Note-Book of Anton Chekhov Part 5

In a letter: "A Russian abroad, if not a spy, is a fool." The neighbor goes to Florence to cure himself of love, but at a distance his love grows stronger.

Yalta. A young man, interesting, liked by a lady of forty. He is indifferent to her, avoids her. She suffers and at last, out of spite, gets up a scandal about him.

Pete's mother even in her old age beaded her eyes.

Viciousness is a bag with which man is born.

B. said seriously that he is the Russian Maupa.s.sant. And so did S.

A Jewish surname: Cap.

A lady looking like a fish standing on its head; her mouth like a slit, one longs to put a penny in it.

Russians abroad: the men love Russia pa.s.sionately, but the women don't like her and soon forget her.

Chemist Propter.

Rosalie Ossipovna Aromat.

It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.

And she began to engage in prost.i.tution, got used to sleeping on the bed, while her aunt, fallen into poverty, used to lie on the little carpet by her side and jumped up each time the bell rang; when they left, she would say mindingly, with a pathetic grimace; "Something for the chamber-maid." And they would tip her sixpence.

Prost.i.tutes in Monte Carlo, the whole tone is prost.i.tutional; the palm trees, it seems, are prost.i.tutes, and the chickens are prost.i.tutes.

A big dolt, Z., a qualified nurse, of the Petersburg Rozhdestvensky School, having ideals, fell in love with X., a teacher, and believed him to be ideal, a public spirited worker after the manner of novels and stories of which she was so fond. Little by little she found him out, a drunkard, an idler, good-natured and not very clever.

Dismissed, he began to live on his wife, sponged on her. He was an excrescence, a kind of sarcoma, who wasted her completely. She was once engaged to attend some intellectual country people, she went to them every day; they felt it awkward to give her money--and, to her great vexation, gave her husband a suit as a present. He would drink tea for hours and this infuriated her. Living with her husband she grew thin, ugly, spiteful, stamped her foot and shouted at him: "Leave me, you low fellow." She hated him. She worked, and people paid the money to him, for, being a Zemstvo worker, she took no money, and it enraged her that their friends did not understand him and thought him ideal.

A young man made a million marks, lay down on them, and shot himself.

"That woman." ... "I married when I was twenty; I have not drunk a gla.s.s of vodka all my life, haven't smoked a single cigarette." After he had run off with another woman, people got to like him more and to believe him more, and, when he walked in the street, he began to notice that they had all become kinder and nicer to him--because he had fallen.

A man and woman marry because both of them don't know what to do with themselves.

The power and salvation of a people lie in its intellegentsia, in the intellectuals who think honestly, feel, and can work.

A man without a mustache is like a woman with a mustache.

A man who cannot win a woman by a kiss will not win her by a blow.

For one sensible person there are a thousand fools, and for one sensible word there are a thousand stupid ones; the thousand overwhelms the one, and that is why cities and villages progress so slowly. The majority, the ma.s.s, always remain stupid; it will always overwhelm; the sensible man should give up hope of educating and lifting it up to himself; he had better call in the a.s.sistance of material force, build railways, telegraphs, telephones--in that way he will conquer and help life forward.

Really decent people are only to be found amongst men who have definite, either conservative or radical, convictions; so-called moderate men are much inclined to rewards, commissions, orders, promotions.

"What did your uncle die of?"

"Instead of fifteen Botkin drops,[1] as the doctor prescribed, he took sixteen."

[Footnote 1: A very harmless purgative.]

A young philologist, who has just left the University, comes home to his native town. He is elected churchwarden. He does not believe in G.o.d, but goes to church regularly, makes the sign of the cross when pa.s.sing near a church or chapel, thinking that that sort of thing is necessary for the people and that the salvation of Russia is bound up with it. He is elected chairman of the Zemstvo board and a Justice of the Peace, he wins orders and medals; he does not notice that he has reached the age of forty-five; then suddenly he realizes that all the time he has been acting and making a fool of himself, but it is now too late to change his way of life. Once in his sleep he suddenly hears like the report of a gun the words: "What are you doing?"--and he starts up all in a sweat.