PARTISAN REVIEW
ing, velvet softness and so on lend a certain rhetorical quality and
monotony to these descriptions, and they dampen one's enthusiasm
and almost fatigue the reader. This lack of restraint
is
also evident
in your characterizations of women ("Malva," "On the Rafts") and
in love scenes. The effect you create is not of expansiveness nor of a
broad sweep of your brush, but merely lack of restraint. Then, you
make frequent use of words entirely unsuited to your kind of story.
Accompaniment,
disk,
harmony-these words stand in the way of
the narrative. You speak often of waves. There is a strained, circum–
spect effect in your portrayals of people of culture; it
is
not because
you haven't observed them closely enough, for you do know them;
it
is
that you don't exactly know how to tackle them.
How old are you? I don't know you or where you come from
or who you are, but
it
seems to me that you should quit Nizhni while
you are still young and really live for two or three years, lose your–
self, so to speak, among literature and literary people; it would not
be
in order to learn to crow like the rest of our cocks or to acquire
even more sharpness, but rather to plunge head over heels into liter–
ature and fall in love with it; in addition, the provinces cause one to
age early. Korolenko, Potapenko, Mamin and Ertel are all excellent
people; at the outset, perhaps, their company may seem somewhat
dull, but after a year or two you will get used to them and esteem
them according to their merits; their society will pay you back with
interest for the unpleasantness and inconvenience of life in the capital.
I
am hurrying to the post office. Keep well and happy, and
let me clasp your hand cordially.
I
thank you again for your letter.
Yours,
A.
CHEKHOV
To
MIKHAIL MENSHIKOV
9
January
28,
1900, Yalta
Dear Mikhail Osipovich,
I cannot figure out what sort of ailment Tolstoy has. Cherinov
1o
failed to reply and from what I read in the newspapers and what
9 Mikhail Menshikov (1859-1919) was a sailor who became a journalist
and editor of
This Week.
10 Professor of medicine in Moscow to whom Chekhov had telegraphed in
regard to Tolstoy's illness.
