Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchMELIHOVO, August 1.My letters chase you, but do not catch you. I have written to youoften, and among other places to St. Moritz. Judging from yourletters you have had nothing from me. In the first place, there ischolera in Moscow and about Moscow, and it will be in our partssome day soon. In the second place, I have been appointed choleradoctor, and my section includes twenty-five villages, four factories,and one monastery. I am organizing the building of barracks, andso on, and I feel lonely, for all the cholera business is alien to myheart, and the work, which involves continual driving about, talking,and attention to petty details, is exhausting for me. I have notime to write. Literature has been thrown aside for a long time now,and I am poverty-stricken, as I thought it convenient for myself andmy independence to refuse the remuneration received by the sectiondoctors. I am bored, but there is a great deal that is interestingin cholera if you look at it from a detached point of view. I am sorryyou are not in Russia. Material for short letters is being wasted.There is more good than bad, and in that cholera is a great contrastto the famine which we watched in the winter. Now all are working—theyare working furiously. At the fair at Nizhni they are doingmarvels which might force even Tolstoy to take a respectful attitudeto medicine and the intervention of cultured people generallyin life. It seems as though they had got a hold on the cholera. Theyhave not only decreased the number of cases, but also the percentageof deaths. In immense Moscow the cholera does not exceed fiftycases a week, while on the Don it is a thousand a day—an impressivedifference. We district doctors are getting ready; our plan ofaction is definite, and there are grounds for supposing that in ourparts we too shall decrease the percentage of mortality from cholera.We have no assistants, one has to be doctor and sanitary attendantat one and the same time. The peasants are rude, dirty in theirhabits, and mistrustful; but the thought that our labours are notthrown away makes all that scarcely noticeable. Of all the Serpuhovodoctors 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 nomoney, I am very quickly exhausted, and worst of all, I can never306