I regret that I had not time nor inclination to watch over the rise and development of the passion which took complete possession of Katya when she was fourteen or fifteen.  I mean her passionate love for the theatre.  When she used to come from boarding-school and stay with us for the summer holidays, she talked of nothing with such pleasure and such warmth as of plays and actors.  She bored us with her continual talk of the theatre.  My wife and children would not listen to her.  I was the only one who had not the courage to refuse to attend to her.  When she had a longing to share her transports, she used to come into my study and say in an imploring tone: 

“Nikolay Stepanovitch, do let me talk to you about the theatre!”

I pointed to the clock, and said: 

“I’ll give you half an hour—­begin.”

Later on she used to bring with her dozens of portraits of actors and actresses which she worshipped; then she attempted several times to take part in private theatricals, and the upshot of it all was that when she left school she came to me and announced that she was born to be an actress.

I had never shared Katya’s inclinations for the theatre.  To my mind, if a play is good there is no need to trouble the actors in order that it may make the right impression; it is enough to read it.  If the play is poor, no acting will make it good.

In my youth I often visited the theatre, and now my family takes a box twice a year and carries me off for a little distraction.  Of course, that is not enough to give me the right to judge of the theatre.  In my opinion the theatre has become no better than it was thirty or forty years ago.  Just as in the past, I can never find a glass of clean water in the corridors or foyers of the theatre.  Just as in the past, the attendants fine me twenty kopecks for my fur coat, though there is nothing reprehensible in wearing a warm coat in winter.  As in the past, for no sort of reason, music is played in the intervals, which adds something new and uncalled-for to the impression made by the play.  As in the past, men go in the intervals and drink spirits in the buffet.  If no progress can be seen in trifles, I should look for it in vain in what is more important.  When an actor wrapped from head to foot in stage traditions and conventions tries to recite a simple ordinary speech, “To be or not to be,” not simply, but invariably with the accompaniment of hissing and convulsive movements all over his body, or when he tries to convince me at all costs that Tchatsky, who talks so much with fools and is so fond of folly, is a very clever man, and that “Woe from Wit” is not a dull play, the stage gives me the same feeling of conventionality which bored me so much forty years ago when I was regaled with the classical howling and beating on the breast.  And every time I come out of the theatre more conservative than I go in.