Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
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....
TO A. F. KONI.
PETERSBURG,
January 16, 1891.
DEAR SIR, ANATOLY FYODOROVITCH,
I did not hasten to answer your letter because I am not leaving Petersburg
before next Saturday. I am sorry I have not been to see Madame Naryshkin,
but I think I had better defer my visit till my book has come out, when I
shall be able to turn more freely to the material I have. My brief Sahalin
past looms so immense in my imagination that when I want to speak about it
I don’t know where to begin, and it always seems to me that I have not said
what was wanted.
I will try and describe minutely the position of the children and young
people in Sahalin. It is exceptional. I saw starving children, I saw girls
of thirteen prostitutes, girls of fifteen with child. Girls begin to live
by prostitution from twelve years old, sometimes before menstruation has
begun. Church and school exist only on paper, the children are educated by
their environment and the convict surroundings. Among other things I have
noted down a conversation with a boy of ten years old. I was making the
census of the settlement of Upper Armudano; all the inhabitants are
poverty-stricken, every one of them, and have the reputation of being
desperate gamblers at the game of shtoss. I go into a hut; the people are
not at home; on a bench sits a white-haired, round-shouldered, bare-footed
boy; he seems lost in thought. We begin to talk.
I. “What is your father’s second name?”
He. “I don’t know.”
I. “How is that? You live with your father and don’t know what his name is?
Shame!”
He. “He is not my real father.”
I. “How is that?”
He. “He is living with mother.”
I. “Is your mother married or a widow?”
He. “A widow. She followed her husband here.”
I. “What has become of her husband, then?”
He. “She killed him.”
I. “Do you remember your father?”
He. “No, I don’t, I am illegitimate. I was born when mother was at Kara.”
On the Amur steamer going to Sahalin, there was a convict with fetters on
his legs who had murdered his wife. His daughter, a little girl of six, was
with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled
after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the
convicts and soldiers all in a heap together. I remember I was at a funeral
in Sahalin. Beside the newly dug grave stood four convict bearers ex
officio; the treasury clerk and I, in the capacity of Hamlet and Horatio,
wandering about the cemetery; the dead woman’s lodger, a Circassian, who
had come because he had nothing better to do; and a convict woman who had
come out of pity and had brought the dead woman’s two children, one a baby,
and the other, Alyoshka, a boy of four, wearing a woman’s jacket and blue
breeches with bright-coloured patches on the knees. It was cold and damp,
there was water in the grave, the convicts were laughing. The sea was in
sight. Alyoshka looked into the grave with curiosity; he tried to wipe his
chilly nose, but the long sleeve of his jacket got into his way. When they
began to fill in the grave I asked him: “Alyoshka, where is your mother?”
He waved his hand with the air of a gentleman who has lost at cards,
laughed, and said: “They have buried her!”
The convicts laughed, the Circassian turned and asked what he was to do
with the children, saying it was not his duty to feed them.
Infectious diseases I did not meet with in Sahalin. There is very little
congenital syphilis, but I saw blind children, filthy, covered with
eruptions--all diseases that are evidence of neglect. Of course I am not
going to settle the problem of the children. I don’t know what ought to be
done. But it seems to me that one will do nothing by means of philanthropy