Note-Book of Anton Chekhov Part 9

If you wish to become an optimist and understand life, stop believing what people say and write, observe and discover for yourself.

Husband and wife zealously followed X.'s idea and built up their life according to it as if it were a formula. Only just before death they asked themselves: "Perhaps that idea is wrong? Perhaps the saying 'mens sana in corpore sano' is untrue?"

I detest: a playful Jew, a radical Ukrainian, and a drunken German.

The University brings out all abilities, including stupidity.

Taking into consideration, dear sir, as a result of this view, dear sir....

The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.

Owing to our flightiness, because the majority of us are unable and unaccustomed to think or to look deeply into life's phenomena, nowhere else do people so often say: "How ba.n.a.l!" nowhere else do people regard so superficially, and often contemptuously other people's merits or serious questions. On the other hand nowhere else does the authority of a name weigh so heavily as with us Russians, who have been abased by centuries of slavery and fear freedom....

A doctor advised a merchant to eat soup and chicken. The merchant thought the advice ironical. At first he ate a dinner of botvinia and pork, and then, as if recollecting the doctor's orders, ordered soup and chicken and swallowed them down too, thinking it a great joke.

Father Epaminond catches fish and puts them in his pocket; then, when he gets home, he takes out a fish at a time, as he wants it, and fries it.

The n.o.bleman X. sold his estate to N. with all the furniture according to an inventory, but he took away everything else, even the oven dampers, and after that N. hated all n.o.blemen.

The rich, intellectual X., of peasant origin, implored his son:--"Mike, don't get out of your cla.s.s. Be a peasant until you die, do not become a n.o.bleman, nor a merchant, nor a bourgeois. If, as you say, the Zemstvo officer now has the right to inflict corporal punishment on peasants, then let him also have the right to punish you." He was proud of his peasant origin, he was even haughty about it.

They celebrated the birthday of an honest man. Took the opportunity to show off and praise one another. Only towards the end of the dinner they suddenly discovered that the man had not been invited; they had forgotten.

A gentle quiet woman, getting into a temper, says: "If I were a man, I would just bash your filthy mug."

A Mussulman for the salvation of his soul digs a well. It would be a pleasant thing if each of us left a school, a well, or something like that, so that life should not pa.s.s away into eternity without leaving a trace behind it.

We are tired out by servility and hypocrisy.

N. once had his clothes torn by dogs, and now, when he pays a call anywhere, he asks: "Aren't there any dogs here?"

A young pimp, in order to keep up his powers, always eats garlic.

School guardian. Widowed priest plays the harmonium and sings: "Rest with the saints."

In July the red bird sings the whole morning.

"A large selection of _cigs"_[1]--so read X. every day when he went down the street, and wondered how one could deal only in _cigs_ and who wanted them. It took him thirty years before he read it correctly: "A large selection of cigars."

[Footnote 1: _Cigs_ in Russian is a kind of fish.]

A bride to an engineer: a dynamite cartridge filled with one-hundred-rouble notes.

"I have not read Herbert Spencer. Tell me his subjects. What does he write about?" "I want to paint a panel for the Paris exhibition.

Suggest a subject." (A wearisome lady.)

The idle, so-called governing, cla.s.ses cannot remain long without war.

When there is no war they are bored, idleness fatigues and irritates them, they do not know what they live for; they bite one another, try to say unpleasant things to one another, if possible with impunity, and the best of them make the greatest efforts not to bore the others and themselves. But when war comes, it possesses all, takes hold of the imagination, and the common misfortune unites all.

An unfaithful wife is a large cold cutlet which one does not want to touch, because some one else has had it in his hands.