from The Portable Chekhov, edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. These selections come from letters written to various friends and family.

“Apparently in obedience to a local custom, the newlyweds kissed every minute, kissed so vehemently that every time their lips made an explosive noise, and I had a taste of oversweet raisins in my mouth, and got a spasm in my left calf. Their kisses did the varicose vein in my left leg no good.” – Anton Chekhov

“Cultured people must, in my opinion, meet the following conditions:
“1. They respect human personality, and for this reason they are always affable, gentle, civil, and read to give in to others. They do not raise a rumpus over a hammer or a lost eraser; when they have lived with you they do not make you feel that they are doing you a favor, and on leaving they do not say: ‘Impossible to live with you!’ They overlook noise, cold, overdone meat, jokes, the presence of strangers in their rooms.
“2. They are sorry not only for beggars and cats. Their hearts ache over what the naked eye does not see…. They sit up nights in order to help P--, to keep their brothers at the university, and to buy clothes for their mother.
“3. They respect the property of others and therefore pay their debts.
“4. They are candid, and dread lying as they dread fire. They do not lie even about trifles. A lie insults the listener and debases him in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose; they behave in the street as they do at home; they do not show off before their inferiors. They do not chatter and do not force uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for the ears of other people they often keep silent.
“5. They do not belittle themselves to arouse compassion in others. They do not play on other people’s heart-strings so as to elicit sighs and be fussed over. They do not say: ‘People don’t understand me’ or ‘I have frittered away m y talent,’ because all that is striving after cheap effect; it is vulgar, stale, false.
“6. They are not vain. They do not care for such paste diamonds as familiarity with celebrities, the handclasp of the drunken P--, the raptures of a stray spectator in a picture gallery, popularity in beer-halls…. When they have done a kopeck’s worth of work they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred rubles’ worth, and they do not brag of having the entrée where others are not admitted. The truly talented always keep in the shade, among the crowd, far from the show. Even Krylov said that an empty barrel is noisier than a full one.
“7. If they possess talent they respect it. They sacrifice peace, women, wine, vanity to it. They are proud of their talent; they are aware that their calling is not just to live with people but to have an educative influence on them. Besides they are fastidious.
“8. They develop their esthetic sense. They cannot fall asleep in their clothes, see the cracks in the wall full of insects, breathe foul air, walk on a spittle-covered floor, eat from a pot off a kerosene stove. They seek as far as possible to tame and ennoble the sexual instinct. What they want from a woman is not a bed-fellow, not equine sweat, not a cleverness that shows itself in the ability to ---- and to lie incessantly. What they need, especially if they are artists, is freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for being not a ---- but a mother. They do not swill vodka at all hours. They do not sniff about cupboards, for they are not pigs. They drink only when they are free, on occasion. For they want mens sana in corpore sano…
“And so on. That is what cultivated people are like. In order to educate yourself and not be below the level of your surroundings it is not enough to have read Pickwick Papers and memorized a monologue from Faust. It is not enough to come to Yakimanka [where the family lived], only to leave a week later.
“What is needed is continuous work, day and night, constant reading, study, will-power…every hour counts.
“Trips to Yakimanka and back will not help. You must make a clean break. Come to us; smash the vodka bottle; lie down and read—Turgenev, if you like, whom you have not read. Give up your conceit, you are not a child. You will soon be thirty. It is time!
“I am waiting…we are all waiting…” – A Chekhov, to his brother, Nikolay

“I didn’t know there were so many old women in the world, or I should have shot myself a long time ago.” – A. Chekhov

“When I have children, I’ll say to them, not without pride: ‘You sons of bitches, in my time I had dalliance with a dark-eyed Hindu—and where? In a coconut grove, on a moonlit night!’” – A. Chekhov

“My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.” – A. Chekhov

“God’s world is good. Only one thing isn’t good: ourselves. How little there is in us of justice and humility, how poor is our conception of patriotism! The drunken, bedraggled, good-for-nothing of a husband loves his wife and child, but what’s the good of that love? We, so the newspapers say, love our great country, but how is that love expressed? Instead of knowledge—inordinate brazenness and conceit, instead of hard work—laziness and swinishness; there is no justice; the concept of honor does not go beyond ‘the honor of the uniform,’ the uniform which is the everyday adornment of the prisoners’ dock. What is needed is work; everything else can go to the devil. The main thing is to be just—the rest will be added unto us. May Heaven protect you.” - A. Chekhov

“Tomorrow I go to Naples. Pray that I meet a beautiful Russian lady there, preferably a widow or a divorcée. The guidebooks say that a love affair is indispensable to an Italian tour. Well, devil take it, if a love affair, then a love affair!” – A. Chekhov

“Ties are wonderfully cheap here. So cheap that maybe I’ll try eating them.” – A Chekhov

“Science and technology are passing through a great period now, but for our writing fraternity it is a flabby, sour, dull time; we ourselves are sour and dull, and can only beget rubber boys, and the only one who does not see it is Stasov [an art critic] whom Nature has endowed with the rare ability to get drunk even on slops. The cause of this is not our stupidity, or our lack of talent, or our insolence…but a disease which for an artist is worse than syphilis and impotence. We lack ‘something’—that is true, and it means that if you lift the skirt of our Muse, you will find the spot level. Remember that the writers whom we call eternal or simply good and who intoxicate us have one very important characteristic in common: they move in a certain direction and they summon you there too, and you feel, not with your mind alone, but with your whole being, that they have a goal, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father who does not come and trouble the imagination for nothing. Some, depending on their caliber, have immediate objects: abolition of serfdom, liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or like Denis Davydov [author of drinking songs], simply vodka; others have remote objectives: God, immortality, the happiness of mankind, and so forth. The best of them are realistic, and paint life as it is, but because every line is permeated, as with sap, by the consciousness of a purpose, you are aware not only of life as it is, but of life as it ought to be, and that captivates you. And we? We! We paint life as it is, and beyond that neither whoa! Nor giddap! Whip us and we cannot go a step farther. We have neither immediate nor distant aims and our souls are a yawning void. We have no politics, we don’t believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and blindness. One who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing cannot be an artist. Whether it is a disease or not—that is a question of name and doesn’t matter, but it must be admitted that our situation is unenviable…” – A. Chekhov

“[quoting Mme S--, sarcastically] ’The greatest miracle is man himself and we shall never tire of studying him.’ Or: ‘The aim of life is life itself.’ Or: ‘I believe in life, in its bright moments, for the sake of which one can, and indeed one must, live; I believe in man, in that part of his soul which is good…’ Can all this be sincere, and does it mean anything? This isn’t an outlook, it’s caramels. She underscores ‘can’ and ‘must’ because she is afraid to speak of what is and what has to be reckoned with. Let her first say what is, and only then I will listen to what one can and must do….
“I write that we are without aims, and you realize that I consider aims necessary and would gladly go looking for them, but Mme. S--- writes that one must not delude man with all manner of good things that he will never get: ‘prize that which is,’ and in her opinion all our trouble comes from the fact that we keep pursuing lofty and distant aims. If this isn’t a country wife’s logic, it’s the philosophy of despair. He who sincerely believes that man needs lofty and distant aims as little as a cow does, that ‘all our trouble’ comes from pursuing these aims—has nothing left him but to eat, drink, sleep, or if he is fed up with that, he can take a running start and dash his head against the corner of a chest.” – A. Chekhov

“Write, write, my joy, or else when we are married, I’ll beat you.” – A Chekhov