Chekhov is
always pithy and to-the-point. In both stories and letters, even those addressed
to family and friends, there are few if any preliminaries. He is in Moscow,
having just returned from his journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, river
steamer and ocean-going freighter from the katorga, or penal colony, on
Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, 4,000 miles east of Moscow. He is writing to
his friend, editor and sometime-antagonist Alexi Suvorin on this date, Dec. 9, in 1890:
“While I was
living on Sakhalin, I felt nothing more than a certain bitterness in my
innards, the sort that comes from rancid butter, but now, when I think back on
it, Sakhalin seems to me like hell itself. For two months I worked strenuously,
giving myself no rest, and during the third the bitterness I’ve just spoken of
became more than I could stand, the bitterness and boredom and the thought that
cholera was on its way to Sakhalin from Vladivostok and that I might therefore
risk spending the winter quarantined in the penal colony.”
Chekhov is
thirty years old and already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill
him fourteen years later. He has entered his mature phase as a writer and
within the year had published “Gusev” and “A Dreary Story.” Over the next three
years he would publish his Sakhalin findings in journals, work that would
result in 1895 in Sakhalin Island, a nonfiction masterpiece still
without an audience in the West. (I recommend the Oneworld Classics edition
translated by Brian Reeve which comes with notes, biography and bibliography of
Chekhov, photographs, a selection of pertinent letters and the text of the
first chapter in Russian.) This passage follows the sentences at the top:
“How little
justice and humility there is in us, and how poorly we understand patriotism! A
drunken, frazzled, dissolute husband may love his wife and children, but what
good is his love? The newspapers tell us we love our great homeland, but how do
we express our love? Instead of knowledge we have insolence and arrogance
beyond measure, instead of work – indolence and swinishness; we have no sense
of justice, our conception of honor goes no farther than honor for one’s
uniform, a uniform that usually adorns the prisoner’s dock in court. What is
needed is work, and the hell with everything else. We must above all be just,
and all the rest will be added unto us.”
Chekhov might
be writing of our time and place.
[The
translators of the quoted passages above are Michael Henry Heim and Simon
Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973).]
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