husband" and has a "perfect right to beat her"—when she lets a single day go by without a letter. But all this sustained to the very end and involved, these caresses, with the distressing medical details of the progress of his disease becomes a little ghastly.
And yet I am not sure that the correspondence is not a model of what a dying gentleman's letters ought to be when he is married to a wife of whom he has grown very fond, but whom he is obliged by his principles and by his magnanimity to leave quite at liberty to absent herself all winter, following her own profession on the stage in Moscow. This much is clear: only a highly civilized man could have played Chekhov's part in that marriage with unfailing gayety and unfailing generosity.
Chekhov was tremendously industrious at all periods of his life. While he was dying he undertook the writing of his best play, "The Cherry Orchard." He put it through. "Ineffective" is a word that does not apply to the Chekhovism that one finds in the letters. With the ineffective "Russian Hamlet" of Turgenev, with the really unpractical and impotent members of the intelligentsia—idle, chattering, vodka-drinking triflers—he has personally as little in common as he has with the Asiatic manners of his peasants or with the stolidity of his bureaucrats, or with the self-satisfaction of his new bourgeoisie.
Oh, once upon a time, doubtless, he felt in himself something of the melancholy impotence of Ivanoff in the play of that name; something of the automatism expressed by the author Trigorin in "The Sea Gull"; much, perhaps, of the vague unrest expressed by the idealistic student Trophim of in "The Cherry Orchard." But Chekhov himself, as revealed in the
