Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchAugust 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 havenot sent me one correct address, and so not one of my letters hasreached and my long description and lectures about the cholera havebeen wasted. It’s mortifying. But what is most mortifying is thatafter a whole series of letters from me about our exertions againstthe cholera, you all at once write me from gay Biarritz that you envymy leisure! Well, Allah forgive you!Well, I am alive and in good health. The summer was a splendidone, dry, warm, abounding in the fruits of the earth, but its wholecharm was from July onwards, spoilt by news of the cholera. Whileyou were inviting me in your letters first to Vienna, and then toAbbazzio I was already one of the doctors of the Serpuhovo Zemstvo,was trying to catch the cholera by its tail and organizing a newsection full steam. In the morning I have to see patients, and in theafternoon drive about. I drive, I give lectures to the natives, treatthem, get angry with them, and as the Zemstvo has not granted mea single kopeck for organizing the medical centres I cadge from thewealthy, first from one and then from another. I turn out to be anexcellent beggar; thanks to my beggarly eloquence, my section hastwo excellent barracks with all the necessaries, and five barracks thatare not excellent, but horrid. I have saved the Zemstvo from expenditureeven on disinfectants. Lime, vitriol, and all sorts of stinkingstuff I have begged from the manufacturers for all my twenty-fivevillages. In fact Kolomin ought to be proud of having been at thesame high school with me. My soul is exhausted. I am bored. Notto belong to oneself, to think about nothing but diarrhoea, to startup in the night at a dog’s barking and a knock at the gate (“Haven’tthey come for me?”), to drive with disgusting horses along unknownroads; to read about nothing but cholera, and to expect nothing butcholera, 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 ahash which wouldn’t agree with anyone. The cholera is already inMoscow and in the Moscow district. One must expect it from hourto hour. Judging from its course in Moscow one must suppose that308