a daughter lying dangerously ill--how could she feel like acting? Kurepin
did well to praise the actors.

The next day after the performance there was a review by Pyotr Kitcheyev in
the _Moskovsky Listok_. He calls my play impudently cynical and immoral
rubbish. The _Moskovskiya Vyedomosti_ praised it.

... If you read the play you will not understand the excitement I have
described to you; you will find nothing special in it. Nikolay, Shehtel,
and Levitan--all of them painters--assure me that on the stage it is so
original that it is quite strange to look at. In reading one does not
notice it.




TO D. V. GRIGOROVITCH.

MOSCOW,
1887.


I have just read "Karelin's Dream," and I am very much interested to know
how far the dream you describe really is a dream. I think your description
of the workings of the brain and of the general feeling of a person who is
asleep is physiologically correct and remarkably artistic. I remember I
read two or three years ago a French story, in which the author described
the daughter of a minister., and probably without himself suspecting it,
gave a correct medical description of hysteria. I thought at the time that
an artist's instinct may sometimes be worth the brains of a scientist, that