passionately and earnestly liberal as Pisemsky. All his priests, officials,
and generals are regular blackguards. No one was so down on the old legal
and military set as he.

By the way, I have read also Bourget's "Cosmopolis." Rome and the Pope and
Correggio and Michael Angelo and Titian and doges and a fifty-year-old
beauty and Russians and Poles are all in Bourget, but how thin and strained
and mawkish and false it is in comparison even with our coarse and simple
Pisemsky! ...

What a good thing I gave up the town! Tell all the Fofanovs, Tchermnys,
_et tutti quanti_ who live by literature, that living in the country
is immensely cheaper than living in the town. I experience this now every
day. My family costs me nothing now, for lodging, bread, vegetables, milk,
butter, horses, are all our own. And there is so much to do, there is not
time to get through it all. Of the whole family of Chekhovs, I am the only
one to lie down, or sit at the table: all the rest are working from morning
till night. Drive the poets and literary men into the country. Why should
they live in starvation and beggary? Town life cannot give a poor man rich
material in the sense of poetry and art. He lives within four walls and
sees people only at the editors' offices and in eating-shops....




MELIHOVO,
January 25, 1894.


I believe I am mentally sound. It is true I have no special desire to live,