Letters of Anton Chekhov (Tchekhov) - Penn State University

Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends with biographical sketchTO A. N. PLESHTCHEYEV.SUMY, June 28, 1888.… We have been to the province of Poltava. We went to theSmagins’, and to Sorotchintsi. We drove with a four-in-hand, in anancestral, very comfortable carriage. We had no end of laughter,adventures, misunderstandings, halts, and meetings on the way ….If you had only seen the places where we stayed the night and thevillages stretching eight or ten versts through which we drove! …What weddings we met on the road, what lovely music we heard inthe evening stillness, and what a heavy smell of fresh hay there was!Really one might sell one’s soul to the devil for the pleasure of lookingat the warm evening sky, the pools and the rivulets reflecting thesad, languid sunset ….… The Smagins’ estate is “great and fertile,” but old, neglected,and dead as last year’s cobwebs. The house has sunk, the doors won’tshut, the tiles in the stove squeeze one another out and form angles,young suckers of cherries and plums peep up between the cracks ofthe floors. In the room where I slept a nightingale had made herselfa nest between the window and the shutter, and while I was therelittle naked nightingales, looking like undressed Jew babies, hatchedout from the eggs. Sedate storks live on the barn. At the beehousethere is an old grandsire who remembers the King Goroh* andCleopatra of Egypt.Everything is crumbling and decrepit, but poetical, sad, and beautifulin the extreme.*Translator’s Note: The equivalent of Old King Cole.82