Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends

ALEXIN,

May 13, 1891.

I am going to write you a Christmas story—that’s certain. Two, indeed, if you like. I sit and write and write ...; at last I have set to work. I am only sorry that my cursed teeth are aching and my stomach is out of order.

I am a dilatory but productive author. By the time I am forty I shall have hundreds of volumes, so that I can open a bookshop with nothing but my own works. To have a lot of books and to have nothing else is a horrible disgrace.

My dear friend, haven’t you in your library Tagantsev’s “Criminal Law”? If you have, couldn’t you send it me? I would buy it, but I am now “a poor relation”—a beggar and as poor as Sidor’s goat. Would you telephone to your shop, too, to send me, on account of favours to come, two books: “The Laws relating to Exiles,” and “The Laws relating to Persons under Police Control.” Don’t imagine that I want to become a procurator; I want these works for my Sahalin book. I am going to direct my attack chiefly against life sentences, in which I see the root of all the evils; and against the laws dealing with exiles, which are fearfully out of date and contradictory.