work
Letters to a Governor's Wife
also: Письма к губернаторше, Pisma k gubernatorshe
A didactic Tolstoy tract, cast as letters addressed to a provincial governor's wife, on marriage and adultery; Chekhov names it here as a work he "despises," and uses it a second time, alongside the Kreutzer Sonata afterword, as the type-specimen of Tolstoy's moralizing register he values far below Tolstoy's actual fiction.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 8 September 1891. Moscow. §6 "Letters to a Governor's Wife"
A didactic Tolstoy tract, cast as letters to a provincial governor's wife, on marriage and adultery. Chekhov calls it something he "despises" even before comparing the \emph{Afterword} unfavorably to it -- the comparison working by degree (the Afterword is \emph{worse} than a work already held in contempt) rather than by simple opposition.