To Al. P. Chekhov, February 1883. Moscow.

The 20th of February 1883. Moscow.

My most benevolent brother,

Alexander Pavlovich!

First of all, congratulations to you and your other half on a safe delivery and an increase, and to the town of Taganrog on a fresh little citizeness. Long may the newborn (cross yourself!) live, abounding (cross yourself!) in beauty physical and moral, in gold, in voice, in push and shove, and may she in time snag herself a valiant husband (cross yourself, you fool!), having first charmed and plunged into despair every schoolboy in Taganrog!!!

Having offered that congratulation, I proceed straight to business. Nikolka has just shoved your letter at me to read. The question of the right "to read or not to read," for want of time, we’ll leave aside. If the letter concerned Nikolka’s person alone I’d confine myself to congratulations, but your letter touches on several questions at once, all quite interesting. It’s these questions I want to talk over. In passing I’ll answer all your previous tablets of the law too. Unfortunately I haven’t time to write as much as I ought. For the sake of decency and thoroughness I’ll resort to a framework, a system: I’ll take your letter apart thread by thread, from "a" to izhitsa inclusive. I am the critic, it – the work possessing literary interest. I have the right, as one who has read it. You’ll look at the matter as the author – and everything will come off well enough. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt us writing men to try our small strength at criticism-mongering. A warning is necessary: the substance lies only in the above-listed questions; I’ll try to keep my interpretation as free of anything personal as possible.

1) That Nikolka is in the wrong – there’s no point discussing that. He answers not only your letters but even business letters; I know no one ruder than him in that respect. He’s been meaning for a year to write to Lentovsky, who’s been looking for him; for half a year the letter of a decent man has lain on the shelf unanswered, though it was written for the sake of an answer and nothing else. You’d be hard put to find a bigger balalaika-strummer than our brother. And the most terrible thing of all is that he’s incorrigible... You’ve moved him to pity with your letter, but I don’t think he’ll find time to answer you. But that’s not the point. Let me start with the form of the letter. I remember how you used to laugh at uncle’s manifestos... You were laughing at yourself. Your manifestos rival uncle’s for sweetness. It’s all there: "embrace"... "wounds of the soul"... All that’s missing is for you to burst into tears... If uncle’s letters are to be believed, he, uncle, ought long since to have dissolved into tears. (The provinces!..) You drip tears from the start of the letter to the end... In all your letters, in fact, and in all your works too... One might think you and uncle are made up of nothing but tear glands. I’m not laughing, not exercising my wit... I wouldn’t have touched this tearfulness, this shortness of breath from joy and grief, these wounds of the soul and so on, if they weren’t so ill-timed and... ruinous. Nikolka (you know this perfectly well) is fooling his life away; a good, strong, Russian talent is perishing, perishing for nothing at all... Another year or two and our artist’s song is sung. He’ll be ground down among the crowd of tavern-hall people, the vile Yarons and other filth... You saw his work of late... What’s he doing? He’s doing everything that’s cheap, common... and meanwhile a remarkable picture stands begun in the room. The "Russian Theatre" offered him work illustrating Dostoevsky... He gave his word and won’t keep it, though those illustrations would have given him a name, bread... But why go on? Half a year ago you saw him, and I hope you haven’t forgotten... And instead of supporting him, cheering the talented good fellow with a good, strong word, bringing him inestimable benefit, you write pitiful, mournful words... You brought a half-hour’s gloom down on him, reduced him to mush, softened him up, and nothing more... By tomorrow he’ll have forgotten your letter. You’re a fine stylist, you’ve read a great deal, written a great deal, understand things as well as anyone else does – and it costs you nothing to write your brother a good word... Not a lecture, no! If instead of dripping tears you’d talked with him about his painting, he’d sit down at his painting that very minute, I’m sure of it, and would certainly answer you. You know how one can influence him... "Forgotten... I’m writing my last letter" – all that is nonsense, that’s not the point... That’s not what needs underlining... Underline, you who are strong, educated, developed, what’s alive, what’s eternal, what works not on petty feeling but on truly human feeling... You’re capable of that... You are witty, you are real, you are an artist. For your letter, in which you describe the prayer service on the deck (with its Hatteras ice), were I God, I’d forgive you all your sins voluntary and involuntary, of deed and word... (By the way: Nikolka, having read that letter of yours, badly wanted to write "deck.") In your works too you underline the petty stuff... And yet you weren’t born a subjective scribbler... That’s not innate, it’s acquired... Renouncing an acquired subjectivity is as easy as anything, if only you’d be a bit more honest: throw yourself overboard everywhere, don’t shove yourself into the hero’s part in your own novel, renounce yourself for even half an hour. You have a story where the young married couple spend the whole dinner kissing, moaning, churning water... Not one sensible word, nothing but complacency! And you didn’t write it for the reader... You wrote it because that chattering is agreeable to you. But describe the dinner instead – what they ate, how they ate, what the cook was like, how vulgar your hero is, content with his lazy happiness, how vulgar your heroine is, how ridiculous in her love for that napkin-tucked, well-fed, gorged goose... Everyone likes to see well-fed, contented people – that’s true, but to describe them it’s not enough to say what they said and how many times they kissed... Something else is needed too: to renounce the personal impression that honeyed happiness produces on anyone not embittered... Subjectivity is a terrible thing. It’s bad if only because it gives the poor author away hand and foot. I’d wager every deacon’s daughter and clerk’s wife who’s read your work is in love with you, and were you a German you’d drink beer free of charge in every beer-hall kept by a German woman. Without this subjectivity, this weepiness, an eminently useful artist would have come out of you. You know so well how to laugh, to sting, to mock, you have such a rounded style, you’ve endured much, seen far too much... Ah! The material’s going to waste. If only you’d stuff it into letters, egg on Nikolka’s imagination with it... Out of your material one could forge iron things, not manifestos. What a useful man you could become! Try it, write Nikolka once, then again, a businesslike word, honest, good – you’re a hundred times cleverer than him – write to him, and you’ll see what comes of it... He’ll answer you, however lazy he may be... But don’t write pitiful, softening words: he’s soft enough as it is...

"It doesn’t take much sensitivity," you write further on, "to understand that in leaving I was cutting myself off from the family and condemning myself to oblivion..." It follows that you’ve been forgotten. That you yourself don’t believe what you’re writing isn’t even worth discussing. There’s no need to lie, friend. Knowing the character of our whimpering mother and of Nikolai, who in his cups remembers and kisses the whole world, you couldn’t have written that; if not for the tear glands, you wouldn’t have written it. – "I expected it, and of course I got what I expected..." You want to move me... One does need to be moved, very much so, but you won’t manage it with words like those. These are quotations from "Little Sisters," and you have weightier things of your own you could quote to better effect.

2) "Father wrote to me that I haven’t justified myself" and so on. You’re writing this for the hundredth time. I don’t know what you want from father. He’s the enemy of tobacco-smoking and unlawful cohabitation – do you want to make him your friend? That trick works with mother and aunt, but not with father. He’s the same kind of flint as the Old Believers, no softer, and you won’t budge him an inch. That, perhaps, is his strength. However sweetly you write, he’ll go on sighing forever, writing you the same thing, and, worst of all, suffering... And as if you didn’t know that already? Strange... Forgive me, brother, but it seems to me another string is playing here, and a rather nasty one at that. You don’t go against the goad, but you seem to be currying favor with it... What business is it of yours how this or that Old Believer looks on your cohabitation? What are you climbing up to him for, what are you looking for? Let him look however he pleases... That’s his affair, an Old Believer’s affair... You know you’re right, so stand your ground, however much people write, however much they suffer... In that (uncurrying) defiance lies the whole salt of life, friend.

Everyone has the right to live with whomever he pleases and however he pleases – that’s the right of a developed person, and you, it follows, don’t believe in that right, since you find it necessary to send lawyers after the Pimenovnas and the Stamatiches. What is your cohabitation, from your own point of view? It’s your nest, your warmth, your grief and joy, your poetry, and yet you carry that poetry around like a stolen watermelon, eyeing everyone with suspicion (what, you wonder, does he think of it?), thrusting it at everyone, whining, groaning... Were I your family, I’d be offended, to say the least. You’re interested in what I think, what Nikolai thinks, what father thinks?! But what business is it of yours? You won’t be understood, any more than you understand "the father of six children," any more than you used to understand a father’s feeling... You won’t be understood, however close people stand to you, and there’s no need to be understood. Live, and that’s that. One can’t feel for everyone at once, and yet you want us to feel for you as well. The moment you see our faces are indifferent, you start whining. Wondrous are Thy works, O Lord! Whereas I, in your place, were I a family man, wouldn’t let anyone so much as have an opinion of mine, let alone a wish to understand it. That’s my own affair, my own department, and no sisters have the right (by the very natural order of things) to poke their understanding, sentimental nose into it! I wouldn’t even write letters about my own fatherly joy... They won’t understand, and they’ll laugh at the manifesto – and they’ll be right to. You’ve set Anna Ivanovna along the same lines, too. Back in Moscow, meeting us, she’d already dissolve in bitter tears and ask, "Can it really be too late, at thirty?" As if we’d asked her... It’s our own affair what we thought, and it’s not your business, any of you, to explain us to ourselves. I’d sooner let myself be thrashed than let my wife go bowing to her brothers, however exalted those brothers might be! So there. That’s a good subject for a story. No time to write the story.

3) "I have no right to expect anything from my sister... she hasn’t had time yet to form... an unfoul opinion of me. And she doesn’t yet know how to look into a soul..." (Doesn’t "looking into a soul" remind you a bit of a village constable’s reading of hearts?) You’re right... Sister loves you, but has no notion of you at all... The scenery you write about has only made her afraid to think about you. Very natural! Remember, did you ever once talk to her like a human being? She’s a big girl now, at the courses, has settled into serious study, has become serious, and did you ever say or write her a single serious word? The same story as with Nikolai. You stay silent, and it’s no wonder she’s a stranger to you. Strangers have done more for her than you, her own brother... She could learn a great deal from you, but you’re stingy. (You won’t astonish her with love, for love without good works is dead.) She’s living through a struggle now, and what a desperate one! It’s astonishing! Everything that threatened to become her life’s task has collapsed... She’s no worse now than any Turgenev heroine... I say this without exaggeration. The soil is the most fertile, only sow it! And you scribble her lyric verses and get angry that she doesn’t write to you! What is she supposed to write to you about? She sat down to write once, thought and thought, and wrote about Fedotikha... She’d like to write something else too, but hasn’t found anyone who’d guarantee her that her words won’t be eyed by Tretyakov and Co. I confess I’m too nervous with the family. I’m nervous in general. Often rude, unjust, but why does sister tell me things she won’t tell any of you? Probably because I never saw in her only a "dearly beloved sister," just as in Mishka I never denied a human being with whom one ought to talk... And she is a human being, God knows, a human being. You joke with her: gave her a promissory note, bought her a table on credit, a watch on credit... Fine pedagogy! It’s not the parents who’ll answer for her in the next world. That’s not their business... "I’ll say nothing of Anton. You were left alone..." Looking at the matter from a gentlemanly point of view, I too ought to say nothing and pass by. But at the start of the letter I said I’d steer round anything personal... I’ll steer round it here too, and touch only the "question..." (What a horror of questions!) There’s one nasty illness in this world that no writing man can boast of not knowing, not a single one!.. I’ve gone and put it down! I have to cross it out... And you’re acquainted with it too... It’s Kicheevism – the unwillingness of people of one and the same camp to understand each other. A vile illness! We’re our own people, we breathe the same air, we think alike, we’re kin in spirit, and yet... we’re petty enough to write: "I’ll say nothing!" Grandly announced! There are so few of us that we ought to stick together... well, vous comprenez! you understand! (French). However much we may have sinned against each other (and we’ve hardly sinned much!), we cannot fail to respect even the smallest trace of "something like the salt of the earth." We – I, you, the Tretyakovs, our Mishka – are worth more than a thousand others, not less than a hundred... Our task is common and plain: to think, to have a head on our shoulders... Whoever isn’t with us is against us. And yet we renounce each other! We sulk, whine, pout, gossip, spit in each other’s face! How many people Tretyakov and Co. have spat on! They drank brotherhood with "Vasya," and enrolled the rest of humanity among the narrow-minded! I’m a fool, I don’t know how to blow my nose properly, haven’t read much, but I pray to your god – and that ought to be enough for you to value me at my weight in gold! Stepanov is a fool, but he’s a university man, a thousand times above Semyon Gavrilovich and Vasya, and yet they made him knock his temple against the edge of the piano after the cancan! A disgrace! A fine understanding of people and a fine use of them! A fine one I’d be if I put a fool’s cap on Zembulatov for not being acquainted with Darwin! He, raised under serfdom, is an enemy of serfdom – for that alone I love him! And if I started renouncing A, B, V... Zh, one after another, I’d end up alone!

We newspapermen have a sickness – envy. Instead of rejoicing at your success, people envy you and... a pinch of pepper on it! A pinch of pepper! And yet we all pray to the same god, every one of us doing the same work... Pettiness! A kind of ill breeding... And how it poisons life!

There’s work to be done, and so I stop here. I’ll finish some other time. I’ve written to you in a friendly spirit, on my word of honor; no one has forgotten you, no one bears you any particular grudge, and... there’s no reason not to write to you in a friendly spirit.

My regards to Anna Ivanovna and to the one and only Ma.

Are you getting "Oskolki"? Let me know. I’ve sent you Leikin’s own confirmation.

And with that, my respects.

A. Chekhov

Care for a subject or two?

Look how I’ve rattled on! Twenty rubles’ worth of paper, if not more!