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me dead, but this is stupider and stuffier than "Letters to a Gover–
nor's Wife,"8 which I despise. The hell with the philosophy of the
great of this world! All eminent sages are as despotic as generals, as
discourteous and lacking in delicacy as generals, because they know
they are safe from punishment. Diogenes spat into peoples' beards,
sure that nothing would happen to him; Tolstoy abuses doctors
as
scoundrels and shows his ignorance in regard to weighty questions be–
cause he is another Diogenes, whom you can't take to the police station
or call down in the newspapers. And
so,
the hell with the philosophy
of the great of this world!
All
of it, with all its beggarly epilogues and
letters to governors' ladies, isn't worth a single filly in his "Story of
a Horse."
... Keep well and don't forget this miserable sinner.
I
miss
you
very much.
Yours,
A.
CHEKHOV
To
ELENA SHAVROVA
7
September
16, 1891,
Moscow
So
we old bachelors smell like dogs? Very well, but let me dis–
pute your thesis that specialists in women's diseases are Lotharios and
cynics at heart. Gynecologists are concerned with a kind of violent
prose you have never even dreamed of, and to which, were you
aware of it, you would attribute an odor even worse than that of
dogs, with the harshness characteristic of your imagination. He who
always
sails
the seas loves dry land; he who is eternally absorbed in
prose passionately pines for poetry. All gynecologists are idealists.
Your doctor reads verses, and your instinct has served you well; I
would add that he is a great liberal, something of a mystic, and
muses of a wife along the lines of Nekrasov's Russian Woman. The
eminent Snegirev never speaks of "the Russian woman" without a
tremor in his voice. Another gynecologist I know is in love with a mys–
terious unknown who wears a veil, and whom he has seen from a
distance. Still another attends all the first nights--and stands next to
6 By
~gol.
7 Elena Shavrova (1847-1937) was a writer and actress. She met Chekhov
in 1889 and asked him to read a story she had written.
