Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchTO A. S. SUVORIN.SUMY, MADAME LINTVARYOV’S ESTATE, May 30, 1888.… I am staying on the bank of the Psyol, in the lodge of an oldsignorial estate. I took the place without seeing it, trusting to luck,and have not regretted it so far. The river is wide and deep, withplenty of islands, of fish and of crayfish. The banks are beautiful,well-covered with grass and trees. And best of all, there is so muchspace that I feel as if for my one hundred roubles I have obtained aright to live on an expanse of which one can see no end. Nature andlife here is built on the pattern now so old-fashioned and rejectedby magazine editors. Nightingales sing night and day, dogs bark inthe distance, there are old neglected gardens, sad and poetical estatesshut up and deserted where live the souls of beautiful women;old footmen, relics of serfdom, on the brink of the grave; youngladies longing for the most conventional love. In addition to allthese things, not far from me there is even such a hackneyed clicheas a water-mill (with sixteen wheels), with a miller, and his daughterwho always sits at the window, apparently waiting for someone. Allthat I see and hear now seems familiar to me from old novels andfairy-tales. The only thing that has something new about it is amysterious bird, which sits somewhere far away in the reeds, andnight and day makes a noise that sounds partly like a blow on anempty barrel and partly like the mooing of a cow shut up in a barn.Every Little Russian has seen this bird in the course of his life, buteveryone describes it differently, which means that no one has seenit …. Every day I row to the mill, and in the evening I go to theislands to fish with fishing maniacs from the Haritovenko factory.Our conversations are sometimes interesting. On the eve of WhitSunday all the maniacs will spend the night on the islands and fishall night; I, too. There are some splendid types.My hosts have turned out to be very nice and hospitable people.It is a family worth studying. It consists of six members. The oldmother, a very kind, rather flabby woman who has had sufferingenough in her life; she reads Schopenhauer and goes to church tohear the Song of Praise; she conscientiously studies every number of78