Thanks for your letter. Though you do scare me in your letter saying you
are soon going to die, though you do taunt me with having rejected you, yet
thank you all the same; I know perfectly well you are not going to die, and
that no one has rejected you.
I am in Yalta and I am dreary, very dreary indeed. The aristocracy, so to
call it, are performing “Faust,” and I go to the rehearsals and there I
enjoy the spectacle of a perfect flower-bed of black, red, flaxen, and
brown heads; I listen to the singing and I eat. At the house of the
principal of the high school I eat tchibureks, and saddle of lamb with
boiled grain; in various estimable families I eat green soup; at the
confectioner’s I eat--in my hotel also. I go to bed at ten and I get up at
ten, and after dinner I lie down and rest, and yet I am bored, dear Lika. I
am not bored because “my ladies” are not with me, but because the northern
spring is better than the spring here, and because the thought that I must,
that I ought to write never leaves me for an instant. To write and write
and write! It is my opinion that true happiness is impossible without
idleness. My ideal is to be idle and to love a plump girl. My loftiest
happiness is to walk or to sit doing nothing; my favourite occupation is to
gather up what is not wanted (leaves, straws, and so on) and to do what is
useless. Meanwhile, I am a literary man, and have to write here in Yalta.
Dear Lika, when you become a great singer and are paid a handsome salary,
then be charitable to me, marry me, and keep me at your expense, that I may
be free to do nothing. If you really are going to die, it might be
undertaken by Varya Eberly, whom, as you know, I love. I am so all to
pieces with the perpetual thought of work I ought to do and can’t avoid
that for the last week I have been continually tormented with palpitations
of the heart. It’s a loathsome sensation.
I have sold my fox-skin greatcoat for twenty roubles! It cost sixty, but as
forty roubles’ worth of fur has peeled off it, twenty roubles was not too
low a price. The gooseberries are not ripe here yet, but it is warm and
bright, the trees are coming out, the sea looks like summer, the young
ladies are yearning for sensations: but yet the north is better than the
south of Russia, in spring at any rate. In our part nature is more
melancholy, more lyrical, more Levitanesque; here it is neither one thing
nor the other, like good, sonorous, but frigid verse. Thanks to my
palpitations I haven’t drunk wine for a week, and that makes the
surroundings seem even poorer....
M. gave a concert here, and made one hundred and fifty roubles clear
profit. He roared like a grampus but had an immense success. I am awfully
sorry I did not study singing; I could have roared too, as my throat is
rich in husky elements, and they say I have a real octave. I should have
earned money, and been a favourite with the ladies....