description and lectures about the cholera have been wasted. It's
mortifying. But what is most mortifying is that after a whole series of
letters from me about our exertions against the cholera, you all at once
write me from gay Biarritz that you envy my leisure! Well, Allah forgive
you!

Well, I am alive and in good health. The summer was a splendid one, dry,
warm, abounding in the fruits of the earth, but its whole charm was from
July onwards, spoilt by news of the cholera. While you were inviting me in
your letters first to Vienna, and then to Abbazzio I was already one of the
doctors of the Serpuhovo Zemstvo, was trying to catch the cholera by its
tail and organizing a new section full steam. In the morning I have to see
patients, and in the afternoon drive about. I drive, I give lectures to the
natives, treat them, get angry with them, and as the Zemstvo has not
granted me a single kopeck for organizing the medical centres I cadge from
the wealthy, first from one and then from another. I turn out to be an
excellent beggar; thanks to my beggarly eloquence, my section has two
excellent barracks with all the necessaries, and five barracks that are not
excellent, but horrid. I have saved the Zemstvo from expenditure even on
disinfectants. Lime, vitriol, and all sorts of stinking stuff I have begged
from the manufacturers for all my twenty-five villages. In fact Kolomin
ought to be proud of having been at the same high school with me. My soul
is exhausted. I am bored. Not to belong to oneself, to think about nothing
but diarrhoea, to start up in the night at a dog's barking and a knock at
the gate ("Haven't they come for me?"), to drive with disgusting horses
along unknown roads; to read about nothing but cholera, and to expect
nothing but cholera, and at the same time to be utterly uninterested in
that disease, and in the people whom one is serving--that, my good sir, is
a hash which wouldn't agree with anyone. The cholera is already in Moscow
and in the Moscow district. One must expect it from hour to hour. Judging