Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchTO D. V. GRIGOROVITCH.MOSCOW, 1887.I have just read “Karelin’s Dream,” and I am very much interestedto know how far the dream you describe really is a dream. I thinkyour description of the workings of the brain and of the generalfeeling of a person who is asleep is physiologically correct and remarkablyartistic. I remember I read two or three years ago a Frenchstory, in which the author described the daughter of a minister., andprobably without himself suspecting it, gave a correct medical descriptionof hysteria. I thought at the time that an artist’s instinctmay sometimes be worth the brains of a scientist, that both have thesame purpose, the same nature, and that perhaps in time, as theirmethods become perfect, they are destined to become one vast prodigiousforce which now it is difficult even to imagine …. “Karelin’sDream” has suggested to me similar thoughts, and to-day I willinglybelieve Buckle, who saw in Hamlet’s musings on the dust ofAlexander the Great, Shakespeare’s knowledge of the law of the transmutationof substance—i.e., the power of the artist to run ahead ofthe men of science …. Sleep is a subjective phenomenon, and theinner aspect of it one can only observe in oneself. But since theprocess of dreaming is the same in all men, every reader can, I think,judge Karelin by his own standards, and every critic is bound to besubjective. From my own personal experience this is how I can formulatemy impression.In the first place the sensation of cold is given by you with remarkablesubtlety. When at night the quilt falls off I begin to dreamof huge slippery stones, of cold autumnal water, naked banks—andall this dim, misty, without a patch of blue sky; sad and dejected likeone who has lost his way, I look at the stones and feel that for somereason I cannot avoid crossing a deep river; I see then small tugsthat drag huge barges, floating beams …. All this is infinitely grey,damp, and dismal. When I run from the river I come across thefallen cemetery gates, funerals, my school-teachers …. And all thetime I am cold through and through with that oppressive nightmare-likecold which is impossible in waking life, and which is only68