... It has all subsided at last, and I sit as before at my writing-table and compose stories with untroubled spirit. You can’t think what it was like! ... I have already told you that at the first performance there was such excitement in the audience and on the stage as the prompter, who has served at the theatre for thirty-two years, had never seen. They made an uproar, shouted, clapped and hissed; at the refreshment bar it almost came to fighting, and in the gallery the students wanted to throw someone out and two persons were removed by the police. The excitement was general.... ... The actors were in a state of nervous tension. All that I wrote to you and Maslov about their acting and attitude to their work must not, of course, go any further. There is much one has to excuse and understand.... It turned out that the actress who was doing the chief part in my play had a daughter lying dangerously ill--how could she feel like acting? Kurepin did well to praise the actors. The next day after the performance there was a review by Pyotr Kitcheyev in the _Moskovsky Listok_. He calls my play impudently cynical and immoral rubbish. The _Moskovskiya Vyedomosti_ praised it. ... If you read the play you will not understand the excitement I have described to you; you will find nothing special in it. Nikolay, Shehtel, and Levitan--all of them painters--assure me that on the stage it is so original that it is quite strange to look at. In reading one does not notice it. TO D. V. GRIGOROVITCH. MOSCOW, 1887. I have just read “Karelin’s Dream,” and I am very much interested to know how far the dream you describe really is a dream. I think your description of the workings of the brain and of the general feeling of a person who is asleep is physiologically correct and remarkably artistic. I remember I read two or three years ago a French story, in which the author described the daughter of a minister., and probably without himself suspecting it, gave a correct medical description of hysteria. I thought at the time that an artist’s instinct may sometimes be worth the brains of a scientist, that both have the same purpose, the same nature, and that perhaps in time, as their methods become perfect, they are destined to become one vast prodigious force which now it is difficult even to imagine.... “Karelin’s Dream” has suggested to me similar thoughts, and to-day I willingly believe Buckle, who saw in Hamlet’s musings on the dust of Alexander the Great, Shakespeare’s knowledge of the law of the transmutation of substance--i.e., the power of the artist to run ahead of the men of science.... Sleep is a subjective phenomenon, and the inner aspect of it one can only observe in oneself. But since the process of dreaming is the same in all men, every reader can, I think, judge Karelin by his own standards, and every critic is bound to be subjective. From my own personal experience this is how I can formulate my impression.