'Their Lack of Taste is Depressing'

From the saddest literary letter I know: “There’s not a single well-dressed German woman; their lack of taste is depressing.” 

His digestive tract ravaged by the TB bacillus, his lungs almost gone and emphysema compounding the near-impossibility of breathing, Chekhov still had an eye for the ladies and a storyteller’s attentiveness to revealing detail. It’s June 28, 1904, and in his final letter he writes to his younger sister, Maria Chekhova, from a spa in Badenweiler, Germany. Four days later, at age forty-four, he is dead. The translators are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973). In Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (2004), Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips render the sentence with a more generalized emphasis: “There is no such thing as a well-dressed German woman. Their lack of taste induces deep despondency.”

 

Chekhov complains of the heat. He weighs a move to Lake Como, Trieste, Odessa. What sort of boats are available? Trains? Is the food any good, he asks, adding (according to Heim/Karlinsky):

 

“The food here is very tasty, but it does not do me much good. My stomach keeps getting upset. I can’t eat the kind of butter they have here. Apparently my stomach is ruined beyond all hope. About the only remedy for it is to fast, in other words, to refrain entirely from eating, and that’s that. And the only medicine for being short-winded is to keep perfectly still.”

 

Chekhov’s final, jaunty gesture is well-known. Daniel Rayfield in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997) describes the scene:

 

“German and Russian medical etiquette dictated that a doctor at a colleague’s death, when all hope was gone, should offer champagne. [Dr.] Schwörer felt Anton’s pulse and ordered a bottle. Anton sat up and loudly proclaimed ‘Ich sterbe’ [I’m dying]. He drank, murmured ‘I haven’t had champagne for a long time,’ lay down on his left side, as he always had with Olga [Knipper, his wife], and died without a murmur, before she could reach the other side of the bed.”