'I Now Believe in Hell'

Anton Chekhov was thirty-one years old and had experienced his first haemoptysis (blood coughed from the lungs) seven years earlier, when he visited Pompeii and climbed to the summit of Mount Vesuvius on April 6, 1891. The most recent significant eruption of the volcano, which remains active, had occurred in 1872. Chekhov writes to his sister Maria on April 7: 

“What a torture it is to climb Vesuvius! Ashes, mountains of lava, congealed waves of molten minerals, mounds and all sorts of nasty things. You take one step forward and fall a half step back. The soles of your feet hurt; you have trouble breathing. You keep going and going, and the summit is still far off. You start thinking you ought to turn back, but you’re ashamed to for fear of ridicule.”

 

Two words come to mind to describe Chekhov’s climb up an active volcano while already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him thirteen years later: intrepid and foolish. Knowing Chekhov with his omnivorous sense of curiosity, frequent disregard and even denial of ill health, and his courage, we shouldn’t be surprised. Who wouldn’t want to peer into a smoking caldera? He continues:

 

“Vesuvius’s crater is several sazhens [one sazhen = seven feet] in diameter. I stood at its edge and looked down into it as if I were looking into a teacup. The earth surrounding it is covered with a thin coating of sulphur and gives off a dense vapor. A noxious white smoke pours out of the crater, sparks and red-hot rocks fly everywhere. While Satan lies snorting beneath the smoke.”

 

Chekhov was touring Italy with his editor and friend Alexi Suvorin. One year earlier, he had traveled to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, 4,000 miles east of Moscow. He would publish his nonfiction masterpiece, Sakhalin Island, in 1895. Chekhov continues his letter to Maria:

 

“There is quite a mixture of sounds: you hear breakers beating, thunder clapping, railroad trains pounding, boards falling. It is all quite terrifying, and at the same time makes you want to jump right down into the maw. I now believe in Hell. The lava is of such high temperature that a copper coin will melt in it.”

 

There’s a tradition of writers visiting Vesuvius, starting with Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the most famous eruption, in 79 A.D., the one that buried Pompeii, and described what he saw in a letter to Tacitus. Later visitors included Goethe, Chateaubriand, Byron and Walter Scott.

 

My favorite description can be found in an unlikely source, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) by Charles Montagu Doughty. The passage comes in Chap. XV, “Nomad Life Upon the Harra.” Doughty studied geology at Cambridge, and it shows. In 1872, on his way to Arabia, he stops in Italy and climbs Vesuvius, which he recalls in his description of the Arabian Aueyrid Harra, a desolate tract of volcanic rock he calls “a wilderness of burning and rusty horror.” Here is a brief excerpt from the passage: 

 

“In the year 1872 I was a witness to the great eruption of Vesuvius. Standing from the morning alone upon the top of the mountain, that day in which the great outbreak began, I waded ankle-deep in flour of sulphur upon a burning hollow soil of lava; in the midst was a mammel-like chimney, not long formed, fuming with a light corrosive breath; which to those in the plain had appeared by night as a fiery beacon with trickling lavas. Beyond was a new seat of the weak daily eruption, a pool of molten lava and wherefrom issued all that strong dinning noise and uncouth travail of the mountain; from thence was from time to time tossed aloft, and slung into the air, a swarm of half-molten wreathing missiles.”

 

Doughty's Vesuvius passage continues for another two pages, inserted digressively into an account of lava fields in Arabia. Most noteworthy is Doughty’s language. His word choice is often unexpected, as in “flour of sulphur” and “uncouth travail.” You won’t mistake Doughty’s prose for anyone else’s, though he lacks Chekhov’s comic sense.

 

[The translators of the quoted Chekhov passages above are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973).]