4 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina’s letters to Anton: 12 Nov. 1889.
5 See RGALI, 640 1 189: Svobodin’s letters to Lavrov: 11 Oct. 89.
6 See G. Shaliugin ‘Uchitel’ slovesnosti’ in Chekhoviana 1990, 124–9.
7 See OR, 331 46 33: A. Ipatieva-Golden’s letters to Anton, 1889–91.
8 This passage is to be found in Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Rozhdenie teatra, 1989, 60–1.
THIRTY
Arming for the Crusade
December 1889–April 1890
BY THE END OF 1889 Anton had resolved to make a long journey – from which he thought he might not return – over Siberia to the edge of the Russian empire, the island of Sakhalin, Russia’s grimmest penal colony. His family and friends had hints – his ardent obituary of the explorer of Central Asia, Nikolai Przhevalsky; his reading of Misha’s old law-lecture notes, geography textbooks, maps, political journalism; contact with administrators of Siberia’s prison empire. Ever since childhood Anton had been an avid reader of explorers’ biographies and geographers’ descriptions. Now, shaken by Kolia’s death, he was seeking to emulate Przhevalsky’s heroic exploits. After The Wood Demon, the writer felt humiliated, and the doctor-scientist in his personality took the lead. Not for the last time, Anton’s entangled love life made the life of a solitary wanderer seem particularly alluring to him.
After the first performance of The Wood Demon friends expected Chekhov to flee, as he had after both premières of Ivanov, to the other capital city, but Anton put off his New Year visit to Petersburg. The Suvorins drank Anton’s health in his absence. He had fled to the Kiseliovs at Babkino. He composed for Maria Kiseliova an opening line of a story ‘On such and such a date hunters wounded a young female elk in the Daragan forest’ and left the rest for her to write. Anton, however, had an ulterior motive for going back to Babkino: he needed to talk to Maria’s brother-in-law, a Senator Golubev who could get him a berth on a ship that returned via China and India from Sakhalin to Odessa. In exchange for the Kiseliovs’ help he agreed to examine Maria’s father who was dying in Petersburg.
Around 4 January 1890, Chekhov took horses from Babkino and rejoined the railway north: he went to Petersburg with Maria Kiseliova and her younger daughter. In Petersburg, too he had business: he wanted to ask the Department of Taxes to give his brother Misha a job, and Kleopatra Karatygina asked him to persuade Suvorin to give her work. Above all, he needed official support for his journey to Sakhalin.
Anton spent a month lobbying in the city. Suvorin’s name opened the doors of ministries and the prison administration, but Suvorin disapproved of Chekhov’s journey: it was hazardous, and would take his closest friend away for a year. Chekhov saw the director of prisons, Galkin-Vraskoi, who, when Anton undertook to review his report, promised that Siberia’s prison gates would be opened to Chekhov (and then sent a secret telegram to ensure the opposite). Suvorin gave Anton a newspaper correspondent’s card.
Chekhov’s plans were praised in the newspapers. Many Russian writers had made involuntary, often one-way, journeys to Siberia; none had undertaken voluntary exploration. This journey to the heart of evil was a Dantean exploit that rehabilitated Chekhov in radical eyes. They hoped Chekhov would discover on Sakhalin a set of coherent ‘ideals’. Perhaps Anton’s main reason for making this suicidal journey was to silence accusations that he was indifferent to the suffering he portrayed. The Russian Zolas – Korolenko and Ertel – withdrew their strictures. The animals in the literary zoo were envious of Chekhov’s limelight; some of them were even glad that he would be out of the way for the rest of the year. From Petersburg Gruzinsky wrote to Ezhov (in Moscow playing whist with Vania and Misha): ‘It’s excellent that Chekhov is going; Sakhalin is not the point, the point is travelling the great oceans and meeting prisoners.’ The right wing, however, sneered: before Anton set off, Burenin wrote:
The talented writer Chekhov
To distant Sakhalin trekked off.
He searched its grim quarries
For ideas for stories,
But finding there a total lack,
Took the earliest steamboat back.
Inspiration, says this fable,
Lies beneath the kitchen table.
Obsessed with his expedition, Anton lost interest in his elder brother. When Suvorin asked, Anton demurred:
I don’t know what to do with Aleksandr. It’s not just that he drinks. That would be all right, but he is inextricably stuck in surroundings where it is literally impossible not to drink. Between us: his spouse also drinks. Grey, nasty, gloomy … And that man since he was 14, practically, has wanted to marry. All his life he’s been marrying and swearing that he’ll never marry again.
Anton alternated hard work with frivolity. He read everything about Siberia. Suvorin had a collection of forbidden books, which included pamphlets on political prisoners, as well as Tolstoy’s diatribe against sex and marriage, The Kreutzer Sonata – a book it was hard to ban, since Tsar Alexander III had liked it. Anton went to Shcheglov’s name-day party; he went with the Suvorins and their Trésor to the Petersburg Dog Show. Shcheglov was exhausted by the parties until three or four in the morning. Anton had surreptitious encounters with Kleopatra Karatygina. He channelled her energy into making notes on Siberia and Sakhalin, some from the Public Library, some from her own experience. She gave him lists of friends to tap for hospitality; she taught him Siberian etiquette – never ask why anyone is in Siberia; she gave him the dates for navigation on Siberia’s rivers; for his birthday she made him a travelling pillow – ‘for when you’re sick on the boat’. In return she wanted affection. Her weapon was Anton’s anxiety not to be found out: ‘Where did I put the letter to you? Which envelope did I put it in? … The letter to my sister!’1 When Anton’s family did find out, Kleopatra denied responsibility: ‘If your mama and sister find out your secret d’un polichinelle of course it isn’t my fault. You did ask me not to blurt things out in Moscow.’ Like Olga Kundasova, Kleopatra resigned herself to being unloved. She wrote dozens of notes, some in doggerel, some reproachful. She touched Chekhov for loans that she never repaid. She hoped that his dream of ‘a room to share with Lika Mizinova’ would prove a curse.
Anton and Suvorin clung to one another: they travelled back to Moscow together, and Suvorin took a room in the Slav Bazaar. They discussed illness, real and imaginary. One night they watched Racine’s Phèdre; the next they went to the Literary Society’s fancy dress ball; the following night they dined with Grigorovich, and healed the breach between him and Chekhov. As Anton recuperated from his ‘Sakhalin fever’, his women, and libraries: he summed up his Petersburg month to Pleshcheev: ‘I think of the sins I have committed, of the thousand barrels of wine I have drunk … In one month in Petersburg I committed so many great and petty deeds that I should be both promoted to general and hanged.’
The Suvorins left. Anton lacked congenial company. Levitan was in Paris, from where he complained of ‘psychopathic’ impressionists and women ‘overworked by centuries of screwing’.2 Anton studied atlases, ancient and modern, and dreamed of river boats. ‘I feel like crossing 12 or 18 months out of my life,’ he told one journalist. He wrote just one story for New Times: ‘Devils’, later ‘Thieves’, portrays a nest of horse thieves in the steppes. Suvorin was upset that Chekhov romanticized criminals. Anton just edited Suvorin’s unsolicited manuscripts, and compiled a geographical introduction to a future book on Sakhalin. In Moscow he sent Masha, Olga Kundasova and Lika Mizinova to the Rumiantsev Museum (now the Russian State Library) to copy what he had marked about Sakhalin and Siberia in hundreds of journals and books. From Petersburg, from Aleksandr and from Kleopatra, came facts, opinions and pleas. Karatygina reverted to a motherly style:
Forgive me for poking my Roman Catholic profile where I shouldn’t, but I am awfully reluctant to have you in my Siberian kingdom playing the part of a hopeless floating point (out of boredom and ignorance) and therefore I have taken it on myself, my bold child, with
out your knowledge, to get for you letters of recommendation.
Anton was deeply upset that February by a reminder of Kolia’s death:
Ezhov was sitting at the table crying: his young wife is ill with consumption. He has to take her south quickly. I asked him if he had money, he said yes. He spoilt my mood with his tears. He reminded me of certain things, and anyway I’m sorry for him.
Of the many forces that pursued Chekhov to the Hades of Sakhalin, ‘certain things’ – i.e. Kolia’s ghost – were the most persistent, if not the avowed motives.
From intimations of mortality Anton was rescued by Lika Mizinova. She and Anton began to exert a pull on each other. Granny Sofia’s diary traces day by day Lika falling in thrall:
5 March. Monday. Lika at 8 p.m. went to the Chekhovs, she came back at 3 a.m., very pleased that she had been there …
10 March. Saturday. Lidia [Lika’s mother] is writing … advice for Lika, to bring her to her senses, to pull her back from an idle, disorientated life, she is never home and every night comes back late; she doesn’t like the house or home life. This upsets us terribly, especially her mother, and it’s impossible to talk to her, she starts yelling immediately and it ends with her walking out angry with family life, saying that it’s hell, not life.
13 March. Tuesday. Lika has been out and about until 2 a.m., she went to the Rumiantsev museum to make notes about Sakhalin island …
28 March. Wednesday. I happened to make the acquaintance of the mother of Maria Chekhova, Lika and I met her in the arcade, very nice, simple manners, we were introduced and had a chat there and then.
29 March. Thursday. Lika was to go to All Night Vigil at some nunnery with her girl friends. She deceived us! She went with the Chekhovs and came back at 1.30 a.m.
31 March. Saturday. The brazen Kundasova appeared to ask us to let Lika come to the Chekhovs, to which Lidia [her mother] said that we had a long-standing custom of a family Easter at home …
5 April. Thursday … We liked Anton very much – he’s a doctor and a writer, such a nice personality, simple manners, considerate …
21 April. Saturday. Today, finally, Anton Chekhov is setting off. So Lika will have some rest. At 1 Anton came to say goodbye. His family and many friends, among them Olga Kundasova, she really is infatuated, are off to the station at 7 to see him off. He spent half an hour with us and set off with Lika … I’m afraid, is our Lika involved with him? It looks very like it … But he’s a fine man, an alluring personality.3
Anton was swamped with affection on the eve of his departure. He told Suvorin ‘such girls that if I rounded them all up to my country cottage I’d have a really wild ball, pregnant with consequences.’
It was easier to part with his brothers and men friends: he promised to bring back Manila cigars and ivory carvings of naked Japanese girls. Shcheglov, Ezhov and Gruzinsky lauded Anton’s courage. Pavel Svobodin declared that he would be called Chekhov of Sakhalin. Anton fobbed off Misha, who fancied meeting in Japan and returning to Russia together. Lily Markova’s husband, Sakharov, asked to be the expedition’s artist (for a fee of 1000 roubles): the husband of an ex-mistress was no travelling companion for Anton in Siberia: he begged Suvorin to put Sakharov off the idea.
Suvorin could not see the point of the crusade, of expense, suffering and wasted time. To him Anton addressed a fiery missive:
You write that Sakhalin is of no use, no interest to anyone. Can that be true? Sakhalin can be useless and uninteresting only to a society that does not exile thousands of people there and spend millions on it. After Australia in the past and Cayenne, Sakhalin is the only place where criminal colonization can be studied … Sakhalin is a place of the most unendurable sufferings free or enslaved man can endure … I’d say that places like Sakhalin should be visited for homage, as Turks go to Mecca … We have rotted alive millions of people, rotted them for nothing, without thinking, barbarically; we have herded people through the cold in fetters tens of thousands of miles, infected them with syphilis, debauched them, bred criminals and blamed all this on red-nosed prison warders. All educated Europe now knows that it’s not the warders but all of us that are guilty, but we don’t care, we’re not interested.
Rarely had Anton been so emotionally stoked up. He felt mortally insulted by a reviewer’s phrase ‘priests of unprincipled writing like Mr Chekhov’ in the March issue of the radical monthly Russian Thought, and raged to Vukol Lavrov, its editor:
I would not reply even to slander were it not that I am soon leaving Russia for a long time, perhaps never to return, and I have not the strength to refrain from replying … After your accusation not only are business relations but the most ordinary nodding acquaintance between us is impossible.
Had Chekhov perished on Sakhalin, Russian Thought would have been blamed, as Burenin was blamed for killing Nadson. It was to take two years’ diplomacy by Pavel Svobodin to undo the damage done to Chekhov and to Russian Thought by a careless remark and Anton’s pride. Anton left in high dudgeon and high spirits.
On 21 April, fortified by three glasses of Santurini wine from Dr Korneev, he took the train to Iaroslavl. Here he took a river boat down the Volga and up the Kama into the Urals. He left his mother Masha and Lika weeping at the station. (He had told them he would be back in September, knowing well that he would be away until December.) Lika was left a photograph inscribed: ‘To the kindly creature I am running from to Sakhalin and who scratched my nose … P.S. This inscription, like an exchange of cards, obliges me to nothing.’ Chekhov dropped hints in Siberia that he and Lika were betrothed.
Friends travelled with Anton the first thirty miles to the St Sergei monastery: his brother Vania, the Levitan ménage à trois – the mistress Sofia Kuvshinnikova and her husband Dr Kuvshinnikov (who gave Anton a bottle of cognac to open on the Pacific Ocean). Olga Kundasova stayed on the train as far as Iaroslavl and accompanied Anton down the Volga. Next day, when they had passed Kineshma, she disembarked.
Anton was at last truly alone, travelling into unknown territory.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 47 13b: Kleopatra Karatygina’s letters to Anton Chekhov, 1890.
2 See OR, 331 49 25b: this phrase is cut from Levitan, 1956.
3 Quoted from Vl. Rynkevich, Puteshestvie k domu s mezoninom, Rostov, 1990, 54–7: the Ioganson diary is in GPB, SPb, and in MXaT.
THIRTY-ONE
Crossing Siberia
22 April–June 1890
STEAMING DOWN THE VOLGA to Nizhni and up the Kama to Perm, his stomach churning from the farewell, Chekhov wrote greetings to friends and instructions to family. At Perm the river journey ended; here, on the slopes of the Urals, heavy rain turned the snow to mud. Chekhov arrived at Perm at 2.00 a.m.; the train across the Urals left at six in the evening. A 200-mile train journey took all night to Ekaterinburg. Here Anton had the addresses of his mother’s relatives. One visited Anton in the American Hotel, but did not invite him to dine.
Anton stayed three days in Ekaterinburg reconnoitring. The railhead ended another 200 miles east at Tiumen. America had been joined coast-to-coast for twenty years; Russia had no Trans-Siberian railway. From Tiumen Chekhov hoped to spare himself 1000 miles overland through blizzards and floods to Tomsk: ships went down the Tobol and the Irtysh and then upstream, southeast up the Ob and the Tom, to Tomsk, from where travellers had to go overland. Siberia’s major rivers flow from south to north, and travellers head from west to east. The great Siberian road was a rutted belt of mud, snow or dust (depending on the season), interrupted by ferry crossings over wide, dangerous rivers. Prisoners and exiles and the crude birchpole carts (tarantasy) of officials and carters were the traffic.
To reach the Russian Far East – Vladivostok, Kamchatka or Sakhalin – by sea a Voluntary Fleet had been launched by public subscription. Anton, in Nikolai Przhevalsky’s footsteps, was crossing the hard way. Arriving in Ekaterinburg on 28 April, he was told that until 18 May no passenger ships could leave Tiumen: ice obstructed the Tobol, but th
e Irtysh had already melted and flooded for miles. He had left two weeks too early or four weeks too late. Nevertheless, on 1 May Chekhov took the train, pursued by furious blizzards, to Tiumen. Here he bought a cart, and hired horses to Tomsk.
Anton kept a pencilled diary. He wrote few letters: he was too bruised and exhausted, wet and cold, and the post to Russia took weeks. He was also ill-equipped. Misha had bought him a wooden trunk which crashed about the cart as it bumped over the ruts and lumps of ice and nearly brained him. Others had soft leather bags as mattresses to sleep on or cushions to brace against. Only the thick leather coat that Aleksei Kiseliov had provided protected Anton’s body from hypothermia and broken bones when he was flung from the cart. The revolver he had brought he never even drew. Though Siberia was full of prisoners, escaped and settled, its lonely roadhouses were cleaner and friendlier than European Russia’s inns. He starved. On Russia’s rivers he gorged himself on sterlets. In Siberia, in spring, there was only bread, wild garlic and coarse powdered tea. Evgenia had given Anton a portable coffee stove and coffee: it took him three weeks to learn how to brew up.
On 7 May, paying his drivers double or treble the standard tariff, he reached the shores of the Irtysh, 450 miles in four days by cart from Tiumen. He was now stranded: the roads were so flooded that he could not turn back, and the winds so furious that the ferryman would not row across. He wrote not to his mother, who feared for his life, but to Maria Kiseliova, who had in her letters been hinting for years that suffering would do him good:
A second troika, also at top speed; we veer right, it veers left. ‘We’re colliding’ flashes in my head. One instant and a crashing sound, the horses entangle in a black mass, my cart is on its rear, I tumble to the ground all my suitcases and bundles on top of me. I leap up and see a third troika. My mother must have been praying for me last night. If I had been asleep or the third troika had come straight after the second I’d have been crushed to death or crippled … I feel a complete loneliness that I have never known before.
Anton Chekhov Page 27
