Russian Archives -

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RECORD ONE

An Announcement
The Wisest of Lines
A Poem

This is merely a copy, word by word, of what was published this morning in the State newspaper:

“In another hundred and twenty days the building of the Integral will be completed. The great historic hour is near, when the first Integral will rise into the limitless space of the universe. A thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the United States. A still more glorious task is before you, – the integration of the indefinite equation of the Cosmos by the use of the glass, electric, fire breathing Integral. Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words.

Surgery

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

AZEMSTVO HOSPITAL. In the absence of the doctor, who has gone off to get married, the patients are received by his assistant, the feldscher Kuryatin, a stout man of about forty, whose face wears an expression of amiability and a sense of duty. He is dressed in a shabby pongee jacket, frayed woolen trousers, and between the index and middle fingers of his left hand carries a cigar that gives off a stench.