There is nothing new. A dead calm in literature. In the editor’s offices they are drinking tea and cheap wine, drinking it without relish as they walk about, evidently from having nothing to do. Tolstoy is writing a little book about Art. He came to see me in the clinic, and said that he had flung aside his novel “Resurrection” as he did not like it, and was writing only about Art, and had read sixty books about Art. His idea is not a new one; all intelligent old men in all the ages have sung the same tune in different keys. Old men have always been prone to see the end of the world, and have always declared that morality was degenerating to the uttermost point, that Art was growing shallow and wearing thin, that people were growing feebler, and so on, and so on.
Lyov Nikolaevitch wants to persuade us in his little book that at the present time Art has entered upon its final phase, that it is in a blind alley, from which it has no outlet (except retreat).
I am doing nothing, I feed the sparrows with hemp-seed and prune a rose-tree a day. After my pruning, the roses flower magnificently. I am not looking after the farming.
Keep well, dear Alexandr Ivanovitch, thank you for your letter and friendly sympathy. Write to me for the sake of my infirmity, and don’t blame me too much for my carelessness in correspondence.
In future I am going to try and answer your letters as soon as I have read them. Warmest greetings.
TO SUVORIN.
MELIHOVO, July 12, 1897.
... I am reading Maeterlinck, I have read his “Les Aveugles,” “L’Intrus,” and am reading “Aglavaine et Selysette.” They are all strange wonderful things, but they make an immense impression, and if I had a theatre I should certainly stage “Les Aveugles.” There is, by the way, a magnificent scenic effect in it, with the sea and a lighthouse in the distance. The public is semi-idiotic, but one might avoid the play’s failing by writing the contents of the play—in brief, of course—on the programme, saying the play is the work of Maeterlinck, a Belgian author and decadent, and that what happens in it is that an old man, who leads about some blind men, has died in silence and that the blind men, not knowing this, are sitting and waiting for his return....