About Love by Anton Chekhov

Author:Anton Chekhov [Chekhov, Anton; Helwig, David; Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2017-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

The next year I went to see him. Travel there, think, observe how things are going on. In his letters my brother called his estate The Chumbaroklov Wasteland, now Himalaiskoe. I arrived at this now Himalaiskoe after noon. It was hot. Everywhere ditches, fences, hedges, barriers, tool handles, rows of fir trees – and I can’t figure out how to get into the yard or where to tie my horse. I walk toward the house, and there to meet me is a red-coloured dog, fat and looking like a pig. He wants to bark, but he’s too lazy. Out of the house came the cook, bare-legged, fat, also looking like a pig, and she said that the gentleman was taking a nap after lunch. I go in to my brother, he’s sitting in bed, his knees covered with a blanket; he’s aged, got fat, flabby, his cheeks, nose and lips bulging – looks as if he’ll give a grunt under the blanket.

We embraced and shed a few tears, out of gladness and the sad thought that once we were young and now were both grey-haired and soon enough to die. He dressed and took me out to show me his estate.

Well, and how is life going for you here?’ I asked.

‘Not bad at all. I swear to God I live happily.’

This was no longer the poor timid devil of a functionary, but the present-day landowner, a gentleman. He’d already made himself at home here, settled in and starting to enjoy it all; he ate a lot, soaped himself in the bathhouse, put on weight, had gone to law against the community and both factories, and he took great offense when the peasants didn’t call him ‘Your Excellency.’ He dealt with spiritual matters firmly, in the grand manner, and he performed his acts of charity, not simply but with a flourish. What acts of charity? He treated the peasants for every illness with soda and castor oil, and on the afternoon of his name day he offered public prayers in the middle of the village and afterwards he set out a gallon of vodka as he thought he should. Oh those terrible gallons of vodka! Today a fat landowner drags the peasants to an assembly to account for the crop damage by their cattle, and tomorrow, on a festival day, he stands them a full gallon, and they drink and shout ‘Hurray,’ and drunk, they bow at his feet. A change for the better in his life, a full stomach and idleness, create a self-importance in a Russian, a towering insolence. Nikolai Ivanych, a clerk in the finance department afraid even to see with his own eyes, now spoke only truisms in the tone of a cabinet minister: ‘Education is necessary, but for the people it is premature,’ ‘Corporal punishment is harmful in general, but in some cases it is wholesome and indispensible.’

‘I know the people and am able to deal with them,’ he said. ‘The people love me. I have only to wave a finger, and the people will do anything I wish.

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