YALTA,
January 8, 1900.
... My health is not so bad. I feel better than I did last year, but yet
the doctors won’t let me leave Yalta. I am as tired and sick of this
charming town as of a disagreeable wife. It’s curing me of tuberculosis,
but it’s making me ten years older. If I go to Nice it won’t be before
February. I am writing a little; not long ago I sent a long story to
_Zhizn_. Money is short, all I have received so far from Marks for the
plays is gone by now....
If Prince Baryatinsky is to be judged by his paper, I must own I was unjust
to him, for I imagined him very different from what he is. They will shut
up his paper, of course, but he will long maintain his reputation as a good
journalist. You ask me why the _Syeverny Kurier_ is successful? Because our
society is exhausted, hatred has turned it as rank and rotten as grass in a
bog, and it has a longing for something fresh, free, light--a desperate
longing.
* * * * *
I often see the academician Kondakov here. We talk of the Pushkin section
of belles-lettres. As Kondakov will take part in the elections of future
academicians, I am trying to hypnotize him, and suggest that they should
elect Barantsevitch and Mihailovsky. The former is broken down and worn
out. He is unquestionably a literary man, is poverty-stricken in his old
age.... An income and rest would be the very thing for him. The
latter--that is Mihailovsky--would make a good foundation for the new
section, and his election would satisfy three-quarters of the brotherhood.
But my hypnotism failed, my efforts came to nothing. The supplementary
clauses to the statute are like Tolstoy’s After-word to the Kreutzer
Sonata. The academicians have done all they can to protect themselves from
literary men, whose society shocks them as the society of the Russian
academicians shocked the Germans. Literary men can only be honorary
academicians, and that means nothing--it is just the same as being an
honorary citizen of the town of Vyazma or Tcherepovets, there is no salary
and no vote attached. A clever way out of it! The professors will be
elected real academicians, and those of the writers will be elected
honorary academicians who do not live in Petersburg, and so cannot be
present at the sittings and abuse the professors.
I hear the muezzin calling in the minaret. The Turks are very religious;
it’s their fast now, they eat nothing the whole day. They have no religious
ladies, that element which makes religion shallow as the sand does the
Volga.
You do well to print the martyrology of Russian towns avoided by the
extortionate railway contractors. Here is what the famous author Chekhov
wrote on the subject in his story “My Life.” [Footnote: Appended to the
letter was a printed cutting.] Railway contractors are revengeful people;
refuse them a trifle, and they will punish you for it all your life--and
it’s their tradition.
Thanks for your letter, thanks for your indulgence.