Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Anton ChekhovTO D. V. GRIGOROVITCH.MOSCOW, March 28, 1886.Your letter, my kind, fervently beloved bringer of good tidings,struck me like a flash of lightning. I almost burst into tears, I wasoverwhelmed, and now I feel it has left a deep trace in my soul! MayGod show the same tender kindness to you in your age as you haveshown me in my youth! I can find neither words nor deeds to thankyou. You know with what eyes ordinary people look at the electsuch as you, and so you can judge what your letter means for myself-esteem. It is better than any diploma, and for a writer who isjust beginning it is payment both for the present and the future. Iam almost dazed. I have no power to judge whether I deserve thishigh reward. I only repeat that it has overwhelmed me.If I have a gift which one ought to respect, I confess before thepure candour of your heart that hitherto I have not respected it. Ifelt that I had a gift, but I had got into the habit of thinking that itwas insignificant. Purely external causes are sufficient to make oneunjust to oneself, suspicious, and morbidly sensitive. And as I realizenow I have always had plenty of such causes. All my friends andrelatives have always taken a condescending tone to my writing,and never ceased urging me in a friendly way not to give up realwork for the sake of scribbling. I have hundreds of friends in Moscow,and among them a dozen or two writers, but I cannot recall asingle one who reads me or considers me an artist. In Moscow thereis a so-called Literary Circle: talented people and mediocrities of allages and colours gather once a week in a private room of a restaurantand exercise their tongues. If I went there and read them asingle passage of your letter, they would laugh in my face. In thecourse of the five years that I have been knocking about from onenewspaper office to another I have had time to assimilate the generalview of my literary insignificance. I soon got used to lookingdown upon my work, and so it has gone from bad to worse. That isthe first reason. The second is that I am a doctor, and am up to myears in medical work, so that the proverb about trying to catch twohares has given to no one more sleepless nights than me.37