To A. S. Suvorin, 30 May 1888. Sumy.

30 May 1888. Sumy.

30 May, Sumy, the Lintvaryova estate.

Dear

Alexei Sergeevich!

I am answering your letter, which I received only yesterday; the envelope was torn, crumpled, and dirty, a fact to which my hosts and their household gave a rich political coloring.

I am living on the bank of the Psel, in the wing of an old manor house. I rented the dacha sight unseen, at random, and so far have not regretted it. The river is wide, deep, abundant in islands, fish, and crayfish, the banks are beautiful, there is a great deal of greenery... And above all, it is spacious to such a degree that it seems to me that for my hundred roubles I have bought the right to live in a space with no visible end. Nature and life here are built to that very pattern which is now so outmoded and rejected by the editors: not to mention the nightingales, which sing day and night, the barking of dogs heard from afar, the old neglected gardens, the tightly shuttered, very poetic and melancholy manor houses in which the souls of beautiful women dwell, not to mention the old serf-era lackeys breathing their last, or the young ladies yearning for the most conventional love – not far from me there is even so hackneyed a cliche as a water mill (with sixteen wheels) with its miller and his daughter, who always sits at the window and, it seems, is waiting for something. Everything I now see and hear seems to me long familiar from old tales and stories. Only one thing breathed novelty at me – the mysterious bird called the "water bittern," which sits somewhere far off in the reeds and by day and by night gives a cry that resembles partly a blow struck on an empty barrel, partly the bellow of a cow shut up in a shed. Every one of the Ukrainians here has seen this bird in his time, but each describes it differently, which means no one has actually seen it. There is novelty of another sort too, but it is borrowed, and so not quite new.

Every day I row out to the mill, and in the evenings I set off for the islands to fish with the fishing-maniacs from the Kharitonenko plant. The conversations are interesting. Around Trinity Sunday all the maniacs will spend the night on the islands and fish the whole night through; I shall too. There are some superb characters.

My hosts have turned out to be very kind and hospitable people. A family worth studying. It consists of six members. The mother, an old woman, very kind, damp-eyed, a woman who has suffered her fill; she reads Schopenhauer and goes to church for the akathist service; she conscientiously studies every issue of "Vestnik Evropy" and "Severny Vestnik" and knows novelists I have never even dreamed of; she attaches great importance to the fact that the painter Makovsky once lived in her wing, and that a young man of letters lives there now; talking with Pleshcheev, she feels a sacred trembling through her whole body and rejoices every minute that she has been "granted the honor" of seeing a great poet.

Her eldest daughter, a woman physician – the pride of the whole family and, as the peasants style her, a saint – presents herself as truly something extraordinary. She has a tumor in the brain; from this she is completely blind, suffers from epilepsy, and from constant headache. She knows what awaits her, and speaks of the death that is near with stoic and astonishing composure. In treating patients I have grown used to seeing people who will soon die, and I always felt somehow strange when, in my presence, people who were near death spoke, or smiled, or wept; but here, when I see on the terrace this blind woman laughing, joking, or listening as my "Twilight" is read to her, what now begins to seem strange to me is not that the woman doctor will die, but that the rest of us do not feel our own death and go on writing our "Twilights" as though we would never die.

The second daughter is also a woman physician, an old maid, a quiet, shy, endlessly kind creature who loves everyone and is plain of face. Patients are a sheer torment to her, and over them she is anxious to the point of near-psychosis. At consultations we always disagree: I turn out to be the bearer of good news exactly where she sees death, and I double the doses she prescribes. But where death is obvious and inevitable, there my woman doctor feels altogether un-doctorly. Once I was seeing patients together with her at the paramedic station; a young Ukrainian peasant woman came in with a malignant tumor of the glands on her neck and the back of her head. The affected area was so extensive that no treatment was conceivable.

And so, precisely because the peasant woman felt no pain now, though in six months she would die in terrible torment, the woman doctor looked at her with such deep guilt, as though apologizing for her own health and ashamed that medicine is helpless. She busies herself diligently with the household and understands it down to every detail. She even knows horses. When, say, the side-horse balks or grows restless, she knows how to remedy the trouble and instructs the coachman. She loves family life very much, which fate has denied her, and, it seems, dreams of it; when in the evenings they play music and sing in the big house, she paces quickly and nervously up and down the dark avenue, like an animal that has been shut in... I think she has never in her life done anyone harm, and it seems to me she has never been, and will never be, happy for a single minute.

The third daughter, who has finished the course at the Bestuzhev courses, is a young woman of masculine build, strong, bony as a bream, muscular, sunburnt, loud-voiced... She laughs so that it can be heard a mile off. A passionate devotee of all things Ukrainian. At her own expense she has built a school on the estate and teaches the local Ukrainian children Krylov’s fables in Ukrainian translation. She makes pilgrimages to Shevchenko’s grave the way a Turk goes to Mecca. She does not cut her hair, wears a corset and a bustle, busies herself with the household, loves to sing and to laugh, and would not refuse even the most conventional sort of love, though she has read Marx’s "Das Kapital" – but she is unlikely to marry, being plain.

The eldest son is a quiet, modest, intelligent, untalented, and hard-working young man, without pretensions and, it seems, content with what life has given him. He was expelled from the fourth year of university, a fact of which he does not boast. He speaks little. He loves the land and farming, and lives on good terms with the local Ukrainians.

The second son is a young man obsessed with the idea that Tchaikovsky is a genius. A pianist. He dreams of living according to Tolstoy’s teachings.

There you have a brief description of the company among whom I now live. As for the local Ukrainians, the women remind me of Zankovetskaya, and all the men of Panas Sadovsky. There are a great many guests.

I have A. N. Pleshcheev staying with me. Everyone looks on him as a demigod, counts it a happiness if he deigns to honor someone’s bowl of soured milk with his attention, presents him with bouquets, invites him everywhere, and so on. The young lady Vata – a Poltava boarding-school girl who is a guest of my hosts – courts him with particular devotion. And he "listens and eats" and smokes his cigars, which give his admirers headaches. He is slow-moving and lazy in the manner of old men, but this does not stop the fair sex from rowing him about in boats, driving him to neighboring estates, and singing him romances. Here he plays the same part he plays in Petersburg – that is, an icon that people pray before because it is old and once hung beside wonder-working icons. For my own part, quite apart from the fact that he is a very good, warm, and sincere man, I see in him a vessel full of traditions, interesting memories, and fine commonplaces.

I have written and already sent a story to "Novoye Vremya."

What you write about "Lights" is entirely fair. "Nikolai and Masha" run through "Lights" like a red thread, but what is to be done? Being unaccustomed to writing at length, I grow anxious; every time I write, I am seized by the thought that my story is too long for its station, and I try to write as briefly as possible. The ending with the engineer and Kisochka struck me as an unimportant detail clogging up the story, and so I threw it out, replacing it, of necessity, with "Nikolai and Masha."

You write that neither the conversation about pessimism nor Kisochka’s story advances or resolves the question of pessimism in the least. It seems to me that it is not for writers of fiction to resolve such questions as God, pessimism, and the like. The fiction-writer’s business is only to depict who said or thought what, how, and under what circumstances, about God or about pessimism. The artist must be not the judge of his characters and of what they say, but only an impartial witness. I heard a disorderly, inconclusive conversation between two Russians about pessimism, and I am obliged to convey that conversation exactly as I heard it; the judging of it will be done by the jury – that is, by the readers. My only business is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to know how to light up my figures and speak in their language. Shcheglov-Leontiev holds it against me that I ended the story with the phrase: "There’s no making sense of anything in this world!" In his view, an artist-psychologist ought to make sense of it – that is what he is a psychologist for. But I do not agree with him. It is high time that writing people, artists especially, admitted that in this world one cannot make sense of anything, just as Socrates once admitted and as Voltaire admitted. The crowd thinks it knows everything and understands everything; and the stupider it is, the wider its horizon seems to it. But if an artist whom the crowd trusts should resolve to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees, that alone will amount to great knowledge in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.

As for your play, you are wrong to abuse it. Its shortcomings lie not in any lack of talent or powers of observation on your part, but in the very nature of your creative gift. You are more inclined toward a strict manner of creation, bred in you by your frequent reading of the classical models and your love of them. Imagine that your "Tatyana" were written in verse, and you would see that its faults would take on quite a different aspect. Had it been written in verse, no one would have noticed that all the characters speak in one and the same language, no one would have reproached your heroes for philosophizing and holding forth like feuilletonists instead of simply talking – all this, in the verse form of the classics, merges with the general background the way smoke merges with air – and the absence of the vulgar language and the vulgar, petty gestures with which contemporary drama and comedy ought to abound, and which your "Tatyana" entirely lacks, would not be noticed. Give your characters Latin surnames, dress them in togas, and you would get the very same result... The shortcomings of your play are incurable, because they are organic. Console yourself with the thought that they are, in you, a product of your positive qualities, and that if you were to make a gift of these very shortcomings of yours to other playwrights – Krylov, say, or Tikhonov – their plays would become both more interesting and more intelligent.

Now as to the future. At the end of June or the start of July I shall go to Kiev, and from there down the Dnieper to Yekaterinoslav, then to Alexandrovsk, and so on to the Black Sea. I shall visit Feodosia. If you really are going to Constantinople, might I not come along with you? We could call on Father Paisius, who will prove to us that Tolstoy’s teaching comes from the devil. All through June I shall be writing, and so, in all likelihood, I shall have enough money for the journey. From the Crimea I shall go to Poti, from Poti to Tiflis, from Tiflis to the Don, from the Don to the Psel... In the Crimea I shall begin writing a lyrical play.

What a letter I have run on to you, though! I must finish. Give my regards to Anna Ivanovna, Nastya, and Borya. Alexei Nikolaevich sends you his greetings. He is a little unwell today: breathing is hard for him, and his pulse limps like Leikin. I shall doctor him. Farewell, keep well, and God grant you all good things.

Sincerely devoted,

A. Chekhov.