Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

I shall have to stay at Tomsk till the rains are over. They say the road to

Irkutsk is awful.

TOMSK,

May 20.

It is Trinity Sunday with you, while with us even the willow has not yet come out, and there is still snow on the banks of the Tom. To-morrow I am starting for Irkutsk. I am rested. There is no need for hurry, as steam navigation on Lake Baikal does not begin till the 10th of June; but I shall go all the same.

I am alive and well, my money is safe; I have a slight pain in my right eye. It aches.

… Everyone advises me to go back across America, as they say one may die of boredom in the Volunteer Fleet; it’s all military discipline and red tape regulations, and they don’t often touch at a port.

To fill up my time I have been writing some impressions of my journey and sending them to Novoye Vremya; you will read them soon after the 10th of June. I write a little about everything, chit-chat. I don’t write for glory but from a financial point of view, and in consideration of the money I have had in advance.

Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull too.

* * * * *

In two and a half days I shall be in Krasnoyarsk, and in seven or eight in Irkutsk. It’s fifteen hundred versts to Irkutsk. I have made myself coffee and am just going to drink it.

… After Tomsk the Taiga begins. We shall see it.

My greeting to all the Lintvaryovs and to our old Maryushka. I beg mother not to worry and not to put faith in bad dreams. Have the radishes succeeded? There are none here at all.

Keep well, don’t worry about money — there will be plenty; don’t try to spend less and spoil the summer for yourselves.

TO A. S. SUVORIN.

TOMSK,

May 20, 1890.

Greetings to you at last from Siberia, dear Alexey Sergeyevitch! I have missed you and our correspondence terribly.

I will begin from the beginning, however. At Tyumen I was told the first steamer to Tomsk went on the 18th of May. I had to do the journey with horses. For the first three days every joint and sinew ached, but afterwards I got used to the jolting and felt no more aches. Only the lack of sleep, the continual worry over the luggage, the jolting and the fasting brought on spitting of blood when I coughed, and this depressed my spirits, which were none too grand before. For the first few days it was bearable but then a cold wind began to blow, the windows of heaven were opened, the rivers flooded the meadows and roads, I was continually having to change my chaise for a boat. You’ll read of my struggles with the floods and the mud in the article I enclose. I did not mention in it that my big high boots were tight, and that I waded through the mud and the water in my felt boots, and that my felt boots were soaked to jelly. The road was so abominable that during the last two days of my journey I only did seventy versts.

When I set off I promised to send you notes of my journey after Tomsk, since the road between Tyumen and Tomsk has been described a thousand times already. But in your telegram you have expressed the desire to get my impressions of Siberia as quickly as possible, and have even had the cruelty, sir, to reproach me with lapse of memory, as though I had forgotten you. It was absolutely impossible to write on the road. I kept a brief diary in pencil and can offer you now only what is written in that diary. To avoid writing at great length and getting mixed up, I divided all my impressions into chapters. I am sending you six chapters. They are written for you personally. I wrote for you only, and so have not been afraid of being too subjective, and have not been afraid of there being more of Chekhov’s feelings and thoughts than of Siberia in them. If you find some lines interesting and worth printing, give them a profitable publicity, signing them with my name and printing them in separate chapters, a tablespoonful once an hour. The general title can be From Siberia, then From Trans-Baikalia, then From the Amur, and so on.

You shall have another helping from Irkutsk, for which I am starting to-morrow. I shall not be less than ten days on the journey — the road is bad. I shall send you a few chapters again, and shall send them whether you intend to print them or not. Read them and when you are tired of them telegraph to me “Shut up!”

I have been as hungry as a dog the whole way. I stuffed myself with bread so as not to dream of turbot, asparagus, and suchlike. I even dreamed of buckwheat porridge. I have dreamed of it for hours at a time.