Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchApril 29, 1890.MY DEAR TUNGUSES!The Kama is a very dull river. To realise its beauties one wouldhave to be a native sitting motionless on a barge beside a barrel ofnaphtha, or a sack of dried fish, continually taking a pull at thebottle. The river banks are bare, the trees are bare, the earth is a dullbrown, there are patches of snow, and there is such a wind that thedevil himself could not blow as keenly and hatefully. When a coldwind blows and ruffles up the water, which now after the floods isthe colour of coffee slops, one feels cold and bored and miserable;the strains of a concertina on the bank sound dejected, figures intattered sheepskins standing motionless on the barges that meet uslook as though they were petrified by some unending grief. Thetowns on the Kama are grey; one would think the inhabitants wereemployed in the manufacture of clouds, boredom, soaking fencesand mud in the streets, as their sole occupation. The stopping-placesare thronged with inhabitants of the educated class, for whom thearrival of a steamer is an event ….… To judge from appearances not one of them earns more thanthirty-five roubles, and all of them are ailing in some way.I have told you already there are some legal gentlemen in thesteamer: the president of the court, one of the judges, and the prosecutor.The president is a hale and hearty old German who hasembraced Orthodoxy, is pious, a homoeopath, and evidently a devoteeof the sex. The judge is an old man such as dear Nikolay used todraw; he walks bent double, coughs, and is fond of facetious subjects.The prosecutor is a man of forty-three, dissatisfied with life, aliberal, a sceptic, and a very good-natured fellow. All the journeythese gentlemen have been occupied in eating, settling mighty questionsand eating, reading and eating. There is a library on the steamer,and I saw the prosecutor reading my “In the Twilight.” They begantalking about me. Mamin-Sibiryak, who has described the Urals, isthe author most liked in these parts. He is more talked of than Tolstoy.I have been two and a half years sailing to Perm, so it seems to me.We reached there at two o’clock in the night. The train went at sixo’clock in the evening. I had to wait. It rained. Rain, cold, mud …142