Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchYALTA, March 27, 1894.I am in good health generally, ill in certain parts. For instance, acough, palpitations of the heart, haemorrhoids. I had palpitationsof the heart incessantly for six days, and the sensation all the timewas loathsome. Since I have quite given up smoking I have beenfree from gloomy and anxious moods. Perhaps because I am notsmoking, Tolstoy’s morality has ceased to touch me; at the bottomof my heart I take up a hostile attitude towards it, and that of courseis not just. I have peasant blood in my veins, and you won’t astonishme with peasant virtues. From my childhood I have believed inprogress, and I could not help believing in it since the differencebetween the time when I used to be thrashed and when they gaveup thrashing me was tremendous.... But Tolstoy’s philosophy touchedme profoundly and took possession of me for six or seven years, andwhat affected me was not its general propositions, with which I wasfamiliar beforehand, but Tolstoy’s manner of expressing it, his reasonableness,and probably a sort of hypnotism. Now something inme protests, reason and justice tell me that in the electricity andheat of love for man there is something greater than chastity andabstinence from meat. War is an evil and legal justice is an evil; butit does not follow from that that I ought to wear bark shoes andsleep on the stove with the labourer, and so on, and so on. But thatis not the point, it is not a matter of pro and con; the thing is that inone way or another Tolstoy has passed for me, he is not in my soul,and he has departed from me, saying: “I leave this your house empty.”I am untenanted. I am sick of theorizing of all sorts, and such boundersas Max Nordau I read with positive disgust. Patients in a feverdo not want food, but they do want something, and that vaguecraving they express as “longing for something sour.” I, too, wantsomething sour, and that’s not a mere chance feeling, for I noticethe same mood in others around me. It is just as if they had all beenin love, had fallen out of love, and now were looking for some newdistraction. It is very possible and very likely that the Russians willpass through another period of enthusiasm for the natural sciences,and that the materialistic movement will be fashionable. Naturalscience is performing miracles now. And it may act upon people320