ALEXIN,
May 7, 1891.
The summer villa is all right. There are woods and the Oka: it is far away
in the wilds, it is warm, nightingales sing, and so on. It is quiet and
peaceful, and in bad weather it will be dull and depressing here. After
travelling abroad, life at a summer villa seems a little mawkish. I feel as
though I had been taken prisoner and put into a fortress. But I am
contented all the same. In Moscow I received from the Society of Dramatic
Authors not two hundred roubles, as I expected, but three hundred. It’s
very kind on the part of fortune.
Well, my dear sir, I owe you, even if we adopt your reckoning, not less
than eight hundred roubles. In June or July, when my money will be at the
shop, I will write to Zandrok to send all that comes to me to you in
Feodosia, and do not try and prevent me. I give you my word of honour that
when I have paid my debts and settled with you, I’ll accept a loan of 2,000
from you. Do not imagine that it is disagreeable to me to be in your debt.
I lend other people money, and so I feel I have the right to borrow money,
but I am afraid of getting into difficulties and the habit of being in
debt. You know I owe your firm a devilish lot.
There is a fine view from my window. Trains are continually passing. There
is a bridge across the Oka.
ALEXIN,
May 10, 1891.
Yes, you are right, my soul needs balsam. I should read now with pleasure,
even with joy, something serious, not merely about myself but things in
general. I pine for serious reading, and recent Russian criticism does not
nourish but simply irritates me. I could read with enthusiasm something new
about Pushkin or Tolstoy. That would be balsam for my idle mind.
I am homesick for Venice and Florence too, and am ready to climb Vesuvius
again; Bologna has been effaced from my memory and grown dim. As for Nice
and Paris, when I recall them “I look on my life with loathing.”
In the last number of _The Messenger of Foreign Literature_ there is a
story by Ouida, translated from the English by our Mihail. Why don’t I know
foreign languages? It seems to me I could translate magnificently. When I
read anyone else’s translation I keep altering and transposing the words in
my brain, and the result is something light, ethereal, like lacework.
On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays I write my Sahalin book, on the other
days, except Sunday, my novel, and on Sundays, short stories. I work with
zest. The weather has been superb every day; the site of our summer villa
is dry and healthy. There is a lot of woodland. There are a lot of fish and
crayfish in the Oka. I see the trains and the steamers. Altogether if it
were not for being somewhat cramped I should be very very much pleased with
it.
* * * * *
I don’t intend to get married. I should like to be a little bald old man
sitting at a big table in a fine study....
ALEXIN,
May 13, 1891.
I am going to write you a Christmas story--that’s certain. Two, indeed, if
you like. I sit and write and write ...; at last I have set to work. I am
only sorry that my cursed teeth are aching and my stomach is out of order.
I am a dilatory but productive author. By the time I am forty I shall have
hundreds of volumes, so that I can open a bookshop with nothing but my own
works. To have a lot of books and to have nothing else is a horrible
disgrace.
My dear friend, haven’t you in your library Tagantsev’s “Criminal Law”?
If you have, couldn’t you send it me? I would buy it, but I am now “a
poor relation”--a beggar and as poor as Sidor’s goat. Would you telephone
to your shop, too, to send me, on account of favours to come, two books:
“The Laws relating to Exiles,” and “The Laws relating to Persons under
Police Control.” Don’t imagine that I want to become a procurator; I
want these works for my Sahalin book. I am going to direct my attack
chiefly against life sentences, in which I see the root of all the
evils; and against the laws dealing with exiles, which are fearfully out
of date and contradictory.