but that is not, so far, disease, but something probably passing and
natural. It does not follow every time that an author describes someone
mentally deranged, that he is himself deranged. I wrote "The Black Monk"
without any melancholy ideas, through cool reflection. I simply had a
desire to describe megalomania. The monk floating across the country was a
dream, and when I woke I told Misha about it. So you can tell Anna Ivanovna
that poor Anton Pavlovitch, thank God! has not gone out of his mind yet,
but that he eats a great deal at supper and so he dreams of monks.

I keep forgetting to write to you: read Ertel's story "The Seers" in
"Russkaya Mysl." There is poetry and something terrible in the
old-fashioned fairy-tale style about it. It is one of the best new things
that has come out in Moscow....




YALTA,
March 27, 1894.


I am in good health generally, ill in certain parts. For instance, a cough,
palpitations of the heart, haemorrhoids. I had palpitations of the heart
incessantly for six days, and the sensation all the time was loathsome.
Since I have quite given up smoking I have been free from gloomy and
anxious moods. Perhaps because I am not smoking, Tolstoy's morality has
ceased to touch me; at the bottom of my heart I take up a hostile attitude
towards it, and that of course is not just. I have peasant blood in my
veins, and you won't astonish me with peasant virtues. From my childhood I
have believed in progress, and I could not help believing in it since the