KRASNOYARSK,
May 28, 1890.
What a deadly road! It was all we could do to crawl to Krasnoyarsk and my
trap had to be repaired twice. The first thing to be broken was the
vertical piece of iron connecting the front of the carriage with the axle;
then the so-called circle under the front broke. I have never in all my
life seen such a road--such impassable mud and such an utterly neglected
road. I am going to write about its horrors to the _Novoye Vremya_, and so
won’t talk about it now.
The last three stations have been splendid; as one comes down to
Krasnoyarsk one seems to be getting into a different world. You come out of
the forest into a plain which is like our Donets steppe, but here the
mountain ridges are grander. The sun shines its very best and the
birch-trees are out, though three stations back the buds were not even
bursting. Thank God, I have at last reached a summer in which there is
neither rain nor a cold wind. Krasnoyarsk is a picturesque, cultured town;
compared with it, Tomsk is “a pig in a skull-cap and the acme of _mauvais
ton_.” The streets are clean and paved, the houses are of stone and large,
the churches are elegant.
I am alive and perfectly well. My money is all right, and so are my things;
I lost my woollen stockings but soon found them again.
Apart from my trap, everything so far has been satisfactory and I have
nothing to complain of. Only I am spending an awful lot of money.
Incompetence in the practical affairs of life is never felt so much as on a
journey. I pay more than I need to, I do the wrong thing, and I say the
wrong thing, and I am always expecting what does not happen.
... I shall be in Irkutsk in five or six days, shall spend as many days
there, then drive on to Sryetensk--and that will be the end of my journey
on land. For more than a fortnight I have been driving without a break, I
think about nothing else, I live for nothing else; every morning I see the
sunrise from beginning to end. I’ve grown so used to it that it seems as
though all my life I had been driving and struggling with the muddy roads.
When it does not rain, and there are no pits of mud on the road, one feels
queer and even a little bored. And how filthy I am, what a rapscallion I
look! What a state my luckless clothes are in!
... For mother’s information: I have still a jar and a half of coffee; I
feed on locusts and wild honey; I shall dine to-day at Irkutsk. The further
east one gets the dearer everything is. Rye flour is seventy kopecks a
_pood_, while on the other side of Tomsk it was twenty-five and
twenty-seven kopecks per _pood_, and wheaten flour thirty kopecks. The
tobacco sold in Siberia is vile and loathsome; I tremble because mine is
nearly done.
... I am travelling with two lieutenants and an army doctor who are all on
their way to the Amur. So my revolver is after all quite superfluous. In
such company hell would have no terrors. We are just having tea at the
station, and after tea we are going to have a look at the town.
I should have no objection to living in Krasnoyarsk. I can’t think why this
is a favourite place for sending exiles to.
* * * * *
Your Homo Sachaliensis,
A. CHEKHOV.