I was amazed at the welcome I received from the people of Saint Petersburg. Suvorin, Grigorovich, Burenin… all this invited, praised… and I was horrified that I had been writing carelessly, half-heartedly.

You have a real talent — a talent that puts you far out of the circle of the new generation of writers. You are, I am sure, destined to write some excellent genuinely artistic works. To do so, here’s what you need: respect for your talent, which is so rarely given. Give up your deadline work. Save your impressions for a thoughtful, polished work, not written in one sitting, but written in the happy hours of the internal disposition. (One such work will be a hundred times more valuable than the hundreds of nice stories scattered around the newspapers at different times; you will immediately win a prize and become prominent in the eyes of sensitive people and then all the reading public.) I truly believe in your talent and wish it from the bottom of my heart to develop fully and to express itself fully.

Up until now I have treated my literary work extremely frivolously, carelessly, uselessly. I do not remember any of my stories that would have taken me more than a day to complete, and “The Gamekeeper”, which you liked, was written in the bathing house! Like reporters write their notes on fires, so I wrote my stories: mechanically, half-awake, without the slightest concern for either the reader or myself. Excuse my comparison, it (the letter) affected me like a governor’s order to ‘leave the city in 24 hours! ’, in other words, I suddenly felt the urgent need to hurry, to get out of where I was stuck as soon as possible.