"Checkov, Anton - The Wife And Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chekhov Anton)

doctor's assistant says one goes into a cottage and what does one
see? Every one is sick, every one delirious, some laughing,
others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no one to fetch
them water, no one to give them a drink, and nothing to eat but
frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor) and his lady
assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need bread
which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them,
on the ground that their names have been taken off the register
of this district, and that they are now reckoned as inhabitants
of Tomsk; and, besides, the Zemstvo has no money.

"Laying these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg
you not to refuse immediate help.

"Your well-wisher."

Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal
name* or his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their assistants
go on for years growing more and more convinced every day that
they can do _nothing_, and yet continue to receive their salaries
from people who are living upon frozen potatoes, and consider
they have a right to judge whether I am humane or not.

*Sobol in Russian means "sable-marten."- TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants
came every morning to the servants' kitchen and went down on
their knees there, and that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen
at night out of the barn, the wall having first been broken in,
and by the general depression which was fostered by
conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather -- worried by all
this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing "A
History of Railways"; I had to read a great number of Russian and
foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make
calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then
again to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a
book or began to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes
began blinking, I would get up from the table with a sigh and
begin walking about the big rooms of my deserted country-house.
When I was tired of walking about I would stand still at my study
window, and, looking across the wide courtyard, over the pond and
the bare young birch-trees and the great fields covered with
recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the horizon
a group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road ran
down in an irregular streak through the white field. That was
Pestrovo, concerning which my anonymous correspondent had written
to me. If it had not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or
snowy weather, floated cawing over the pond and the fields, and
the tapping in the carpenter's shed, this bit of the world about
which such a fuss was being made would have seemed like the Dead