To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 4 October 1888. Moscow.
А. Н. ПЛЕЩЕЕВУ, 4 октября 1888 г. Москва.
Headnote
1 Written from Moscow on 4 October 1888, this short note to the poet and "Severny Vestnik" editor Alexei Nikolaevich Pleshcheev is a same-day follow-up to Chekhov’s longer letter of that morning (letter 490): Chekhov had barely sent it off when Pleshcheev’s reply arrived. The opening concerns "Svetlov" – the Moscow actor Chekhov had praised in letter 490 as "a good actor and a fine fellow" – whom Pleshcheev evidently hoped would take on his play "Mednye lby" ("Brazen Brows" / "Copper Foreheads," Pleshcheev’s translation of Emile Augier), only to run into a contractual snag with the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Chekhov says he will relay Pleshcheev’s answer to Svetlov and press him instead to take up "A Bad Man" ("Дурной человек"), a comedy Pleshcheev had translated from the German (from Julius Rosen) and wanted placed with him; Chekhov follows up on the matter again five days later in letter 497.
2 The middle of the letter is a small logistical near-miss: had Pleshcheev’s letter come two hours earlier, Chekhov’s own new story (sent to "Severny Vestnik" and referred to as finished in letter 490) would have gone out with this reply; instead it is already en route to Baskov Lane in St. Petersburg, where Pleshcheev lived.
3 The letter’s real center of gravity is its closing paragraph, one of Chekhov’s best-known statements of artistic independence. He looks forward to reading a piece the young critic Dmitri Merezhkovsky was writing about him (it would appear that November in "Severny Vestnik" as "An Old Question Apropos a New Talent"), then insists to Pleshcheev and to Pleshcheev’s wife, Anna Mikhailovna, that he is not afraid of their disapproval of his new story – only of readers who hunt for a political "tendency" between the lines. He refuses every label (liberal, conservative, gradualist, monk, indifferentist), declares he would like to be nothing but a "free artist," and names the journalists Osip Notovich and Grigory Gradovsky, alongside consistory-court secretaries, as figures whose hypocrisy and dishonesty repel him equally. He closes by locating Pharisaism and arbitrary tyranny not only among merchants and in the lock-up but in scholarship, literature, and among the young generally, and sets out his "holy of holies": the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom from force and falsehood.