MOSCOW, October 16, 1891.
I congratulate you on your new cook, and wish you an excellent appetite. Wish me the same, for I am coming to see you soon—sooner than I had intended—and shall eat for three. I simply must get away from home, if only for a fortnight. From morning till night I am unpleasantly irritable, I feel as though someone were drawing a blunt knife over my soul, and this irritability finds external expression in my hurrying off to bed early and avoiding conversation. Nothing I do succeeds. I began a story for the Sbornik; I wrote half and threw it up, and then began another; I have been struggling for more than a week with this story, and the time when I shall finish it and when I shall set to work and finish the first story, for which I am to be paid, seems to me far away. I have not been to the province of Nizhni Novgorod yet, for reasons not under my control, and I don’t know when I shall go. In fact it’s a hopeless mess—a silly muddle and not life. And I desire nothing now so much as to win two hundred thousand....
Ah, I have such a subject for a novel! If I were in a tolerable humour I could begin it on the first of November and finish it on the first of December. I would make five signatures of print. And I long to write as I did at Bogimovo—i.e., from morning till night and in my sleep.
Don’t tell anyone I am coming to Petersburg. I shall live incognito. In my letters I write vaguely that I am coming in November....
Shall I remind you of Kashtanka, or forget about her? Won’t she lose her childhood and youth if we don’t print her? However, you know best....
P. S.—If you see my brother Alexandr, tell him that our aunt is dying of consumption. Her days are numbered. She was a splendid woman, a saint.
If you want to visit the famine-stricken provinces, let us go together in January, it will be more conspicuous then....
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