TO A. S. SUVORIN.

MOSCOW,
October 16, 1891.


I congratulate you on your new cook, and wish you an excellent appetite.
Wish me the same, for I am coming to see you soon--sooner than I had
intended--and shall eat for three. I simply must get away from home, if
only for a fortnight. From morning till night I am unpleasantly irritable,
I feel as though someone were drawing a blunt knife over my soul, and this
irritability finds external expression in my hurrying off to bed early and
avoiding conversation. Nothing I do succeeds. I began a story for the
_Sbornik_; I wrote half and threw it up, and then began another; I have
been struggling for more than a week with this story, and the time when I
shall finish it and when I shall set to work and finish the first story,
for which I am to be paid, seems to me far away. I have not been to the
province of Nizhni Novgorod yet, for reasons not under my control, and I
don't know when I shall go. In fact it's a hopeless mess--a silly muddle
and not life. And I desire nothing now so much as to win two hundred
thousand....

Ah, I have such a subject for a novel! If I were in a tolerable humour I
could begin it on the first of November and finish it on the first of
December. I would make five signatures of print. And I long to write as I
did at Bogimovo--i.e., from morning till night and in my sleep.

Don't tell anyone I am coming to Petersburg. I shall live incognito. In my
letters I write vaguely that I am coming in November....