CHAPTER 71
TO A. S. SUVORIN
CHAPTER 71Visible text2 paragraphs
MOSCOW,
October 16, 1891.
October 16, 1891.
I congratulate you on your new cook, and wish you an excellent appetite. Wish me the same, for I am coming to see you soon -- sooner than I had intended -- and shall eat for three. I simply must get away from home, if only for a fortnight. From morning till night I am unpleasantly irritable, I feel as though someone were drawing a blunt knife over my soul, and this irritability finds external expression in my hurrying off to bed early and avoiding conversation. Nothing I do succeeds. I began a story for the _Sbornik_; I wrote half and threw it up, and then began another; I have been struggling for more than a week with this story, and the time when I shall finish it and when I shall set to work and finish the first story, for which I am to be paid, seems to me far away. I have not been to the province of Nizhni Novgorod yet, for reasons not under my control, and I don't know when I shall go. In fact it's a hopeless mess -- a silly muddle and not life. And I desire nothing now so much as to win two hundred thousand.