Shall I remind you of Kashtanka, or forget about her? Won't she lose her
childhood and youth if we don't print her? However, you know best....

P. S.--If you see my brother Alexandr, tell him that our aunt is dying of
consumption. Her days are numbered. She was a splendid woman, a saint.

If you want to visit the famine-stricken provinces, let us go together in
January, it will be more conspicuous then....




MOSCOW,
October 19, 1891.


What a splendid little letter has come from you! It is warmly and
eloquently written, and every thought in it is true. To talk now of
laziness and drunkenness, and so on, is as strange and tactless as to
lecture a man on the conduct of life at a moment when he is being sick or
lying ill of typhus. There is always a certain element of insolence in
being well-fed, as in every kind of force, and that element finds
expression chiefly in the well-fed man preaching to the hungry. If
consolation is revolting at a time of real sorrow, what must be the effect
of preaching morality; and how stupid and insulting that preaching must
seem. These moral people imagine that if a man is fifteen roubles in
arrears with his taxes he must be a wastrel, and ought not to drink; but
they ought to reckon up how much states are in debt, and prime ministers,
and what the debts of all the marshals of nobility and all the bishops