Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
waiters, and said: “Taste.” That’s the Chinese ceremonial. He did not drink
it off as we do, but drank it in sips, eating something between each sip,
and then, to express his gratitude, gave me several Chinese coins. An
awfully polite people. They are dressed poorly, but beautifully; they eat
daintily, with ceremony....
TO HIS SISTER.
THE STEAMER “MURAVYOV,”
June 29, 1890.
Meteors are flying in my cabin--these are luminous beetles that look like
electric sparks. Wild goats swim across the Amur in the day-time. The flies
here are huge. I am sharing my cabin with a Chinaman--Son-Luli--who is
constantly telling me how in China for the merest trifle it is “off with
his head.” Last night he got drunk with opium, and was talking in his sleep
all night and preventing me from sleeping. On the 27th I walked about the
Chinese town Aigun. Little by little I seem gradually to be stepping into a
fantastic world. The steamer rocks, it is hard to write.
To-morrow I shall reach Habarovsk. The Chinaman began to sing from music
written on his fan.
TELEGRAM TO HIS MOTHER.
SAHALIN,
July 11, 1890.
Arrived well, telegraph Sahalin.--CHEKHOV.
TELEGRAM TO HIS MOTHER.
SAHALIN,
September 27, 1890.
Well. Shall arrive shortly.--CHEKHOV.
TO A. S. SUVORIN.
THE STEAMER “BAIKAL,”
September 11, 1890.
Greetings! I am sailing on the Gulf of Tartary from the north of Sahalin to
the south. I am writing; and don’t know when this letter will reach you. I
am well, though I see on all sides glaring at me the green eyes of cholera
which has laid a trap for me. In Vladivostok, in Japan, in Shanghai,
Tchifu, Suez, and even in the moon, I fancy--everywhere there is cholera,
everywhere quarantine and terror.... They expect the cholera in Sahalin and
keep all vessels in quarantine. In short, it is a bad lookout. Europeans
are dying at Vladivostok, among others the wife of a general has died.
I have spent just two months in the north of Sahalin. I was received by the
local administration very amicably, though Galkin had not written a single
word about me. Neither Galkin nor the Baroness V., nor any of the other
genii I was so foolish as to appeal to for help, turned out of the
slightest use to me; I had to act on my own initiative.
The Sahalin general, Kononovitch, is a cultivated and gentlemanly man. We
soon got on together, and everything went off well. I am bringing some
papers with me from which you will see that I was put on the most agreeable
footing from the first. I have seen _everything_, so that the question is
not now _what_ I have seen, but how I have seen it.
I don’t know what will come of it, but I have done a good deal. I have got
enough material for three dissertations. I got up every morning at five
o’clock and went to bed late; and all day long was on the strain from the
thought that there was still so much I hadn’t done; and now that I have
done with the convict system, I have the feeling that I have seen
everything but have not noticed the elephants.
By the way, I had the patience to make a census of the whole Sahalin
population. I made the round of all the settlements, went into every hut
and talked to everyone; I made use of the card system in making the census,
and I have already registered about ten thousand convicts and settlers. In
other words, there is not in Sahalin one convict or settler who has not
talked with me. I was particularly successful with the census of the
children, on which I am building great hopes.
I dined at Landsberg’s; I sat in the kitchen of the former Baroness
Gembruk.... I visited all the celebrities. I was present at a flogging,
after which I dreamed for three or four nights of the executioner and the
revolting accessories. I have talked to men who were chained to trucks.
Once when I was drinking tea in a mine, Borodavkin, once a Petersburg
merchant who was convicted of arson, took a teaspoon out of his pocket and
gave it to me, and the long and the short of it is that I have upset my
nerves and have vowed not to come to Sahalin again.
I should write more to you, but there is a lady in the cabin who giggles
and chatters unceasingly. I haven’t the strength to write. She has been
laughing and cackling ever since yesterday evening.
This letter will go across America, but I shall go probably not across
America. Everyone says that the American way is duller and more expensive.
To-morrow I shall see Japan, the Island of Matsmai. Now it is twelve
o’clock at night. It is dark on the sea, the wind is blowing. I don’t
understand how the steamer can go on and find its direction when one can’t
see a thing, and above all in such wild, little-known waters as those in
the Gulf of Tartary.
When I remember that I am ten thousand versts away from my world I am
overcome with apathy. It seems I shall not be home for a hundred years....
God give you health and all blessings. I feel dreary.
* * * * *
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