Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

I send you heartfelt good wishes from Irkutsk, from the depths of Siberia. I reached Irkutsk last night and was very glad to have arrived, as I was exhausted by the journey and missed friends and relations, to whom I had not written for ages. Well, what is there of interest to write to you? I will begin by telling you that the journey is extraordinarily long. From Tyumen to Irkutsk I have driven more than three thousand versts. From Tyumen to Tomsk I had cold and flooded rivers to contend with. The cold was awful; on Ascension Day there was frost and snow, so that I could not take off my sheepskin and felt boots until I reached the hotel at Tomsk. As for the floods, they were a veritable plague of Egypt. The rivers rose above their banks and overflowed the meadows, and with them the roads, for dozens of versts around. I was continually having to exchange my chaise for a boat, and one could not get a boat for nothing — for a good boat one had to pay with one’s heart’s blood, for one had to sit waiting on the bank for twenty-four hours at a stretch in the cold wind and the rain…. From Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk was a desperate struggle through impassable mud. My goodness, it frightens me to think of it! How often I had to mend my chaise, to walk, to swear, to get out of my chaise and get into it again, and so on! It sometimes happened that I was from six to ten hours getting from one station to another, and every time the chaise had to be mended it took from ten to fifteen hours. From Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk was fearfully hot and dusty. Add to all that hunger, dust in one’s nose, one’s eyes glued together with sleep, the continual dread that something would get broken in the chaise (it is my own), and boredom…. Nevertheless I am well content, and I thank God that He has given me the strength and opportunity to make this journey. I have seen and experienced a great deal, and it has all been very new and interesting to me not as a literary man, but as a human being. The Yenissey, the Taiga, the stations, the drivers, the wild scenery, the wild life, the physical agonies caused by the discomforts of the journey, the enjoyment I got from rest — all taken together is so delightful that I can’t describe it. The mere fact that I have been for more than a month in the open air is interesting and healthy; every day for a month I have seen the sunrise….

TO HIS SISTER.

IRKUTSK,

June 6, 1890.

Greetings to you, dear mother, Ivan, Masha and Misha, and all of you!

In my last long letter I wrote to you that the mountains near Krasnoyarsk are like the Donets Ridge, but that’s not true; when I looked at them from the street I saw they were like high walls surrounding the city, and I was vividly reminded of the Caucasus. And when towards evening I left the town and was crossing the Yenissey, I saw on the other bank mountains that were exactly like the Caucasus, as misty and dreamy. The Yenissey is a broad, swift, winding river, beautiful, finer than the Volga. And the ferry across it is wonderful, ingeniously constructed, moving against the current; I will tell you when I am home about the construction of it. And so the mountains and the Yenissey are the first things original and new that I have met in Siberia. The mountains and the Yenissey have given me sensations which have made up to me a hundredfold for all the trials and troubles of the journey, and which have made me call Levitan a fool for being so stupid as not to come with me.

The Taiga stretches unbroken from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk. The trees are not bigger than in Sokolniki, but not one driver knows how far it goes. There is no end to be seen to it. It stretches for hundreds of versts. No one knows who or what is in the Taiga, and it only happens in winter that people come through the Taiga from the far north with reindeer for bread. When you get to the top of a mountain and look down, you see a mountain before you, then another, mountains at the sides too — and all thickly covered with forest. It makes one feel almost frightened. That’s the second thing original and new.

From Krasnoyarsk it began to be hot and dusty. The heat was terrible. My sheepskin and cap lie buried away. The dust is in my mouth, in my nose, down my neck — tfoo! We were approaching Irkutsk — we had to cross the Angara by ferry. As though to mock us a high wind sprang up. My military companions and I, after dreaming for ten days of a bath, dinner, and sleep, stood on the bank and turned pale at the thought that we should have to spend the night not at Irkutsk, but in the village. The ferry could not succeed in reaching the bank. We stood an hour, a second, and — oh Heavens! — the ferry made an effort and reached the bank. Bravo, we shall have a bath, we shall have supper and sleep! Oh, how sweet to steam oneself, to eat, to sleep!