I am finishing a story (“Ward No. 6”), a very dull one, owing to a complete absence of woman and the element of love. I can’t endure such stories. I write it as it were by accident, thoughtlessly. Yes, I wrote to you once that you must be unconcerned when you write pathetic stories. And you did not understand me. You may weep and moan over your stories, you may suffer together with your heroes, but I consider one must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect. TO A. S. SUVORIN. MELIHOVO, May 15, 1892. ... I have got hold of the peasants and the shopkeepers here. One had a haemorrhage from the throat, another had his arm crushed by a tree, a third had his little daughter sick.... It seems they would be in a desperate case without me. They bow respectfully to me as Germans do to their pastor, I am friends with them, and all goes well.... May 28, 1892. Life is short, and Chekhov, from whom you are expecting an answer, would like it to flash by brilliantly and with dash. He would go to Prince’s Island, to Constantinople, and again to India and Sahalin.... But in the first place he is not free, he has a respectable family who need his protection. In the second, he has a large dose of cowardice. Looking towards the future I call nothing but cowardice. I am afraid of getting into a muddle, and every journey complicates my financial position. No, don’t tempt me without need. Don’t write to me of the sea. It is hot here. There are warm rains, the evenings are enchanting. Three-quarters of a mile from here there is a good bathing place and good sport for picnics, but no time to bathe or go to picnics. Either I am writing and gnashing my teeth, or settling questions of halfpence with carpenters and labourers. Misha was cruelly reprimanded by his superiors for coming to me every week instead of staying at home, and now there is no one but me to look after the farming, in which I have no faith, as it is on a petty scale, and more like a gentlemanly hobby than real work. I have bought three mousetraps, and catch twenty-five mice a day and carry them away to the copse. It is lovely in the copse.... Our starlings, old and young, suddenly flew away. This puzzled us, for it won’t be time for their migration for ever so long; but suddenly we learn that the other day clouds of grasshoppers from the south, which were taken for locusts, flew over Moscow. One wonders how did our starlings find out that on precisely such a day and so many miles from Melihovo these insects would fly past? Who told them about it? Truly this is a great mystery.... June 16. ... You want me to write my impressions to you.