Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (584 page)

TO HIS MOTHER.

SAHALIN,

October 6, 1890.

My greetings, dear mother!

I write you this letter almost on the eve of my departure for Russia. Every day we expect a steamer of the Volunteer Fleet, and cherish hopes that it will not come later than the 10th of October. I send this letter to Japan, whence it will go by Shanghai or America. I am living at the station of Korsakovo, where there is neither telegraph nor post, and which is not visited by ships oftener than once a fortnight. Yesterday a steamer arrived and brought me from the north a pile of letters and telegrams. From the letters I learn that Masha likes the Crimea, I believe she will like the Caucasus better still….

* * * * *

Strange, with you it has been cold and rainy, while in Sahalin from the day of my arrival till to-day it has been bright warm weather: there is slight cold with hoar-frost in the mornings, the snow is white on one of the mountains, but the earth is still green, the leaves have not fallen, and all the vegetation is still as flourishing as at a summer villa in May. There you have Sahalin!

* * * * *

At midnight yesterday I heard the roar of a steamer. Everybody jumped out of bed: hurrah! the steamer has arrived! We dressed and went out with lanterns to the harbour; we gazed into the distance; there really was a steamer…. The majority of voices decided that it was the Petersburg, on which I am to go to Russia. I was overjoyed. We got into a boat and rowed to the steamer. We went on and on, till at last we saw in the mist the dark hulk of a steamer. One of us shouted in a hoarse voice asking the name of the vessel. And we received the answer “the Baikal.” Tfoo! anathema! what a disappointment! I am I homesick, and weary of Sahalin. Here for the last three months I have seen no one but convicts or people who can talk of nothing but penal servitude, the lash, and the convicts. A depressing existence. One longs to get quickly to Japan and from there to India.

I am quite well, except for flashes in my eye from which I often suffer now, after which I always have a bad headache. I had the flashes in my eye yesterday and to-day, and so I am writing this with a headache and heaviness all over.

At the station the Japanese General Kuse-San lives with his two secretaries, good friends of mine. They live like Europeans. To-day the local authorities visited them in state to present decorations that had been conferred on them; and I, too, went with my headache and had to drink champagne.

Since I have been in the south I have three times driven to Nay Race where the real ocean waves break. Look at the map and you will see at once on the south coast that poor dismal Nay Race. The waves cast up a boat with six American whalefishers, who had been shipwrecked off the coast of Sahalin; they are living now at the station and solemnly walk about the streets. They are waiting for the Petersburg and will sail with me.

I am not bringing you furs, there are none in Sahalin. Keep well and Heaven guard you all.

I am bringing you all presents. The cholera in Vladivostok and Japan is over.

TO A. S. SUVORIN.

MALAYA DMITROVKA,

MOSCOW,

December 9.

… Hurrah! Here at last I am sitting at my table at home! I pray to my faded penates and write to you. I have now a happy feeling as though I had not been away from home at all. I am well and thriving to the marrow of my bones. Here’s a very brief report for you. I was in Sahalin not two months, as you have printed, but three months plus two days. I worked at high pressure. I made a full and minute census of the whole of Sahalin’s population, and saw everything except the death penalty. When we see each other I will show you a whole trunkful of stuff about the convicts which is very valuable as raw material. I know a very great deal now, but I have brought away a horrid feeling. While I was staying in Sahalin, I only had a bitter feeling in my inside as though from rancid butter; and now, as I remember it, Sahalin seems to me a perfect hell. For two months I worked intensely, putting my back into it; in the third month I began to feel ill from the bitterness I have spoken of, from boredom, and the thought that the cholera would come from Vladivostok to Sahalin, and that so I was in danger of having to winter in the convict settlement. But, thank God! the cholera ceased, and on the 13th of October the steamer bore me away from Sahalin. I have been in Vladivostok. About the Primorsky Region and our Eastern sea-coast with its fleets, its problems, and its Pacific dreams altogether, I have only one thing to tell of: its crying poverty! Poverty, ignorance, and worthlessness, that might drive one to despair. One honest man for ninety-nine thieves, that are blackening the name of Russia…. We passed Japan because the cholera was there, and so I have not bought you anything Japanese, and the five hundred you gave me for your purchases I have spent on my own needs, for which you have, by law, the right to send me to a settlement in Siberia. The first foreign port we reached was Hong Kong. It is an exquisite bay. The traffic on the sea was such as I had never seen before even in pictures; excellent roads, trams, a railway to the mountains, a museum, botanical gardens; wherever you look you see the tenderest solicitude on the part of the English for the men in their service; there is even a club for the sailors. I went about in a jinrickshaw — that is, carried by men — bought all sorts of rubbish of the Chinese, and was moved to indignation at hearing my Russian fellow-travellers abuse the English for exploiting the natives. I thought: Yes, the English exploit the Chinese, the Sepoys, the Hindoos, but they do give them roads, aqueducts, museums, Christianity, and what do you give them?

When we left Hong Kong the boat began to rock. The steamer was empty and lurched through an angle of thirty-eight degrees, so that we were afraid it would upset. I am not subject to sea-sickness: that discovery was very agreeable to me. On the way to Singapore we threw two corpses into the sea. When one sees a dead man, wrapped in sailcloth, fly, turning somersaults in the water, and remembers that it is several miles to the bottom, one feels frightened, and for some reason begins to fancy that one will die oneself and will be thrown into the sea. Our horned cattle have fallen sick. Through the united verdict of Dr. Stcherbak and your humble servant, the cattle have been killed and thrown into the sea.

I have no clear memory of Singapore as, for some reason, I felt very sad while I was driving about it, and was almost weeping. Next after it comes Ceylon — an earthly Paradise. There in that Paradise I went more than a hundred versts on the railway and gazed at palm forests and bronze women to my heart’s content…. After Ceylon we sailed for thirteen days and nights without stopping and were all stupid from boredom. I bear the heat well. The Red Sea is depressing; I felt touched as I gazed at Sinai.

God’s world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism! A drunken, broken-down debauchee of a husband loves his wife and children, but of what use is that love? We, so we are told in our own newspapers, love our great motherland, but how does that love express itself? Instead of knowledge — insolence and immeasurable conceit; instead of work — sloth and swinishness; there is no justice, the conception of honour does not go beyond “the honour of the uniform” — the uniform which is so commonly seen adorning the prisoner’s dock in our courts. Work is what is wanted, and the rest can go to the devil. First of all we must be just, and all the rest will be added unto us,

I have a passionate desire to talk to you. My soul is in a ferment. I want no one else but you, for it is only with you I can talk.

* * * * *

How glad I am that everything was managed without Galkin-Vrasskoy’s help. He didn’t write one line about me, and I turned up in Sahalin utterly unknown.

* * * * *

MOSCOW,

December 24, 1890.

I believe in Koch and in spermine and praise God for it. All that — that is the kochines, spermines, and so on — seem to the public a kind of miracle that leaped forth from some brain, after the fashion of Pallas Athene; but people who have a closer acquaintance with the facts know that they are only the natural sequel of what has been done during the last twenty years. A great deal has been done, my dear fellow! Surgery alone has done so much that one is fairly dumbfoundered at it. To one who is studying medicine now, the time before twenty years ago seems simply pitiable. My dear friend, if I were offered the choice between the “ideals” of the renowned “sixties,” or the very poorest Zemstvo hospital of to-day, I should, without a moment’s hesitation, choose the second.

Will kochine cure syphilis? It’s possible. But as for cancer, you must allow me to have my doubts. Cancer is not a microbe; it’s a tissue, growing in the wrong place, and like a noxious weed smothering all the neighbouring tissues. If N.’s uncle feels better, that is, because the microbes of erysipelas — that is, the elements that produce the disease of erysipelas — form a component part of kochine. It was observed long ago that with the development of erysipelas, the growth of malignant tumours is temporarily checked.

* * * * *

It’s a strange business — while I was travelling to Sahalin and back I felt perfectly well, but now, at home, the devil knows what is happening to me. My head is continually aching, I have a feeling of languor all over, I am quickly exhausted, apathetic, and worst of all, my heart is not beating regularly. My heart is continually stopping for a few seconds….

MOSCOW,

January, 1891.

I shall probably come to Petersburg on the 8th of January…. Since by February I shall not have a farthing, I must make haste and finish the novel [Footnote: “The Duel.”] I’ve begun. There is something in the novel about which I must talk to you and ask your advice.

I spent Christmas in a horrible way. To begin with, I had palpitations of the heart; secondly, my brother Ivan came to stay and was ill with typhoid, poor fellow; thirdly, after my Sahalin labours and the tropics, my Moscow life seems to me now so petty, so bourgeois, and so dull, that I feel ready to bite; fourthly, working for my daily bread prevents my giving up my time to Sahalin; fifthly, my acquaintances bother me, and so on.

The poet Merezhkovsky has been to see me twice; he is a very intelligent man.

How sorry I am you did not see my mongoose. It is a wonderful creature.

TO HIS SISTER.

ST. PETERSBURG,

January 14, 1891.

Unforeseen circumstances have kept me a few days longer. I am alive and well. There is no news. I saw Tolstoy’s “The Power of Darkness” the other day, though. I have been to Ryepin’s studio. What else? Nothing else. It’s dull, in fact.

I went to-day to a dog-show; I went there with Suvorin, who at the moment I am writing these lines is standing by the table and asking me to write and tell you that I have been to the dog-show with the famous dog Suvorin….

January, later.

I am alive and well, I have no palpitations, I’ve no money either, and everything is going well.

I am paying visits and seeing acquaintances. I have to talk about Sahalin and India. It’s horribly boring.

… Anna Ivanovna is as nice as ever, Suvorin talks as incessantly as ever.

I receive the most boring invitations to the most boring dinners. It seems

I must make haste and get back to Moscow, as they won’t let me work here.

Hurrah, we are avenged! To make up for our being so bored, the cotton ball has yielded 1,500 roubles clear profit, in confirmation of which I enclose a cutting from a newspaper.

If anything is collected for the benefit of the Sahalin schools, let me know at once.

How is my mongoose? Don’t forget to give him food and drink, and beat him without mercy when he jumps on the table. Does he eat people? [Footnote: A naive question asked by a lady of Chekhov’s acquaintance.]

Write how Ivan is….

January, later.

I am tired as a ballet dancer after five acts and eight tableaux. Dinners, letters which I am too lazy to answer, conversations and imbecilities of all sorts. I have to go immediately to dine in Vassilyevsky Ostrov, and I am bored and ought to work.

I’ll stay another three days and see whether the ballet will go on the same, then I shall go home, or to see Ivan.

I am surrounded by a thick atmosphere of ill-feeling, extremely vague and to me incomprehensible. They feed me with dinners and pay me the vulgarest compliments, and at the same time they are ready to devour me. What for? The devil only knows. If I were to shoot myself I should thereby provide the greatest gratification to nine-tenths of my friends and admirers. And how pettily they express their petty feelings!

… My greetings to Lydia Yegorovna Mizinov. I expect a programme from her. Tell her not to eat farinaceous food and to avoid Levitan. A better admirer than me she will not find in her Town Council nor in higher society.

January 16, 1891.

I have the honour to congratulate you and the hero of the name-day; [Footnote: It was the name-day of Chekhov himself.] I wish you and him health and prosperity, and above all that the mongoose should not break the crockery or tear the wall-paper. I shall celebrate my name-day at the Maly Yaroslavets restaurant, from the restaurant to the benefit performance, from the benefit performance to the restaurant again.

I am working, but with very great difficulty. No sooner have I written a line than the bell rings and someone comes in to talk to me about Sahalin. It’s simply awful! …

I have found Drishka. It appears that she is living in the same house as I am. She ran away from Moscow to Petersburg under romantic circumstances: she meant to marry a lawyer, plighted her troth to him, but an army captain turned up, and so on; she had to run away or the lawyer would have shot both Drishka and the captain with a pistol loaded with cranberries. She is prospering and is the same lively rogue as ever. I went to Svobodin’s name-day party with her yesterday. She sang gipsy songs, and created such a sensation that all the great men kissed her hand.

Rumours have reached me that Lidia Stahievna is going to be married par depit. Is it true? Tell her that I shall carry her off from her husband par depit. I am a violent man.

Has not anything been collected for the benefit of the Sahalin schools? Let me know….