The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: children; and the long and the short of it is, there is nothing
to eat. There is famine and there is a terrible pestilence of
hunger, or spotted, typhus; literally every one is stricken. The
doctor's assistant says one goes into a cottage and what does one
see? Every one is sick, every one delirious, some laughing,
others frantic; the huts are filthy; there is no one to fetch
them water, no one to give them a drink, and nothing to eat but
frozen potatoes. What can Sobol (our Zemstvo doctor) and his lady
assistant do when more than medicine the peasants need bread
which they have not? The District Zemstvo refuses to assist them,
on the ground that their names have been taken off the register
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