Works of A.P. Chekhov, Vol. 10: Sakhalin Island

the sea. It becomes dismal. I go to the assembly, have a long dinner there, and listen to the talk at the next table about gold, about antlers, about a magician who arrived in Nikolayevsk, about some Japanese man who pulls teeth not with pliers, but simply with his fingers. If one listens carefully and for a long time, then, my God, how far the life here is from Russia! Starting with the dried balyk salted and sun-dried fish fillet made from keta chum salmon, which they use here as a snack for vodka, and ending with the conversations, one feels something entirely their own, not Russian, in everything. While I was sailing along the Amur, I had the feeling as if I were not in Russia, but somewhere in Patagonia or Texas; not to mention the original, non-Russian nature, it seemed to me the whole time that the structure of our Russian life is completely alien to the native Amur residents, that Pushkin and Gogol are incomprehensible here and therefore unnecessary, our history is boring, and we, visitors from Russia, seem like foreigners. Regarding religion and politics, I noticed complete indifference here. The priests I saw on the Amur eat meat during fast days, and, among other things, I was told about one of them, dressed in a white silk kaftan, that he engages in gold poaching, competing with his own spiritual children. If you want to make an Amur resident bored and yawn, just talk to him about politics, about the Russian government, or about Russian art. And the morality here is also something peculiar, not our own. Knightly treatment of a woman is elevated almost to a cult, and at the same time, it is not considered reprehensible to yield one's wife to a friend for money; or here is another one: on one hand, the absence of class prejudices—they treat even an exile as an equal here, and on the other hand, it is no sin to shoot a Chinese vagrant in the forest like a dog, or even to secretly hunt for gorbachiki humpback salmon.

But I will continue about myself. Not having found shelter, I