Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

It’s cold driving …; I have my fur coat on. My body is all right, but my feet are freezing. I wrap them in the leather overcoat-but it is no use…. I have two pairs of breeches on. Well, one drives on and on…. Telegraph poles, pools, birch copses flash by. Here we overtake some emigrants, then an etape…. We meet tramps with pots on their back; these gentry promenade all over the plain of Siberia without hindrance. One time they will murder some poor old woman to take her petticoat for their leg-wrappers; at another they will strip from the verst post the metal plate with the number on it — it might be useful; at another will smash the head of some beggar or knock out the eyes of some brother exile; but they never touch travellers. Altogether, travelling here is absolutely safe as far as brigands are concerned. Neither the post-drivers nor the private ones from Tyumen to Tomsk remember an instance of any things being stolen from a traveller. When you reach a station you leave your things outside; if you ask whether they won’t be stolen, they merely smile in answer. It is not the thing even to speak of robbery and murder on the road. I believe, if I were to lose my money in the station or in the chaise, the driver would certainly give it me if he found it, and would not boast of having done so. Altogether the people here are good and kindly, and have excellent traditions. Their rooms are simply furnished but clean, with claims to luxury; the beds are soft, all feather mattresses and big pillows. The floors are painted or covered with home-made linen rugs. The explanation of this, of course, is their prosperity, the fact that a family has sixteen dessyatins [Footnote: I.e., about 48 acres.] of black earth, and that excellent wheat grows in this black earth. (Wheaten flour costs thirty kopecks a pood here. [Footnote: I.e., about 7-1/2d. for 36 lb.]) But it cannot all be put down to prosperity and being well fed. One must give some of the credit to their manner of life. When you go at night into a room where people are asleep, the nose is not aware of any stuffiness or “Russian smell.” It is true one old woman when she handed me a teaspoon wiped it on the back of her skirt; but they don’t set you down to drink tea without a tablecloth, and they don’t search in each other’s heads in your presence, they don’t put their fingers inside the glass when they hand you milk or water; the crockery is clean, the kvass is transparent as beer — in fact, there is a cleanliness of which our Little Russians can only dream, yet the Little Russians are far and away cleaner than the Great Russians! They make the most delicious bread here — I over-ate myself with it at first. The pies and pancakes and fritters and the fancy rolls, which remind one of the spongy Little Russian ring rolls, are very good too…. But all the rest is not for the European stomach. For instance, I am regaled everywhere with “duck broth.” It’s perfectly disgusting, a muddy-looking liquid with bits of wild duck and uncooked onion floating in it…. I once asked them to make me some soup from meat and to fry me some perch. They gave me soup too salt, dirty, with hard bits of skin instead of meat; and the perch was cooked with the scales on it. They make their cabbage soup from salt meat; they roast it too. They have just served me some salt meat roasted: it’s most repulsive; I chewed at it and gave it up. They drink brick tea. It is a decoction of sage and beetles — that’s what it is like in taste and appearance.

By the way, I brought from Ekaterinburg a quarter of a pound of tea, five pounds of sugar, and three lemons. It was not enough tea and there is nowhere to buy any. In these scurvy little towns even the government officials drink brick tea, and even the best shops don’t keep tea at more than one rouble fifty kopecks a pound. I have to drink the sage brew.

The distance apart of the posting stations depends on the distance of the nearest villages from each other — that is, 20 to 40 versts. The villages here are large, there are no little hamlets. There are churches and schools everywhere, the huts are of wood and there are some with two storeys.

Towards the evening the road and the puddles begin to freeze, and at night there is a regular frost, one wants an extra fur coat … Brrr! It’s jolting, for the mud is transformed into hard lumps. One’s soul is shaken inside out…. Towards daybreak one is fearfully exhausted by the cold, by the jolting and the jingle of the bells: one has a passionate longing for warmth and a bed. While they change horses one curls up in some corner and at once drops asleep, and a minute later the driver pulls at one’s sleeve and says: “Get up, friend, it is time to start.” On the second night I had acute toothache in my heels. It was unbearably painful. I wondered whether they were frostbitten.