enthusiastic letter beginning with the words, "I have come to love..."
This letter was accompanied by a photograph representing a young man
with a shaven face, a wide-brimmed hat, and a plaid flung over his
shoulder. The letters that followed were as splendid as before, but now
commas and stops made their appearance in them, the grammatical mistakes
disappeared, and there was a distinctly masculine flavour about them.
Katya began writing to me how splendid it would be to build a great
theatre somewhere on the Volga, on a cooperative system, and to attract
to the enterprise the rich merchants and the steamer owners; there
would be a great deal of money in it; there would be vast audiences; the
actors would play on co-operative terms.... Possibly all this was really
excellent, but it seemed to me that such schemes could only originate
from a man's mind.

However that may have been, for a year and a half everything seemed to
go well: Katya was in love, believed in her work, and was happy; but
then I began to notice in her letters unmistakable signs of falling off.
It began with Katya's complaining of her companions--this was the first
and most ominous symptom; if a young scientific or literary man begins
his career with bitter complaints of scientific and literary men, it is
a sure sign that he is worn out and not fit for his work. Katya wrote
to me that her companions did not attend the rehearsals and never knew
their parts; that one could see in every one of them an utter disrespect
for the public in the production of absurd plays, and in their behaviour
on the stage; that for the benefit of the Actors' Fund, which they only
talked about, actresses of the serious drama demeaned themselves by
singing chansonettes, while tragic actors sang comic songs making fun of
deceived husbands and the pregnant condition of unfaithful wives, and
so on. In fact, it was amazing that all this had not yet ruined the
provincial stage, and that it could still maintain itself on such a
rotten and unsubstantial footing.

In answer I wrote Katya a long and, I must confess, a very boring
letter. Among other things, I wrote to her:

"I have more than once happened to converse with old actors, very worthy
men, who showed a friendly disposition towards me; from my conversations
with them I could understand that their work was controlled not so much
by their own intelligence and free choice as by fashion and the mood of
the public. The best of