Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchthere 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-travellersabuse the English for exploiting the natives. I thought: Yes, theEnglish exploit the Chinese, the Sepoys, the Hindoos, but they dogive them roads, aqueducts, museums, Christianity, and what doyou give them?When we left Hong Kong the boat began to rock. The steamerwas empty and lurched through an angle of thirty-eight degrees, sothat we were afraid it would upset. I am not subject to sea-sickness:that discovery was very agreeable to me. On the way to Singaporewe threw two corpses into the sea. When one sees a dead man,wrapped in sailcloth, fly, turning somersaults in the water, and remembersthat it is several miles to the bottom, one feels frightened,and for some reason begins to fancy that one will die oneself andwill 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 feltvery sad while I was driving about it, and was almost weeping. Nextafter it comes Ceylon—an earthly Paradise. There in that Paradise Iwent more than a hundred versts on the railway and gazed at palmforests and bronze women to my heart’s content …. After Ceylonwe sailed for thirteen days and nights without stopping and were allstupid 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 understandtrue patriotism! A drunken, broken-down debauchee of ahusband 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 andswinishness; there is no justice, the conception of honour does notgo beyond “the honour of the uniform”—the uniform which is socommonly seen adorning the prisoner’s dock in our courts. Work iswhat is wanted, and the rest can go to the devil. First of all we must206