. The monkfloating across the country was a dream, and when I woke I toldMisha about it. So you can tell Anna Ivanovna that poor AntonPavlovitch, thank God! has not gone out of his mind yet, but thathe eats a great deal at supper and so he dreams of monks.I keep forgetting to write to you: read Ertel’s story “The Seers” in“Russkaya Mysl.” There is poetry and something terrible in the oldfashionedfairy-tale style about it. It is one of the best new thingsthat has come out in Moscow ….319
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