TO A. S. SUVORIN , publisher
“Melihovo
October 10, 1892.
Your telegram telling me of Svobodin’s death caught me just
as I was going out of the yard to see patients. You can imagine my feelings.
Svobodin stayed with me this summer; he was very sweet and gentle, in a serene
and affectionate mood, and became very much attached to me. It was evident to
me that he had not very long to live, it was evident to him too. He had the
thirst of the aged for everyday peace and quiet, and had grown to detest the
stage and everything to do with the stage and dreaded returning to Petersburg.
Of course I ought to go to the funeral, but to begin with, your telegram came
towards evening, and the funeral is most likely tomorrow, and secondly the
cholera is twenty miles away, and I cannot leave my centre. There are seven
cases in one village, and two have died already. The cholera may break out in
my section. It is strange that with winter coming on the cholera is spreading
over a wider and wider region.
I have undertaken to be the section doctor till the
fifteenth of October — my section will be officially closed on that day. I
shall dismiss my feldsher, close the barracks, and if the cholera comes, I
shall cut rather a comic figure. Add to that the doctor of the next section is
ill with pleurisy and so, if the cholera appears in his section, I shall be
bound, from a feeling of comradeship, to undertake his section.
So far I have not had a single case of cholera, but I have
had epidemics of typhus, diphtheria, scarlatina, and so on. At the beginning of
summer I had a great deal of work, then towards the autumn less and less.
* * * * *
The sum of my literary achievement this summer, thanks to
the cholera, has been almost nil. I have written little, and have thought about
literature even less. However, I have written two small stories — one
tolerable, one bad.
Life has been hard work this summer, but it seems, to me now
that I have never spent a summer so well as this one. In spite of the turmoil
of the cholera, and the poverty which has kept tight hold of me all the summer,
I have liked the life and wanted to live. How many trees I have planted!...”
(Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated): Delphi Classics)
