If I have a gift which one ought to respect, I confess before the pure
candour of your heart that hitherto I have not respected it. I felt that I
had a gift, but I had got into the habit of thinking that it was
insignificant. Purely external causes are sufficient to make one unjust to
oneself, suspicious, and morbidly sensitive. And as I realize now I have
always had plenty of such causes. All my friends and relatives have always
taken a condescending tone to my writing, and never ceased urging me in a
friendly way not to give up real work for the sake of scribbling. I have
hundreds of friends in Moscow, and among them a dozen or two writers, but I
cannot recall a single one who reads me or considers me an artist. In
Moscow there is a so-called Literary Circle: talented people and
mediocrities of all ages and colours gather once a week in a private room
of a restaurant and exercise their tongues. If I went there and read them a
single passage of your letter, they would laugh in my face. In the course
of the five years that I have been knocking about from one newspaper office
to another I have had time to assimilate the general view of my literary
insignificance. I soon got used to looking down upon my work, and so it has
gone from bad to worse. That is the first reason. The second is that I am a
doctor, and am up to my ears in medical work, so that the proverb about
trying to catch two hares has given to no one more sleepless nights than
me.

I am writing all this to you in order to excuse this grievous sin a little
before you. Hitherto my attitude to my literary work has been frivolous,
heedless, casual. I don't remember a _single_ story over which I have
spent more than twenty-four hours, and "The Huntsman," which you liked, I
wrote in the bathing-shed! I wrote my stories as reporters write their
notes about fires, mechanically, half-unconsciously, taking no thought of
the reader or myself.... I wrote and did all I could not to waste upon the