physical elasticity for it. When I write now or think I ought to write I
feel as much disgust as though I were eating soup from which I had just
removed a beetle--forgive the comparison. What I hate is not the writing
itself, but the literary entourage from which one cannot escape, and which
one takes everywhere as the earth takes its atmosphere....




TO A. S. SUVORIN.

MELIHOVO,
August 15, 1894.


Our trip on the Volga turned out rather a queer one in the end. Potapenko
and I went to Yaroslav to take a steamer from there to Tsaritsyn, then to
Kalatch, from there by the Don to Taganrog. The journey from Yaroslav to
Nizhni is beautiful, but I had seen it before. Moreover, it was very hot in
the cabin and the wind lashed in our faces on deck. The passengers were an
uneducated set, whose presence was irritating. At Nizhni we were met by N.,
Tolstoy's friend. The heat, the dry wind, the noise of the fair and the
conversation of N. suddenly made me feel so suffocated, so ill at ease, and
so sick, that I took my portmanteau and ignominiously fled to the railway
station.... Potapenko followed me. We took the train for Moscow, but we
were ashamed to go home without having done anything, and we decided to go
somewhere if it had to be to Lapland. If it had not been for his wife our
choice would have fallen on Feodosia, but ... alas! we have a wife living
at Feodosia. We thought it over, we talked it over, we counted over our
money, and came to the Psyol to Suma, which you know.... Well, the Psyol is