Part 45 (2/2)

The scene in the house of the General in command of the Peter-Paul Fortress, the spiritualist, I read with a throbbing heart--it is so good!

And Madame Kortchagin in the easy chair; and the peasant, the husband of Fedosya! The peasant calls his grandmother ”an artful one.” That's just what Tolstoy's pen is--an artful one. There's no end to the novel, what there is you can't call an end. To write and write, and then to throw the whole weight of it on a text from the Gospel, that is quite in the theological style. To settle it all by a text from the Gospel is as arbitrary as dividing the convicts into five cla.s.ses. Why into five and not into ten? He must make us believe in the Gospel, in its being the truth, and then settle it all by texts.

... They write about Tolstoy as old women talk about a crazy saint, all sorts of unctuous nonsense; it's a mistake for him to talk to those people....

They have elected Tolstoy [Footnote: An honorary Academician.]--against the grain. According to notions there, he is a Nihilist. Anyway, that's what he was called by a lady, the wife of an actual privy councillor, and I heartily congratulate him upon it....

TO L. S. MIZINOV.

YALTA, January 29, 1900.

DEAR LIRA,

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.

TO GORKY.

YALTA, February 3, 1900.

DEAR ALEXEY MAXIMOVITCH,

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 ma.s.s; one sees that these figures are living in your imagination, but only these figures--the ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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.

TO O. L. KNIPPER.

YALTA, February 10, 1900.

DEAR ACTRESS,

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.

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