Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentaries Book

It's better to be the victim than to be the hangman.
1889 to Alexander Chekhov.

Being quarantined is a surprise I wouldn't wish on anyone. It's worse than being arrested.
1892, to Alexei Suvorin

Anton Chekhov's letters to Alexei Suvorin and a few others. Dealing mostly with literature and the theatre. I'm very curious how representative these are, according to Karlinsky there had been almost no commenter until him who hadn't distorted Chekhov to suit their own ends. You will forgive me for being sceptical. The commentary was, however, very helpful and instructive.

Why, you'd have to be a pretty dry, wiry, immobile crocodile to spend all summer in the city! Two or three good months of tranquility are centrainly worth giving up your work or anything else for that matter.
1886 to Viktor Biblin.

Oh and by the way again, I've enclosed a clipping from the New Times. This Thoreau fellow sounds quite promising, the first chapter at least. He's got ideas and a certain freshness and originality about him.
1887 to Vladimir Korolenko.

You advise me not to chase after two hares at once and to forget about practicing medicine. I don't see what's so impossible about chasing two hares at once even in the literal sense. Provided you have the hounds, the chase is feasable. In all likelihood i'm lacking in hounds (in the figurative sense now), but I feel more alert and more satisfied when I think of myself as having two occupations instead of one. Medicine is my lawful wedded wife, and literature my mistress. When one gets on my nerves, I spend the night with the other.
1888 to Alexei Suvorin.

I take my meals at the common table. Can you imagine? There are two sweet little Dutch girls sitting opposite me, one of whom makes me think of Puschkin's Tatyana and the other of her sister Olga. I look at both of them all through the meal, and picture a neat little white turreted house, excellent butter, superb Dutch cheese, Dutch herring, a dignified pastor, a staid schoolmaster . . . and it makes me want to marry a sweet little Dutch girl and have her and me and our neat little house become a picture on a tray.
Rome, 1891, to Maria Kiselyova

Of course I have no time to give even a thought to literature. I'm not writing a thing. [...] You can't run after two hares at once.
1892, to alexei Suvorin

The following excerpt was written during the 1892 Cholera pandemic:
I have been appointed cholera doctor, and my section includes twenty-five villages, four factories, and one monastery [he tended to this entire section first alone, and later with an assistant]. I am organizing the building of barracks, and so on, and I feel lonely, for all the cholera business is alien to my heart, and the work, which involves continual driving about, talking, and attention to petty details, is exhausting for me. I have no time to write.
[...]
There's been no word yet about cholera uprisings, but there is talk of arrests, proclamations and so on. If our socialists do in fact exploit the epidemic for their own ends, I will feel utter contempt for them. Repulsive means for good ends make the ends themselves repulsive. Let them make dupes of the doctors and their assistants, but why lie to the people? Why assure them that they are right to be ignorant and that their crass prejudices are the holy truth? Can a beautiful future really expiate this base lie? If I were a politician, I'd resolve never to disgrace my present for the sake of my future even if I were promised tons of bliss for a pennyweight of base lies.
1892, to Alexei Suvorin

The novel's goals is to lull the bourgeoisie in its golden dreams. Be true to your wife, pray wih her according to the prayerbook, make a fortune, enjoy sports - and you're all set in this world and the next. The bourgeosie is very fond of what are commonly referred to as "positive heroes" and of novels with happy endings, because they make them feel at ease with the idea that you can hoard capital while maintaining your innocence, be a beast and yet be happy.
1895, to Alexei Suvorin

About the Dreyfus Case:
Little by little, a messy kettle of fish began stewing; it was fueled by anti-Semitism, a fuel that reeks of the slaughterhouse.
1898, to Alexei Suvorin