In a letter to his friend and publisher Alexei Suvorin, between dispensing medical advice and working on his treatise Sakhalin Island, Anton Chekhov is ready for a vacation.
July 11, 1894, Melikhovo
You wrote you would be here one of these days, so I waited…I don’t feel drawn toward [the Tolstoy estate] Yasnaya Polyana. My brain functions feebly and doesn’t want to get any more weighty impressions. I would prefer some sea bathing and nonsensical talk.
Here is my plan. The twentieth or twenty-second of July I am going to Taganrog to treat my uncle, who is seriously ill and insists on my services. He is a truly fine person, the best of men, and I would feel bad about denying him this service although I know it will be futile…After finishing my “Sakhalin” here, and offering thanks to heaven, I will declare my freedom and readiness to go wherever I please. If there is money I will go abroad, or to the Caucasus, or to Bukhara. But I shall doubtless have some financial difficulties, so that a change of plan is not to be avoided. It would be nice to speak to Witte, the Minister of Finance, and tell him that instead of scattering subsidies right and left or promising 100,000 to the fund, he ought to arrange for literary people and artists to travel free on the state railways. Except for Leikin (blast his hide!) all Russian men of letters exist in a virtual state of chronic hunger, for all of them, even those who turn out a couple of thousand pages a year, by some quirk of fate are weighed down by a heap of obligations. And there is nothing more irksome or less poetic, one may say, than the prosaic struggle for existence which takes away the joy of life and drags one into apathy. However, this has nothing to do with the matter at hand. If you go to Taganrog with me—a very nice city—so be it. In August I am at your service; we’ll take off then for Switzerland.
The play can be written somewhere on the shores of Lake Como or even left unborn; there’s no sense getting hot and bothered over it and if we do—then the hell with it.
Now as to leeches. What you need, mainly, is to be in good spirits, and not leeches. In Moscow you impressed me by being cheerful and healthy and as I looked at you I certainly didn’t think you would be reminding me of leeches. But once you did bring them up, very well. Leeches won’t do you any harm. It is not a matter of bloodletting, but rather a nervous counterreaction. They suck but little blood and don’t cause pain…
Write me what’s new. Write about our Taganrog project, too.
…About ten years ago I went in for spiritualism and once got this message from Turgenev, whose spirit I had evoked at a session, “Your life is nearing its decline.” I want so keenly to enjoy everything as if life were a perpetual Shrove Tuesday. I seem to have tried everything: life abroad, a good novel…And some inner force, like a presentiment, nudges me to make haste. Perhaps it is not a presentiment but simply sorrow that life flows on in such a monotonous and pallid way. A protest of the soul, one might say…
I send my respects and pray heaven for the forgiveness of your sins and the showering of blessings upon you.
Prior Antoni