Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
won’t be time for their migration for ever so long; but suddenly we learn
that the other day clouds of grasshoppers from the south, which were taken
for locusts, flew over Moscow. One wonders how did our starlings find out
that on precisely such a day and so many miles from Melihovo these insects
would fly past? Who told them about it? Truly this is a great mystery....
June 16.
... You want me to write my impressions to you.
My soul longs for breadth and altitude, but I am forced to lead a narrow
life spent over trashy roubles and kopecks. There is nothing more vulgar
than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile
talk, and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the
consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I
do. This aching feeling, together with a sense of justice, makes my writing
a contemptible pursuit in my eyes: I don’t respect what I write, I am
apathetic and bored with myself, and glad that I have medicine which,
anyway, I practise not for the sake of money. I ought to have a bath in
sulphuric acid and flay off my skin, and then grow a new hide....
MELIHOVO,
August 1.
My letters chase you, but do not catch you. I have written to you often,
and among other places to St. Moritz. Judging from your letters you have
had nothing from me. In the first place, there is cholera in Moscow and
about Moscow, and it will be in our parts some day soon. In the second
place, I have been appointed cholera doctor, and my section includes
twenty-five villages, four factories, and one monastery. I am organizing
the building of barracks, and so on, and I feel lonely, for all the cholera
business is alien to my heart, and the work, which involves continual
driving about, talking, and attention to petty details, is exhausting for
me. I have no time to write. Literature has been thrown aside for a long
time now, and I am poverty-stricken, as I thought it convenient for myself
and my independence to refuse the remuneration received by the section
doctors. I am bored, but there is a great deal that is interesting in
cholera if you look at it from a detached point of view. I am sorry you are
not in Russia. Material for short letters is being wasted. There is more
good than bad, and in that cholera is a great contrast to the famine which
we watched in the winter. Now all are working--they are working furiously.
At the fair at Nizhni they are doing marvels which might force even Tolstoy
to take a respectful attitude to medicine and the intervention of cultured
people generally in life. It seems as though they had got a hold on the
cholera. They have not only decreased the number of cases, but also the
percentage of deaths. In immense Moscow the cholera does not exceed fifty
cases a week, while on the Don it is a thousand a day--an impressive
difference. We district doctors are getting ready; our plan of action is
definite, and there are grounds for supposing that in our parts we too
shall decrease the percentage of mortality from cholera. We have no
assistants, one has to be doctor and sanitary attendant at one and the same
time. The peasants are rude, dirty in their habits, and mistrustful; but
the thought that our labours are not thrown away makes all that scarcely
noticeable. Of all the Serpuhovo doctors I am the most pitiable; I have a
scurvy carriage and horses, I don’t know the roads, I see nothing by
evening light, I have no money, I am very quickly exhausted, and worst of
all, I can never forget that I ought to be writing, and I long to spit on
the cholera and sit down and write to you, and I long to talk to you. I am
in absolute loneliness.
Our farming labours have been crowned with complete success. The harvest is
considerable, and when we sell the corn Melihovo will bring us more than a
thousand roubles. The kitchen garden is magnificent. There are perfect
mountains of cucumbers and the cabbage is wonderful. If it were not for the
accursed cholera I might say that I have never spent a summer so happily as
this one.
Nothing has been heard of cholera riots yet. There is talk of some arrests,
some manifestoes, and so on. They say that A., the writer, has been
condemned to fifteen years’ penal servitude. If the socialists are really
going to exploit the cholera for their own ends I shall despise them.
Revolting means for good ends make the ends themselves revolting. Let them
get a lift on the backs of the doctors and feldshers, but why lie to the
peasants? Why persuade them that they are right in their ignorance and that
their coarse prejudices are the holy truth? If I were a politician I could
never bring myself to disgrace my present for the sake of the future, even
though I were promised tons of felicity for an ounce of mean lying. Write
to me as often as possible in consideration of my exceptional position. I
cannot be in a good mood now, and your letters snatch me away from cholera
concerns, and carry me for a brief space to another world....
August 16.
I’ll be damned if I write to you again. I have written to Abbazzio, to St.
Moritz. I have written a dozen times at least, so far you have not sent me
one correct address, and so not one of my letters has reached and my long
description and lectures about the cholera have been wasted. It’s
mortifying. But what is most mortifying is that after a whole series of
letters from me about our exertions against the cholera, you all at once
write me from gay Biarritz that you envy my leisure! Well, Allah forgive
you!
Well, I am alive and in good health. The summer was a splendid one, dry,
warm, abounding in the fruits of the earth, but its whole charm was from
July onwards, spoilt by news of the cholera. While you were inviting me in
your letters first to Vienna, and then to Abbazzio I was already one of the
doctors of the Serpuhovo Zemstvo, was trying to catch the cholera by its
tail and organizing a new section full steam. In the morning I have to see
patients, and in the afternoon drive about. I drive, I give lectures to the
natives, treat them, get angry with them, and as the Zemstvo has not
granted me a single kopeck for organizing the medical centres I cadge from
the wealthy, first from one and then from another. I turn out to be an
excellent beggar; thanks to my beggarly eloquence, my section has two
excellent barracks with all the necessaries, and five barracks that are not
excellent, but horrid. I have saved the Zemstvo from expenditure even on
disinfectants. Lime, vitriol, and all sorts of stinking stuff I have begged
from the manufacturers for all my twenty-five villages. In fact Kolomin
ought to be proud of having been at the same high school with me. My soul
is exhausted. I am bored. Not to belong to oneself, to think about nothing
but diarrhoea, to start up in the night at a dog’s barking and a knock at
the gate (“Haven’t they come for me?”), to drive with disgusting horses
along unknown roads; to read about nothing but cholera, and to expect
nothing but cholera, and at the same time to be utterly uninterested in
that disease, and in the people whom one is serving--that, my good sir, is
a hash which wouldn’t agree with anyone. The cholera is already in Moscow
and in the Moscow district. One must expect it from hour to hour. Judging
from its course in Moscow one must suppose that it is already declining and
that the bacillus is losing its strength. One is bound to think, too, that
it is powerfully affected by the measures that have been taken in Moscow
and among us. The educated classes are working vigorously, sparing neither
themselves nor their purses; I see them every day, and am touched, and when
I remember how Zhitel and Burenin used to vent their acrid spleen on these
same educated people I feel almost suffocated. In Nizhni the doctors and
the cultured people generally have done marvels. I was overwhelmed with
enthusiasm when I read about the cholera. In the good old times, when
people were infected and died by thousands, the amazing conquests that are
being made before our eyes could not even be dreamed of. It’s a pity you
are not a doctor and cannot share my delight--that is, fully feel and
recognize and appreciate all that is being done. But one cannot tell about
it briefly.
The treatment of cholera requires of the doctor deliberation before all
things--that is, one has to devote to each patient from five to ten hours
or even longer. As I mean to employ Kantani’s treatment--that is clysters
of tannin and sub-cutaneous injection of a solution of common salt--my
position will be worse than foolish; while I am busying myself over one
patient, a dozen can fall ill and die. You see I am the only man for
twenty-five villages, apart from a feldsher who calls me “your honour,”
does not venture to smoke in my presence, and cannot take a step without
me. If there are isolated cases I shall be capital; but if there is an
epidemic of only five cases a day, then I shall do nothing but be irritable
and exhausted and feel myself guilty.
Of course there is no time even to think of literature. I am writing
nothing. I refused remuneration so as to preserve some little freedom of
action for myself, and so I have not a halfpenny. I am waiting till they
have threshed and sold the rye. Until then I shall be living on “The Bear”
and mushrooms, of which there are endless masses here. By the way, I have
never lived so cheaply as now. We have everything of our own, even our own
bread. I believe in a couple of years all my household expenses will not
exceed a thousand roubles a year.
When you learn from the newspapers that the cholera is over, you will know
that I have gone back to writing again. Don’t think of me as a literary man
while I am in the service of the Zemstvo. One can’t do two things at once.
You write that I have given up Sahalin. I cannot abandon that child of
mine. When I am oppressed by the boredom of belles-lettres I am glad to
turn to something else. The question when I shall finish Sahalin and when I
shall print does not strike me as being important. While Galkin-Vrasskoy
reigns over the prison system I feel very much disinclined to bring out my
book. Of course if I am driven to it by need, that is a different matter.
In all my letters I have pertinaciously asked you one question, which of
course you are not obliged to answer: “Where are you going to be in the
autumn, and wouldn’t you like to spend part of September and October with
me in Feodosia or the Crimea?” I have an impatient desire to eat, drink,
and sleep, and talk about literature--that is, do nothing, and at the same
time feel like a decent person. However, if my idleness annoys you, I can
promise to write with or beside you, a play or a story.... Eh? Won’t you?
Well, God be with you, then.
The astronomer has been here twice. I felt bored with her on both
occasions. Svobodin has been here too. He grows better and better. His
serious illness has made him pass through a spiritual metamorphosis.
See what a long letter I have written, even though I don’t feel sure
that the letter will reach you. Imagine my cholera-boredom, my
cholera-loneliness, and compulsory literary inactivity, and write to me
more, and oftener. Your contemptuous feeling for France I share. The
Germans are far above them, though for some reason they are called
stupid. And the Franco-Russian Entente Cordiale I am as fond of as
Tolstoy is. There’s something nastily suggestive about these cordialities.
On the other hand I was awfully pleased at Virchow’s visit to us.
We have raised a very nice potato and a divine cabbage. How do you manage
to get on without cabbage-soup? I don’t envy you your sea, nor your
freedom, nor the happy frame of mind you are in abroad. The Russian summer