Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchTO N. A. LEIKIN.IRKUTSK, June 5, 1890.Greetings, dear Nikolay Alexandrovitch!I send you heartfelt good wishes from Irkutsk, from the depths ofSiberia. I reached Irkutsk last night and was very glad to have arrived,as I was exhausted by the journey and missed friends andrelations, to whom I had not written for ages. Well, what is there ofinterest to write to you? I will begin by telling you that the journeyis extraordinarily long. From Tyumen to Irkutsk I have driven morethan three thousand versts. From Tyumen to Tomsk I had cold andflooded rivers to contend with. The cold was awful; on AscensionDay there was frost and snow, so that I could not take off my sheepskinand felt boots until I reached the hotel at Tomsk. As for thefloods, they were a veritable plague of Egypt. The rivers rose abovetheir banks and overflowed the meadows, and with them the roads,for dozens of versts around. I was continually having to exchangemy chaise for a boat, and one could not get a boat for nothing—fora good boat one had to pay with one’s heart’s blood, for one had tosit waiting on the bank for twenty-four hours at a stretch in the coldwind and the rain …. From Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk was a desperatestruggle through impassable mud. My goodness, it frightens me tothink of it! How often I had to mend my chaise, to walk, to swear,to get out of my chaise and get into it again, and so on! It sometimeshappened that I was from six to ten hours getting from one stationto another, and every time the chaise had to be mended it took fromten to fifteen hours. From Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk was fearfully hotand dusty. Add to all that hunger, dust in one’s nose, one’s eyesglued together with sleep, the continual dread that something wouldget broken in the chaise (it is my own), and boredom.... NeverthelessI am well content, and I thank God that He has given me thestrength and opportunity to make this journey. I have seen and experienceda great deal, and it has all been very new and interestingto me not as a literary man, but as a human being. The Yenissey, theTaiga, the stations, the drivers, the wild scenery, the wild life, thephysical agonies caused by the discomforts of the journey, the en-174