Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends

TO A. S. SUVORIN.

MOSCOW, March 22, 1890.

... Yesterday a young lady told me that Professor Storozhenko had related to her the following anecdote. The Sovereign liked the Kreutzer Sonata. Pobyedonostsev, Lubimov, and the other cherubim and seraphim, hastened to justify their attitude to Tolstoy by showing his Majesty “Nikolay Palkin.” After reading it, his Majesty was so furious that he ordered measures to be taken. Prince Dolgorukov was informed. And so one fine day an adjutant from Dolgorukov comes to Tolstoy and invites him to go at once to the prince. The latter replies: “Tell the prince that I only visit the houses of my acquaintances.” The adjutant, overcome with confusion, rides away, and next day brings Tolstoy the official notice demanding from him an explanation in regard to his “Nikolay Palkin.” Tolstoy reads the document and says:

“Tell his excellency that I have not for a long time past written anything for publication; I write only for my friends, and if my friends spread my writings abroad, they are responsible and not I. Tell him that!”

“But I can’t tell him that,” cried the adjutant in horror, “the prince will not believe me!”

“The prince will not believe his subordinates? That’s bad.”

Two days later the adjutant comes again with a fresh document, and learns that Tolstoy has gone away to Yasnaya Polyana. That is the end of the anecdote.

Now about the new movements. They flog in our police stations; a rate has been fixed; from a peasant they take ten kopecks for a beating, from a workman twenty—that’s for the rods and the trouble. Peasant women are flogged too. Not long ago, in their enthusiasm for beating in a police station, they thrashed a couple of budding lawyers, an incident upon which Russkiya Vyedomosti has a vague paragraph to-day; an investigation has begun.

Another sign of the times: the cabmen approve of the students’ disturbances.

“They are making a riot for the poor to be taken in to study,” they explain, “learning is not only for the rich.” It is said that when a crowd of students were being taken by night to the prison the populace fell upon the gendarmes to rescue the students from them. The populace is said to have shouted: “You have set up flogging for us, but they stand up for us.”