YALTA, January 29, 1900.
They have written to me that you have grown very fat and become dignified, and I did not expect that you would remember me and write to me. But you have remembered me—and thank you very much for it, dear. You write nothing about your health: evidently it’s not bad, and I am glad. I hope your mother is well and that everything is going on all right. I am nearly well; I am ill from time to time, but not often, and only because I am old—the bacilli have nothing to do with it. And when I see a lovely woman now I smile in an aged way, and drop my lower lip—that’s all.
Lika, I am dreadfully bored in Yalta. My life does not run or flow, but crawls along. Don’t forget me; write to me now and then, anyway. In your letters just as in your life you are a very interesting woman. I press your hand warmly.
YALTA, February 3, 1900.
Thank you for your letter, for the lines about Tolstoy and about “Uncle Vanya,” which I haven’t seen on the stage; thanks altogether for not forgetting me. Here in this blessed Yalta one could hardly keep alive without letters. The idleness, the idiotic winter with the temperature always above freezing-point, the complete absence of interesting women, the pig-faces on the sea-front—all this may spoil a man and wear him out in a very short time. I am tired of it; it seems to me as though the winter had been going on for ten years.
You have pleurisy. If so, why do you stay on in Nizhni. Why? What do you want with that Nizhni, by the way? What glue keeps you sticking to that town? If you like Moscow, as you write, why don’t you live in Moscow? In Moscow there are theatres and all the rest of it, and, what matters most of all, Moscow is handy for going abroad; while living in Nizhni you’ll stick in Nizhni, and never go further than Vasilsursk. You want to see more, to know more, to have a wider range. Your imagination is quick to seize and hold, but it is like a big oven which is not provided with fuel enough. One feels this in general, and in particular in the stories: you present two or three figures in a story, but these figures stand apart, outside the mass; one sees that these figures are living in your imagination, but only these figures—the mass is not grasped. I except from this criticism your Crimean things (for instance, “My Travelling Companion”), in which, besides the figures, there is a feeling of the human mass out of which they have come, and atmosphere and background—everything, in fact. See what a lecture I am giving you—and all that you may not go on staying in Nizhni. You are a young man, strong and tough; if I were you I should make a tour in India and all sorts of places. I would take my degree in two or more faculties—I would, yes, I would! You laugh, but I do feel so badly treated at being forty already, at having asthma and all sorts of horrid things which prevent my living freely. Anyway, be a good fellow and a good comrade, and don’t be angry with me for preaching at you like a head priest.
Write to me. I look forward to “Foma Gordeyev,” which I haven’t yet read properly.
There is no news. Keep well, I press your hand warmly.
YALTA, February 10, 1900.
The winter is very cold, I am not well, no one has written to me for nearly a whole month—and I had made up my mind that there was nothing left for me but to go abroad, where it is not so dull; but now it has begun to be warmer, and it’s better, and I have decided that I shall go abroad only at the end of the summer, for the exhibition.
And you, why are you depressed? What are you depressed about? You are living, working, hoping, drinking; you laugh when your uncle reads aloud to you—what more do you want? I am a different matter. I am torn up by the roots, I am not living a full life, I don’t drink, though I am fond of drinking; I love noise and don’t hear it—in fact, I am in the condition of a transplanted tree which is hesitating whether to take root or to begin to wither. If I sometimes allow myself to complain of boredom, I have some grounds for doing so—but you? And Meierhold is complaining of the dulness of his life too. Aie, aie!
By the way, about Meierhold—he ought to spend the whole summer in the Crimea. His health needs it. Only it must be for the whole summer.
Well, now I am all right again. I am doing nothing because I intend to set to work. I dig in the garden. You write that for you, little people, the future is wrapped in mystery. I had a letter from your chief Nemirovitch not long ago. He writes that the company is going to be in Sevastopol, then in Yalta at the beginning of May: in Yalta there will be five performances, then evening rehearsals. Only the precious members of the company will remain for the rehearsals, the others can have a holiday where they please. I trust that you are precious. To the director you are precious, to the author you are priceless. There is a pun for a titbit for you. I won’t write another word to you till you send me your portrait.
Thank you for your good wishes in regard to my marriage. I have informed myfianceeof your design of coming to Yalta in order to cut her out a little. She said that if “that horrid woman” comes to Yalta, she will hold me tight in her embrace. I observed that to be embraced for so long in hot weather was not hygienic. She was offended and grew thoughtful, as though she were trying to guess in what surroundings I had picked up thisfacon de parler, and after a little while said that the theatre was an evil and that my intention of writing no more plays was extremely laudable—and asked me to kiss her. To this I replied that it was not proper for me to be so free with my kisses now that I am an academician. She burst into tears, and I went away.
In the spring the company will be in Harkov too. I will come and meet you then, only don’t talk of that to anyone. Nadyezhda Ivanovna has gone off to Moscow.
YALTA, February 12, 1900.
I have been racking my brains over your fourth act, and have come to no conclusion except, perhaps, that you must not end it up with Nihilists. It’s too turbulent and screaming; a quiet, lyrical, touching ending would be more in keeping with your play. When your heroine begins to grow old without arriving at anything or deciding anything for herself, and sees that she is forsaken by all, that she is uninteresting and superfluous, when she understands that the people around her were idle, useless, bad people (her father too), and that she has let her life slip—is not that more dreadful than the Nihilists?
Your letters about “The Russalka” and Korsh are very good. The tone is brilliant, and they are wonderfully written. But about Konovalov and the jury, I think you ought not to have written, however alluring the subject. Let A—-t write as much as he likes about it, but not you, for it is not your affair. To treat such questions boldly and with conviction, one must be a man with a single purpose, while you would go off at a tangent halfway through the letter—as you have done—saying suddenly that we all sometimes desire to kill someone, and desire the death of our neighbours. When a daughter-in-law feels sick and tired of an invalid mother-in-law, a spiteful old woman, she, the daughter-in-law, feels easier at the thought that the old woman will soon die: but that’s not desiring her death, but weariness, an exhausted spirit, vexation, longing for peace. If that daughter-in-law were ordered to kill the old woman, she would sooner kill herself, whatever desire might have been brooding in her heart.
Why, of course jurymen may make a mistake, but what of that? It does happen by mistake that help is given to the well-fed instead of to the hungry, but whatever you write on that subject, you will reach no result but harm to the hungry. Whether from our point of view the jury are mistaken or not mistaken, we ought to recognize that in each individual case they form a conscious judgment and make an effort to do so conscientiously; and if a captain steers his steamer conscientiously, continually consulting the chart and the compass, and if the steamer is shipwrecked all the same, would it not be more correct to put down the shipwreck not to the captain, but to something else—for instance, to think that the chart is out of date or that the bottom of the sea has changed? Yes, there are three points the jury have to take into consideration: (1) Apart from the criminal law, the penal code and legal procedure, there is a moral law which is always in advance of the established law, and which defines our actions precisely when we try to act on our conscience; thus, for instance, the heritage of a daughter is laid down by law as a seventh part. But you, acting on the dictates of purely moral principle, go beyond the law and in opposition to it, and bequeath her the same share as your sons, for you know that to act otherwise would be acting against your conscience. In the same way it sometimes happens to the jury to be put in a position in which they feel that their conscience is not satisfied by the established law, that in the case they are judging there are fine shades and subtleties which cannot be brought under the provisions of the penal code, and that obviously something else is needed for a just judgment, and that for the lack of that “something” they will be forced to give a judgment in which something is lacking. (2) The jury know that acquittal is not pardon, and that acquittal does not deliver the prisoner from the day of judgment in the other world, from the judgment of his conscience, from the judgment of public opinion; they decide the question only so far as it is a judicial question, and leave A——t to decide whether it is good to kill children or bad. (3) The prisoner comes to the court already exhausted by prison and examination, and he is in an agonizing position at his trial, so that even if he is acquitted he does not leave the court unpunished.
Well, be that as it may, my letter is almost finished, and I seem to have written nothing. We have the spring here in Yalta, no news of interest....
“Resurrection” is a remarkable novel. I liked it very much, but it ought to be read straight off at one sitting. The end is uninteresting and false—false in a technical sense.
YALTA, February 14, 1900.
The photographs are very, very good, especially the one in which you are leaning in dejection with your elbows on the back of a chair, which gives you a discreetly mournful, gentle expression under which there lies hid a little demon. The other is good too, but it looks a little like a Jewess, a very musical person who attends a conservatoire, but at the same time is studying dentistry on the sly as a second string, and is engaged to be married to a young man in Mogilev, and whose fiance is a person like M——. Are you angry? Really, really angry? It’s my revenge for your not signing them.
Of the seventy roses I planted in the autumn only three have not taken root. Lilies, irises, tulips, tuberoses, hyacinths, are all pushing out of the ground. The willow is already green. By the little seat in the corner the grass is luxuriant already. The almond-tree is in blossom. I have put little seats all over the garden, not grand ones with iron legs, but wooden ones which I paint green. I have made three bridges over the stream. I am planting palms. In fact, there are all sorts of novelties, so much so that you won’t know the house, or the garden, or the street. Only the owner has not changed, he is just the same moping creature and devoted worshipper of the talents that reside at Nikitsky Gate. [Footnote: O. L. Knipper was living at Nikitsky Gate.] I have heard no music nor singing since the autumn, I have not seen one interesting woman. How can I help being melancholy?
I had made up my mind not to write to you, but since you have sent the photographs I have taken off the ban, and here you see I am writing. I will even come to Sevastopol, only I repeat, don’t tell that to anyone, especially not to Vishnevsky. I shall be there incognito, I shall put myself down in the hotel-book Count Blackphiz.
I was joking when I said that you were like a Jewess in your photograph. Don’t be angry, precious one. Well, herewith I kiss your little hand, and remain unalterably yours.
YALTA, February 15, 1900.
Your article in the Nizhni-Novgorod Listok was balm to my soul. What a talented person you are! I can’t write anything but belles-lettres, you possess the pen of a journalist as well. I thought at first I liked the article so much because you praise me in it; afterwards it came out that Sredin and his family and Yartsev were all delighted with it. So peg away at journalism. God bless you!
Why don’t they send me “Foma Gordeyev”? I have read it only in bits, and one ought to read it straight through at a sitting as I have just read “Resurrection.” Except the relations of Nehludov and Katusha, which are somewhat obscure and made up, everything in the novel made the impression of strength, richness, and breadth, and the insincerity of a man afraid of death and refusing to admit it and clutching at texts and holy Scripture.
Write to them to send me “Foma.”
“Twenty-six Men and a Girl” is a good story. There is a strong feeling of the environment. One smells the hot rolls.
They have just brought your letter. So you don’t want to go to India? That’s a pity. When India is in the past, a long sea voyage, you have something to think about when you can’t get to sleep. And a tour abroad takes very little time, it need not prevent your going about in Russia on foot.
I am bored, not in the sense ofweltschmerz, not in the sense of being weary of existence, but simply bored from want of people, from want of music which I love, and from want of women, of whom there are none in Yalta. I am bored without caviare and pickled cabbage.
I am very sorry that apparently you have given up the idea of coming to Yalta. The Art Theatre from Moscow will be here in May. It will give five performances and then remain for rehearsals. So you come, study the stage at the rehearsals, and then in five to eight days write a play, which I should welcome joyfully with my whole heart.
Yes, I have the right now to insist on the fact that I am forty, that I am a man no longer young. I used to be the youngest literary man, but you have appeared on the scene and I became more dignified at once, and no one calls me the youngest now.
YALTA, February 15, 1900.
“Foma Gordeyev” and in a superb binding too is a precious and touching present; I thank you from the bottom of my heart. A thousand thanks! I have read “Foma” only in bits, now I shall read it properly. Gorky should not be published in parts; either he must write more briefly, or you must put him in whole as theVyestnik Evropydoes with Boborykin. “Foma,” by the way, is very successful, but only with intelligent well-read people—with the young also. I once overheard in a garden the conversation of a lady (from Petersburg) with her daughter: the mother was abusing the book, the daughter was praising it....
February 29, 1900.
“Foma Gordeyev” is written all in one tone like a dissertation. All the characters speak alike, and their way of thinking is alike too. They all speak not simply but intentionally; they all have some idea in the background; as though there is something they know they don’t speak out: but in reality there is nothing they know, and it is simply theirfacon de parler.
There are wonderful passages in “Foma.” Gorky will make a very great writer if only he does not weary, does not grow cold and lazy.
YALTA, March 10, 1900.
No winter has ever dragged on so long for me as this one, and time merely drags and does not move, and now I realize how stupid it was of me to leave Moscow. I have lost touch with the north without getting into touch with the south, and one can think of nothing in my position but to go abroad. After the spring, winter has begun here again in Yalta—snow, rain, cold, mud—simply disgusting.
The Moscow Art Theatre will be in Yalta in April; it will bring its scenery and decorations. All the tickets for the four days advertised were sold in one day, although the prices have been considerably raised. They will give among other things Hauptmann’s “Lonely Lives,” a magnificent play in my opinion. I read it with great pleasure, although I am not fond of plays, and the production at the Art Theatre they say is marvellous.
There is no news. There is one great event, though: N.‘s “Socrates” is printed in theNevaSupplement. I have read it, but with great effort. It is not Socrates but a dull-witted, captious, opinionated man, the whole of whose wisdom and interest is confined to tripping people up over words. There is not a trace or vestige of talent in it, but it is quite possible that the play might be successful because there are words in it such as “amphora,” and Karpov says it would stage well.
How many consumptives there are here! What poverty, and how worried one is with them! The hotels and lodging-houses here won’t take in those who are seriously ill. You can imagine the awful cases that may be seen here. People are dying from exhaustion, from their surroundings, from complete neglect, and this in blessed Taurida!
One loses all relish for the sun and the sea....
YALTA, March 26, 1900.
There is a feeling of black melancholy about your letter, dear actress; you are gloomy, you are fearfully unhappy—but not for long, one may imagine, as soon, very soon, you will be sitting in the train, eating your lunch with a very good appetite. It is very nice that you are coming first with Masha before all the others; we shall at least have time to talk a little, walk a little, see things, drink and eat. But please don’t bring with you ...
I haven’t a new play, it’s a lie of the newspapers. The newspapers never do tell the truth about me. If I did begin a play, of course the first thing I should do would be to inform you of the fact.
There is a great wind here; the spring has not begun properly yet, but we go about without our goloshes and fur caps. The tulips will soon be out. I have a nice garden but it is untidy, moss-grown—a dilettante garden.
Gorky is here. He is warm in his praises of you and your theatre. I will introduce you to him.
Oh dear! Someone has arrived. A visitor has come in. Good-bye for now, actress!
YALTA, March 26, 1900.
... There is no news, there is no water in the pipes either. I am sick to death of visitors. Yesterday, March 25, they came in an incessant stream all day; doctors keep sending people from Moscow and the provinces with letters asking me to find lodgings, to “make arrangements,” as though I were a house-agent! Mother is well. Mind you keep well too, and make haste and come home.
YALTA, May 20, 1900.
Greetings to you, dear enchanting actress! How are you? How are you feeling? I was very unwell on the way back to Yalta. [Footnote: Chekhov went to Moscow with the Art Theatre Company on their return from Yalta.] I had a bad headache and temperature before I left Moscow. I was wicked enough to conceal it from you, now I am all right.
How is Levitan? I feel dreadfully worried at not knowing. If you have heard, please write to me.
Keep well and be happy. I heard Masha was sending you a letter, and so I hasten to write these few lines. [Footnote: Chekhov’s later letters to O. L. Knipper have not been published.]
YALTA, September 9, 1900.
I answer the letter in which you write about Mother. To my thinking it would be better for her to go to Moscow now in the autumn and not after December. She will be tired of Moscow and pining for Yalta in a month, you know, and if you take her to Moscow in the autumn she will be back in Yalta before Christmas. That’s how it seems to me, but possibly I am mistaken; in any case you must take into consideration that it is much drearier in Yalta before Christmas than it is after—infinitely drearier.
Most likely I will be in Moscow after the 20th of September, and then we will decide. From Moscow I shall go I don’t know where—first to Paris, and then probably to Nice, from Nice to Africa. I shall hang on somehow to the spring, all April or May, when I shall come to Moscow again.
There is no news. There’s no rain either, everything is dried up. At home here it is quiet, peaceful, satisfactory, and of course dull.
“Three Sisters” is very difficult to write, more difficult than my other plays. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, perhaps something will come of it, next season if not this. It’s very hard to write in Yalta, by the way: I am interrupted, and I feel as though I had no object in writing; what I wrote yesterday I don’t like to-day....
Well, take care of yourself.
My humblest greetings to Olga Leonardovna, to Vishnevsky, and all the rest of them too.
If Gorky is in Moscow, tell him that I have sent a letter to him in Nizhni-Novgorod.
YALTA, October 16, 1900.
... On the 21st of this month I am going to Moscow, and from there abroad. Can you imagine—I have written a play; but as it will be produced not now, but next season, I have not made a fair copy of it yet. It can lie as it is. It was very difficult to write “Three Sisters.” Three heroines, you see, each a separate type and all the daughters of a general. The action is laid in a provincial town, as it might be Perm, the surroundings military, artillery.
The weather in Yalta is exquisite and fresh, my health is improving. I don’t even want to go away to Moscow. I am working so well, and it is so pleasant to be free from the irritation I suffered from all the summer. I am not coughing, and am even eating meat. I am living alone, quite alone. My mother is in Moscow.
Thanks for your letters, my dear fellow, thanks very much. I read them over twice. My warmest greetings to your wife and Maxim. And so, till we meet in Moscow. I hope you won’t play me false, and we shall see each other.
God keep you.
October 22, 1901.
Five days have passed since I read your play (“The Petty Bourgeois”). I have not written to you till now because I could not get hold of the fourth act; I have kept waiting for it, and—I still have not got it. And so I have only read three acts, but that I think is enough to judge of the play. It is, as I expected, very good, written a la Gorky, original, very interesting; and, to begin by talking of the defects, I have noticed only one, a defect incorrigible as red hair in a red-haired man—the conservatism of the form. You make new and original people sing new songs to an accompaniment that looks second-hand, you have four acts, the characters deliver edifying discourses, there is a feeling of alarm before long speeches, and so on, and so on. But all that is not important, and it is all, so to speak, drowned in the good points of the play. Pertchihin—how living! His daughter is enchanting, Tatyana and Pyotr are also, and their mother is a splendid old woman. The central figure of the play, Nil, is vigorously drawn and extremely interesting! In fact, the play takes hold of one from the first act. Only God preserve you from letting anyone act Pertchihin except Artyom, while Alexeyev-Stanislavsky must certainly play Nil. Those two figures will do just what’s needed; Pyotr—Meierhold. Only Nil’s part, a wonderful part, must be made two or three times as long. You ought to end the play with it, to make it the leading part. Only do not contrast him with Pyotr and Tatyana, let him be by himself and them by themselves, all wonderful, splendid people independently of each other. When Nil tries to seem superior to Pyotr and Tatyana, and says of himself that he is a fine fellow, the element so characteristic of our decent working man, the element of modesty, is lost. He boasts, he argues, but you know one can see what sort of man he is without that. Let him be merry, let him play pranks through the whole four acts, let him eat a great deal after his work—and that will be enough for him to conquer the audience with. Pyotr, I repeat, is good. Most likely you don’t even suspect how good he is. Tatyana, too, is a finished figure, only (a) she ought really to be a schoolmistress, ought to be teaching children, ought to come home from school, ought to be taken up with her pupils and exercise-books, and (b) it ought to be mentioned in the first or second act that she has attempted to poison herself; then, after that hint, the poisoning in the third act will not seem so startling and will be more in place. Telerev talks too much: such characters ought to be shown bit by bit between others, for in any case such people are everywhere merely incidental—both in life and on the stage. Make Elena dine with all the rest in the first act, let her sit and make jokes, or else there is very little of her, and she is not clear. Her avowal to Pyotr is too abrupt, on the stage it would come out in too high relief. Make her a passionate woman, if not loving at least apt to fall in love....
I have read your play. [Footnote: “In the Depths.”] It is new and unmistakably fine. The second act is very good, it is the best, the strongest, and when I was reading it, especially the end, I almost danced with joy. The tone is gloomy, oppressive; the audience unaccustomed to such subjects will walk out of the theatre, and you may well say good-bye to your reputation as an optimist in any case. My wife will play Vassilisa, the immoral and spiteful woman; Vishnevsky walks about the house and imagines himself the Tatar—he is convinced that it is the part for him. Luka, alas! you must not give to Artyom. He will repeat himself in that part and be exhausted; but he would do the policeman wonderfully, it is his part. The part of the actor, in which you have been very successful (it is a magnificent part), should be given to an experienced actor, Stanislavsky perhaps. Katchalev will play the baron.
You have left out of the fourth act all the most interesting characters (except the actor), and you must mind now that there is no ill effect from it. The act may seem boring and unnecessary, especially if, with the exit of the strongest and most interesting actors, there are left only the mediocrities. The death of the actor is awful; it is as though you gave the spectator a sudden box on the ear apropos of nothing without preparing him in any way. How the baron got into the doss-house and why he is a baron is also not sufficiently clear.
Andreyev’s “Thought” is something pretentious, difficult to understand, and apparently no good, but it is worked out with talent. Andreyev has no simplicity, and his talent reminds me of an artificial nightingale. Skitalets now is a sparrow, but he is a real living sparrow....
YALTA, December 30, 1902.
... You write that we talked of a serious religious movement in Russia. We talked of a movement not in Russia but in the intellectual class. I won’t say anything about Russia; the intellectuals so far are only playing at religion, and for the most part from having nothing to do. One may say of the cultured part of our public that it has moved away from religion, and is moving further and further away from it, whatever people may say and however many philosophical and religious societies may be formed. Whether it is a good or a bad thing I cannot undertake to decide; I will only say that the religious movement of which you write is one thing, and the whole trend of modern culture is another, and one cannot place the second in any causal connection with the first. Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a great future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of years, in order that man may if only in the remote future come to know the truth of the real God—that is not, I conjecture, by seeking in Dostoevsky, but by clear knowledge, as one knows twice two are four. Modern culture is the first beginning of the work, while the religious movement of which we talked is a survival, almost the end of what has ceased, or is ceasing to exist. But it is a long story, one can’t put it all into a letter....
MOSCOW, June 29, 1903.
... One feels a warm sympathy, of course, for Gorky’s letter about the Kishinev pogrom, as one does for everything he writes; the letter is not written though, but put together, there is neither youthfulness in it nor confidence, like Tolstoy’s.
You are reading belles-lettres now, so read Veresaev’s stories. Begin with a little story in the second volume called “Lizar.” I think you will be very much pleased with it. Veresaev is a doctor; I have got to know him lately. He makes a very good impression....
YALTA, July 12, 1903.
... I have been thinking over your letter for a long time, and alluring as your suggestion or offer is, yet in the end I must answer it as neither you nor I would wish.
I cannot be the editor ofThe World of Art, as I cannot live in Petersburg, ... that’s the first point. And the second is that just as a picture must be painted by one artist and a speech delivered by one orator, so a magazine must be edited by one man. Of course I am not a critic, and I dare say I shouldn’t make a very good job of the reviews; but on the other hand, how could I get on in the same boat with Merezhkovsky, who definitely believes, didactically believes, while I lost my faith years ago and can only look with perplexity at any “intellectual” who does believe? I respect Merezhkovsky, and think highly of him both as a man and as a writer, but we should be pulling in opposite directions....
Don’t be cross with me, dear Sergey Pavlovitch: it seems to me that if you go on editing the magazine for another five years you will come to agree with me. A magazine, like a picture or a poem, must bear the stamp of one personality and one will must be felt in it. This has been hitherto the case in theWorld of Art, and it was a good thing. And it must be kept up....
YALTA, July 28, 1903.
... My play “The Cherry Orchard” is not yet finished; it makes slow progress, which I put down to laziness, fine weather, and the difficulty of the subject....
I think your part [Translator’s Note: Stanislavsky acted Lopahin.] is all right, though I can’t undertake to decide, as I can judge very little of a play by reading it....
YALTA, September 15, 1903.
... Don’t believe anybody—no living soul has read my play yet; I have written for you not the part of a “canting hypocrite,” but of a very nice girl, with which you will, I hope, be satisfied. I have almost finished the play, but eight or ten days ago I was taken ill, with coughing and weakness—in fact, last year’s business over again. Now—that is to-day—it is warmer and I feel better, but still I cannot write, as my head is aching. Olga will not bring the play; I will send the four acts together as soon as it is possible for me to set to work for a whole day. It has turned out not a drama, but a comedy, in parts a farce, indeed, and I am afraid I shall catch it from Vladimir Ivanitch [Footnote: Nemirovitch Dantchenko.]....
I can’t come for the opening of your season, I must stay in Yalta till November. Olga, who has grown fatter and stronger in the summer, will probably come to Moscow on Sunday. I shall remain alone, and of course shall take advantage of that. As a writer it is essential for me to observe women, to study them, and so, I regret to say, I cannot be a faithful husband. As I observe women chiefly for the sake of my plays, in my opinion the Art Theatre ought to increase my wife’s salary or give her a pension! ...
YALTA, October 30, 1903.
... Many thanks for your letter and telegram. Letters are very precious to me now—in the first place, because I am utterly alone here; and in the second, because I sent the play three weeks ago and only got your letter yesterday, and if it were not for my wife, I should know nothing at all and might imagine any mortal thing. When I was writing Lopahin, I thought of it as a part for you. If for any reason you don’t care for it, take the part of Gaev. Lopahin is a merchant, of course, but he is a very decent person in every sense. He must behave with perfect decorum, like an educated man, with no petty ways or tricks of any sort, and it seemed to me this part, the central one of the play, would come out brilliantly in your hands.... In choosing an actor for the part you must remember that Varya, a serious and religious girl, is in love with Lopahin; she wouldn’t be in love with a mere money-grubber....
YALTA, November 2, 1903.
... About the play.
1. Anya can be played by anyone you like, even by a quite unknown actress, so long as she is young and looks like a girl, and speaks in a youthful singing voice. It is not an important part.
(2) Varya is a more serious part.... She is a character in a black dress, something of a nun, foolish, tearful, etc.
... Gorky is younger than you or I, he has his life before him.... As for the Nizhni theatre, that’s a mere episode; Gorky will try it, “sniff it and reject it.” And while we are on this subject, the whole idea of a “people’s” theatre and “people’s” literature is foolishness and lollipops for the people. We mustn’t bring Gogol down to the people but raise the people up to Gogol....
YALTA, November 7, 1903.
... As I am soon coming to Moscow, please keep a ticket for me for “The Pillars of Society”; I want to see the marvellous Norwegian acting, and I will even pay for my seat. You know Ibsen is my favourite writer....
YALTA, November 10, 1903.
Of course the scenery for III. and IV. can be the same, the hall and the staircase. Please do just as you like about the scenery, I leave it entirely to you; I am amazed and generally sit with my mouth wide open at your theatre. There can be no question about it, whatever you do will be excellent, a hundred times better than anything I could invent....
MOSCOW, January 19, 1904.
... At the first performance of “The Cherry Orchard” on the 17th of January, they gave me an ovation, so lavish, warm, and really so unexpected, that I can’t get over it even now....