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TO A. S. SUVORIN. - Letters of Anton Chekhov
| | Page 125 of 279 | | |
MALAYA DMITROVKA,
MOSCOW,
December 9.
... Hurrah! Here at last I am sitting at my table at home! I pray to my faded penates and write to you. I have now a happy feeling as though I had not been away from home at all. I am well and thriving to the marrow of my bones. Here's a very brief report for you. I was in Sahalin not two months, as you have printed, but three months plus two days. I worked at high pressure. I made a full and minute census of the whole of Sahalin's population, and saw _everything_ except the death penalty. When we see each other I will show you a whole trunkful of stuff about the convicts which is very valuable as raw material. I know a very great deal now, but I have brought away a horrid feeling. While I was staying in Sahalin, I only had a bitter feeling in my inside as though from rancid butter; and now, as I remember it, Sahalin seems to me a perfect hell. For two months I worked intensely, putting my back into it; in the third month I began to feel ill from the bitterness I have spoken of, from boredom, and the thought that the cholera would come from Vladivostok to Sahalin, and that so I was in danger of having to winter in the convict settlement. But, thank God! the cholera ceased, and on the 13th of October the steamer bore me away from Sahalin. I have been in Vladivostok. About the Primorsky Region and our Eastern sea-coast with its fleets, its problems, and its Pacific dreams altogether, I have only one thing to tell of: its crying poverty! Poverty, ignorance, and worthlessness, that might drive one to despair. One honest man for ninety-nine thieves, that are blackening the name of Russia.... We passed Japan because the cholera was there, and so I have not bought you anything Japanese, and the five hundred you gave me for your purchases I have spent on my own needs, for which you have, by law, the right to send me to a settlement in Siberia. The first foreign port we reached was Hong Kong. It is an exquisite bay. The traffic on the sea was such as I had never seen before even in pictures; excellent roads, trams, a railway to the mountains, a museum, botanical gardens; wherever you look you see the tenderest solicitude on the part of the English for the men in their service; there is even a club for the sailors. I went about in a jinrickshaw--that is, carried by men--bought all sorts of rubbish of the Chinese, and was moved to indignation at hearing my Russian
fellow-travellers abuse the English for exploiting the natives. I thought: Yes, the English exploit the Chinese, the Sepoys, the Hindoos, but they do give them roads, aqueducts, museums, Christianity, and what do you give them?
When we left Hong Kong the boat began to rock. The steamer was empty and lurched through an angle of thirty-eight degrees, so that we were afraid it would upset. I am not subject to sea-sickness: that discovery was very agreeable to me. On the way to Singapore we threw two corpses into the sea. When one sees a dead man, wrapped in sailcloth, fly, turning somersaults in the water, and remembers that it is several miles to the bottom, one feels frightened, and for some reason begins to fancy that one will die oneself and will be thrown into the sea. Our horned cattle have fallen sick. Through the united verdict of Dr. Stcherbak and your humble servant, the cattle have been killed and thrown into the sea. 
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