Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchTO A. S. SUVORIN.YALTA, January 8, 1900.… My health is not so bad. I feel better than I did last year, butyet the doctors won’t let me leave Yalta. I am as tired and sick of thischarming town as of a disagreeable wife. It’s curing me of tuberculosis,but it’s making me ten years older. If I go to Nice it won’t bebefore February. I am writing a little; not long ago I sent a longstory to Zhizn. Money is short, all I have received so far from Marksfor the plays is gone by now ….If Prince Baryatinsky is to be judged by his paper, I must own Iwas unjust to him, for I imagined him very different from what heis. They will shut up his paper, of course, but he will long maintainhis reputation as a good journalist. You ask me why the SyevernyKurier is successful? Because our society is exhausted, hatred hasturned it as rank and rotten as grass in a bog, and it has a longing forsomething fresh, free, light—a desperate longing.382* * *I often see the academician Kondakov here. We talk of the Pushkinsection of belles-lettres. As Kondakov will take part in the electionsof future academicians, I am trying to hypnotize him, and suggestthat they should elect Barantsevitch and Mihailovsky. The former isbroken down and worn out. He is unquestionably a literary man, ispoverty-stricken in his old age …. An income and rest would be thevery thing for him. The latter—that is Mihailovsky—would make agood foundation for the new section, and his election would satisfythree-quarters of the brotherhood. But my hypnotism failed, myefforts came to nothing. The supplementary clauses to the statuteare like Tolstoy’s After-word to the Kreutzer Sonata. The academicianshave done all they can to protect themselves from literary men,whose society shocks them as the society of the Russian academiciansshocked the Germans. Literary men can only be honoraryacademicians, and that means nothing—it is just the same as beingan honorary citizen of the town of Vyazma or Tcherepovets, there is