Yesterday I chanced to learn your address, and I write to you. If you have
a free minute please write to me how you are in health, and how you are
getting on altogether. Write, if only a couple of lines.
I have had influenza for the last six weeks. There has been a complication
of the lungs and I have a cruel cough. In March I am going south to the
province of Poltava, and shall stay there till my cough is gone. My sister
has gone down there to buy a house and garden.
Literary doings here are quiet but life is bustling. There is a great deal
of talk about the famine, and a great deal of work resulting from the said
talk. The theatres are empty, the weather is wretched, there are no frosts
at all. Jean Shteheglov is captivated by the Tolstoyans. Merezhkovsky sits
at home as of old, lost in a labyrinth of deep researches, and as of old is
very nice; of Chekhov they say he has married the heiress Sibiryakov and
got five millions dowry--all Petersburg is talking of it. For whose
benefit and for what object this slander, I am utterly unable to imagine.
It’s positively sickening to read letters from Petersburg.