MihaElla > Recent Status Updates

...As I am soon coming to Moscow, please keep a ticket for me for "The Pillars of Society"; I want to see the marvellous Norwegian acting, and I will even pay for my seat. You know Ibsen is my favourite writer…

Thank you for your good wishes in regard to my marriage. I have informed my fiancee of your design of coming to Yalta in order to cut her out a little. She said that if "that horrid woman" comes to Yalta, she will hold me tight in her embrace. I observed that to be embraced for so long in hot weather was not hygienic...

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.

Dear Actress,
The photographs are very, very good, especially the one in which you are leaning in dejection with your elbows on the back of a chair, which gives you a discreetly mournful, gentle expression under which there lies hid a little demon.

And you, why are you depressed? What are you depressed about? You are living, working, hoping, drinking; you laugh when your uncle reads aloud to you—what more do you want? I am a different matter. I am torn up by the roots, I am not living a full life, I don't drink, though I am fond of drinking; I love noise and don't hear it—in fact,...

I understand your mood, dear actress, I understand it very well; but yet in your place I would not be so desperately upset.Both the part of Anna & the play itself are not worth wasting so much feeling & nerves over.It is an old play.It is already out of date,& there are a great many defects in it; if more than half the performers have not fallen into the right tone, then naturally it is the fault of the play...

Should we talk of personal life? Yes, that may sometimes be interesting and we might perhaps talk about it; but there again we are constrained, we are reserved and insincere: we are restrained by an instinct of self-preservation and we are afraid. We are afraid of being overheard by some uncultured Esquimaux who does not like us, and whom we don't like either.

Tolstoy's daughters are very nice. They adore their father and have a fanatical faith in him and that means that Tolstoy really is a great moral force, for if he were insincere and not irreproachable his daughters would be the first to take up a sceptical attitude to him, for daughters are like sparrows: you don't catch them with empty chaff….

By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. Happiness continued from day to day, from morning to morning, I cannot stand. When every day I am told of the same thing, in the same tone of voice, I become furious...

... I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train or a steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him. I consider his philosophy won't last long, however. It's more showy than convincing….

To write & write & write! It is my opinion that true happiness is impossible without idleness. My ideal is to be idle & 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,& so on) & to do what is useless. Meanwhile, I am a literary man, and have to write here in Yalta...

As for getting married, what am I to say to you? To marry is interesting only for love; to marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at the bazaar solely because it is of good quality.
The most important screw in family life is love, sexual attraction, one flesh, all the rest is dreary and cannot be reckoned upon, however cleverly we make our calculations...

June 16.
…You want me to write my impressions to you.
My soul longs for breadth and altitude,but I am forced to lead a narrow life spent over trashy roubles and kopecks.There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk,and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I do..

Life is short,& Chekhov,from whom you are expecting an answer, would like it to flash by brilliantly and with dash. He would go to Prince's Island, to Constantinople, and again to India and Sahalin…
But in the first place he is not free,he has a respectable family who need his protection.
In the second,he has a large dose of cowardice. Looking towards the future I call nothing but cowardice....

Melihovo,April 8,1892

If Shapiro were to present me with the gigantic photograph of which you write, I should not know what to do with it.A cumbersome present.You say that I used to be younger.Yes, imagine! Strange as it may seem,I have passed thirty some time ago, and I already feel forty close at hand.I have grown old not in body only,but in spirit. I have become stupidly indifferent to everything in the world...

Do you want my biography? Here it is. I was born in Taganrog in 1860. I finished the course at Taganrog high school in 1879. In 1884 I took my degree in medicine at the University of Moscow. In 1888 I gained the Pushkin prize. In 1890 I made a journey to Sahalin across Siberia and back by sea. In 1891 I made a tour in Europe, where I drank excellent wine and ate oysters.

Ah, my friends, how bored I am! If I am a doctor I ought to have patients and a hospital; if I am a literary man I ought to live among people instead of in a flat with a mongoose, I ought to have at least a scrap of social and political life—but this life between four walls, without nature, without people, without a country, without health and appetite, is not life, but some sort of … and nothing more.

I envy you,not because your wives have gone away, but because you are bathing in the sea & living in a warm house.I am cold in my barn.I should like new carpets,an open fireplace,bronzes,& learned conversations.I shall never be a Tolstoyan.In women I love beauty above all things;& in the history of mankind,culture,expressed in carpets,carriages with springs,& keenness of wit.Ach! To make haste and become an old man

A woman was carting rye, and she fell off the waggon head downwards. She was terribly injured: concussion of the brain, straining of the vertebrae of the neck, sickness, fearful pains, and so on. She was brought to me. She was moaning and groaning and praying for death, and yet she looked at the man who brought her and muttered: "Let the lentils go, Kirila, you can thresh them later, but thresh the oats now."

(Enclosing a photograph of a young man inscribed
"To Lida from Petya.")
Precious Lida!
Why these reproaches!I send you my portrait.Tomorrow we shall meet.Do not forget your Petya. A 1000 kisses!!!
I have bought Chekhov's stories.How delightful! Mind you buy them.Remember me to Masha Chekhov.What a darling you are!
I love you passionately like a tiger,and I offer you my hand.
P.S.—Answer me by signs. You do squint

10 May, 1891

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…

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...

Can you imagine just opposite me are sitting 2 Dutch girls:one of them is like Pushkin's Tatyana,& the other like her sister Olga.I watch them all through dinner,& imagine a neat,clean little house with a turret,excellent butter,superb Dutch cheese,Dutch herrings,a benevolent-looking pastor,a sedate teacher,& I feel I should like to marry a Dutch girl &be depicted with her on a tea-tray beside the little white house

ah, my dears, if you only knew how nice Vienna is! [...] The dinners are good.There is no vodka; they drink beer and fairly good wine.There is one thing that is nasty: they make you pay for bread.When they bring the bill they ask, Wie viel brodchen?—that is, how many rolls have you devoured?And you have to pay for every little roll.
The women are beautiful and elegant. Indeed, everything is diabolically elegant...

I will try and describe minutely the position of the children and young people in Sahalin. It is exceptional. I saw starving children, I saw girls of thirteen prostitutes, girls of fifteen with child. Girls begin to live by prostitution from twelve years old, sometimes before menstruation has begun. Church and school exist only on paper, the children are educated by their environment and the convict surroundings..

I have a passionate desire to talk to you. My soul is in a ferment. I want no one else but you, for it is only with you I can talk.

I have no clear memory of Singapore as, for some reason, I felt very sad while I was driving about it, and was almost weeping. Next after it comes Ceylon—an earthly Paradise. There in that Paradise I went more than a hundred versts on the railway and gazed at palm forests and bronze women to my heart's content…

[swimming across Amur]...I am sharing my cabin with a Chinaman—Son-Luli—who is constantly telling me how in China for the merest trifle it is "off with his head." Last night he got drunk with opium,& was talking in his sleep all night & preventing me from sleeping. On the 27th I walked about the Chinese town Aigun. Little by little I seem gradually to be stepping into a fantastic world...

I must be in love with Jamais as I dreamed of her yesterday. In comparison with all the "jeunes Siberiennes" with their Yakut-Buriat physiognomies, who do not know how to dress, to sing, and to laugh, our Jamais, Drishka, and Gundassiha are simply queens. The Siberian girls and women are like frozen fish; one would have to be a walrus or a seal to get up a flirtation with them.

To his Brother Alexandr
Irkutsk,June 5, 1890.

My European Brother,
It is, of course, unpleasant to live in Siberia; but better to live in Siberia and feel oneself a man of moral worth, than to live in Petersburg with the reputation of a drunkard and a scoundrel. No reference to present company.
* * * * *
Siberia is a cold and long country.