It took a week to reach Tomsk: this time the flooded Tom held him up. It was the coldest May in Siberia for almost forty years. Not a leaf on the birches, not a blade of grass on the ground, and three inches of snow. Only flocks of geese and ducks heralded spring. At Tomsk Anton recuperated for a week. He wrote at length to his family: there were no murders in Siberia; men did not beat their wives; ‘even’ the Jews and Poles were decent farmers; the beds were soft, the rooms were clean. The bread and the salty soup of half-cooked duck innards, however, unsettled Anton’s stomach.
Anton mentioned the crash that nearly killed him. He told ‘sweet Misha’ it was as well he had declined his offer of company. In Tomsk, before the even worse overland stage – 1100 miles to Irkutsk – he ordered a wickerwork superstructure for his cart. The streets were swamped with mud; there was only one bathhouse. Chekhov was the first traveller of the season, and in central Siberia travellers on pleasure were objects of curiosity and hospitality. Sitting in his hotel room, writing to Suvorin, Anton was interrupted by a man in uniform with long moustaches, Arshaulov, police chief of Tomsk. They got talking: the police chief ordered vodka. Anton read Arshaulov’s literary efforts and wrote him a letter of recommendation to Suvorin.
Arshaulov took Anton around the brothels of Tomsk. They got back to the hotel at two in the morning. The experience had not been gratifying: ‘Tomsk is a boring, drunken town; no beautiful women at all, Asiatic lawlessness. The only notable thing about this town is that governors die.’ For the return journey travellers in Tomsk advised an American boat via San Francisco and New York, rather than the austerity of the Russian Voluntary Fleet.
On 21 May Anton left Tomsk, in company. Three army officers – two lieutenants and a military doctor – travelling east by sledge on official business offered to share expenses with Anton. They were rough, sometimes obnoxious company, but they gave the novice traveller confidence. One of them, Lieutenant von Schmidt, had been sent to Siberia (where he was to have a successful career) for beating up his batman. Garrulous and abusive, he may have inspired some of the features of Lieutenant Soliony in Three Sisters – the most Siberian of Chekhov’s plays. Von Schmidt took to Anton (and later wrote him an apologetic letter): he suggested Anton find himself female company:
‘I can’t,’ he [Chekhov] said, ‘I have a bride in Moscow.’ Then after a short silence he added in an odd voice, as if thinking aloud: ‘Only I doubt if I’ll be happy with her – she’s too beautiful.’1
Lika was on Anton’s mind. He was to tell his host on Sakhalin, Bulgarevich, that he planned to many. His letters to Lika constantly invent little tasks for her, he enquires after her admirers, he teases her by proxy. But Lika, or as Anton now called her Jamais, did not write. She was being escorted by the flautist Ivanenko and by Anton’s younger brothers – none of whom Anton took seriously enough to feel jealousy. Through the Chekhovs, however, Lika knew Sofia Kuvshinnikova and her lover, Levitan. Of all Chekhov’s circle Levitan was the most irresistible womanizer, and gave Anton cause to fear for Lika’s fidelity.
The Chekhov family scattered all over Russia as soon as Anton was away. It was as if in Anton they had lost their centre of gravity. School ended in May: Masha and her mother stayed with the Lintvariovs, taking a wreath for Kolia’s grave. Misha went with them but the very next day left for Taganrog. After his return to Luka, Masha would venture with Natalia Lintvariova for a month in the Crimea. Pavel too was on the move, to stay with Aleksandr’s family in Petersburg and even to travel with Aleksandr to Finland.
The Chekhov family had shrunk to just Masha, Anton and their parents. Neither parent was sure that Anton would return. The ‘chest of drawers’ house seemed absurdly large, and the family surrendered the tenancy: they would look for new quarters in September. Vania had, again by bad luck, lost his job, and could find a post only in the peat bogs of Vladimir province, 150 miles from Moscow. Misha from September would be a tax inspector 200 miles south of Moscow. Aunt Fenichka was only just alive.
Ivanenko wrote to Anton at the end of May: his letter reached Sakhalin months later, so that Anton did not realize how badly his family coped without him. Masha and Evgenia fell ill with distress.2
The move to the country was joyless. Masha found herself in love with George Lintvariov and her feelings unreciprocated. Worse, Misha had quarrelled with the Lintvariovs. Masha, nevertheless, had to stay there all May.3
By the end of May, when Misha had returned from Taganrog, Masha set off with her friend ‘Natashevu’ Lintvariova for a happy month, free of parents and brothers, in the Crimea. On 20 June she wrote to Pavel: ‘Thanks to Antosha, I’m very happy to be in such a wonderful fairy tale place. I had a telegram from Irkutsk asking me not to grudge the money, that he’s well and rich. Thanks to him I have many friends in Yalta.’
*
Others were unhappy. Vania was angry that Misha had abandoned Evgenia for Taganrog, and he reported to Masha on Lika:
She is obeying her mama and stays home, not leaving the house after six. Amazing … Things are bad with her, she has no job … I want to drag Lika off to the Sparrow Hills, but doubt she will submit: she is awfully obstinate. Kuvshinnikova left with Levitan 4 days ago for the Volga.
Lika had given up her dreams of being an actress and singer. She was shortly to take up work as a clerk in Moscow’s town council offices.
Far worse, however, was the plight of Ezhov. He wrote on 10 June:
My wife Liudia died on 3 June at 4.30 a.m. I don’t know where you are, Anton, but I’m in the cold tundra and there’s not a spark of hope of my life being happy or making sense. Liudia loved me like nobody else. My tiny successes were happiness for her. On the evening before she died her face was worn out with disease, and she never took her loving eyes off me as if asking, ‘Save me, save me!’
Letters reached Anton too slowly to be worth answering and he stoically accepted his inability to help or console his correspondents. The telegraph linked Europe and Siberia, but the Chekhovs were too thrifty to send telegrams, however much Anton begged them to do so. (He was sparing himself, however, the expense of telegrams.) Anna Suvorina telegraphed to the river boat Anton was catching in eastern Siberia, discreetly but flirtatiously encoding Anton as Mikita and herself as Marina:
HUSBAND ODESSA WHAT CAN I SAY GLAD YOUR SUCCESS GRIEVE YOU NOT HERE WHO PROMISED WRITE GOD HELP YOU MIKITA NO HAPPINESS FOR YOU MARINA.
After 400 miles Anton reached the banks of the Yenisei. At Krasnoyarsk, mountainous forests replace the desolation of the Siberian plains. The road was atrocious: hemmed in by hills, the driver could not avoid the ruts and holes. It took two weeks to reach Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia. All roads ended. Anton put his cart up for sale. He stayed at Irkutsk a week, drawing money, writing letters. He liked the city – ‘just like Europe’ – but his companions were spending his money as well as their own on drink. They sickened him. Anton pined. He thought again of buying a ranch; he longed for female company, and wrote to Masha:
I must be in love with Jamais [Lika], since I dreamt of her last night. Compared with these Siberian Parashas [the name also means chamber pot], all these whorefaces that don’t know how to dress, sing or laugh, our Jamais, Drishka and Gundasikha [Lika, Daria Musina-Pushkina, Olga Kundasova] are queens. Siberian ladies, married or not, are frozen fish. You’d have to be a walrus or a seal to have fun with them.
Irkutsk was hard to leave. When they finally reached Lake Baikal, the ferry had gone. Anton complained:
We searched the village all evening to buy a chicken, but didn’t find one. But there is vodka! Russians are terrible pigs. If you ask why they don’t eat meat or fish, they explain that there is no transport, roads are bad etc., but there’s as much vodka as you like even in the remotest villages.
The next day Anton spotted smoke from the funnel of a small boat; after appalling discomfort it disembarked them on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal. A week later, on 20 June, Chekhov, Homo sachaliensis as he now called himself, made Sre
tensk and boarded the Ermak an hour before it departed. Relief – no more rutted mud tracks – made Anton euphoric.
On the Ermak Anton read his telegrams from the Suvorins; he was free of Lieutenant von Schmidt, there was a washroom (where the crew’s pet fox watched the passengers’ ablutions). He gazed at the wild shores of the Amur, and spied on the Chinese villagers on the right bank. The steamboat shook, it ran aground in two and a half feet of water and the crew took a day and a night to repair the holes. The Far East of the Russian empire, recently acquired from China, was another land. The monsoon climate made it lush in summer. The Manchurian border brought it prosperity. Above all, there was freedom. Anton told his family: ‘Here people are not afraid to talk loudly. There’s nobody to arrest them here and nowhere to exile them to, you can be as liberal as you like … A fugitive political prisoner can freely take a boat to the ocean.’
On 27 June, intoxicated with the Amur air – ‘free and warm’ – Anton reached Blagoveshchensk. He was bewitched by the Chinese traders and Japanese girls. In a Blagoveshchensk brothel, as a letter to Suvorin shows, Anton was happy:
a nice clean room, sentimental in an Asiatic way, furnished with bric-à-brac. No ewers, no rubber devices, no portraits of generals … The Japanese girl has her own concept of modesty. She doesn’t put out the light and when you ask what the Japanese is for one thing or another, she gives a straight answer and as she does so, because she doesn’t understand much Russian, points her fingers and even puts her hand on it. What’s more, she doesn’t put on airs or go coy, like Russian women. And all the time she is laughing and making lots of tsu noises. She is amazingly skilled at her job, so that you feel you are not having intercourse but taking part in a top level equitation class. When you come, the Japanese girl pulls with her teeth a sheet of cotton wool from her sleeve, catches you by the ‘boy’ … gives you a massage, and the cotton wool tickles your belly. And all this is done with coquetry, laughing, singing and saying tsu.4
Anton touched foreign soil when he crossed the Amur to the Chinese port of Aigun. Then he took the Muraviov down to the Amur, to the ocean at Nikolaevsk on the final stage of his journey to Sakhalin.
Notes
1 Lieutenant Schmidt wrote his recollections in Nasha Gazeta, Tallinn, 1927, XI: see G. Shaliugin, ‘Ia i moi voennye sputniki’, Oktiabr’, 1987, 5, 195–201.
2 See OR, 331 46 1a: Aleksandr Ivanenko’s letters to Anton, 1889–91: 28 May 1890.
3 See RGALI, 2540 1 161: Masha’s letters to Ivan Chekhov, 1890–1908: 8 May 1890.
4 This letter is cut from the PSSP: see A. P. Chudakov, ‘“Neprilichnye slova” i oblik klassika’ in Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1991, 11, 54.
THIRTY-TWO
Sakhalin
June–December 1890
CHEKHOV SHARED HIS CABIN to Nikolaevsk with a Chinese citizen, Sung Liu Li, who chattered about decapitation and appended his greetings in Chinese when Chekhov wrote to the family. Turning northeast along the Amur, the boat brought Anton into a bleak landscape, the gateway to the penal settlement. Nikolaevsk had no accommodation and Anton had to board another ship to sleep. After a week he set sail in the steamer Baikal, with soldiers and a few prisoners, across the shallow straits to Sakhalin. The Baikal soon stopped: the sandbanks were too treacherous to navigate and Anton was rowed ashore at Cape Jaore. There, tormented by the mosquitoes, he stayed for two days at the lonely house of a naval officer and his wife. Then, at 5 a.m. on 11 July 1890, after eighty-one days’ travelling, Chekhov finally disembarked at Aleksandrovsk, a cluster of wooden buildings that housed the administration for the prison colonies of central Sakhalin. At dinner in the prison he was introduced to a man who was, Anton said, the spitting image of Ibsen – the prison doctor Dr Perlin, who later took Anton as a lodger.
Anton’s reading had ill prepared him for the island. Six hundred miles long, but with a land area of Scotland, Sakhalin is a hilly sliver of Arctic tundra, thinly covered with coniferous scrub. For half the year the temperature is below 0°C; for the other half chilly fog and rain alternate. The island barely supported a few thousand aborigines, Gilyaks and Ainu, who lived off berries, seeds and fish. A little coal was mined to supply passing ships, but Sakhalin’s only use to Russia was as a penal colony that hardened criminals would fear. Nothing could convey the awfulness of Sakhalin: its bogs rendered impassable by tree-roots, its cold, rain, fog and murderous insects. The officials disingenuously claimed to know nothing of his arrival (despite the newspaper reports and government telegrams they had received). They lived in a dream world. General Vladimir Kononovich, the island’s governor, promised full cooperation1 as soon as the visit of Baron Korf, governor of the whole Amur and Sakhalin province, was over. A week later, Korf dined with Anton and Kononovich. Both governors seemed liberal: they deplored corporal and capital punishment, perpetual servitude and exile. Baron Korf had not visited Sakhalin for five years and proclaimed himself delighted by its progress; Kononovich apparently knew nothing of the daily floggings, the embezzlement of food and medicine, the enforced prostitution of women, the murder of native Gilyaks – barbarities which Anton heard of in his first days on the island.
Kononovich was forced to retire: he was too humane a man for the government, although he closed his eyes to his subordinates’ misdeeds. Dr Perlin, disloyal by nature, was an excellent informant, though an uncongenial host. After a month Anton moved in with a young civil servant, Daniil Bulgarevich. Bulgarevich’s brother had been exiled to Siberia for political offences: Daniil was a decent, melancholy individual. His household was the hearth from which Anton worked. Like many officials and prisoners, Bulgarevich showed the best of his character to Anton. Anton’s medical training ensured that he hid his revulsion and relaxed prisoners and guards. They talked. Anton was the only Russian on the island who was neither prisoner nor jailer. Exiles wept and gave him presents. From his dwindling funds he dispensed charity – he bought one exile a heifer. Psychopathic killers and sadistic guards were equally responsive. They showed a humanity that their colleagues, after Chekhov published his book, found incredible.
The 10,000 prisoners, the 10,000 men and their families who guarded them, the few thousand released prisoners and exiles who tried to farm the intractable Sakhalin bogs, the few hundred aborigines, Gilyaks and Ainu, who had survived the diseases brought by the Japanese (who had territorial claims to Sakhalin) and Russians and the savage plunder by escaped convicts and renegade guards, lived in hell. Until 1888 exile to Sakhalin was for life; even in 1890 exiles were allowed to resettle only in eastern Siberia. The guards, too, were likely to succumb to disease or violence on the island. In late July Kononovich let Chekhov print 10,000 questionnaires in the island’s print shop and interview prisoners and exiles. All August Anton surveyed the west coast around Aleksandrovsk and the Tym river valley that runs north from the centre of the island to the Sea of Okhotsk. In mid September he took a boat to Korsakovsk in Aniva Bay on the south side. At Korsakovsk Anton found hospitality with the Feldmans, a family of policemen and prison officials. Despite their notorious brutality, they showed their best side to Chekhov. Aniva Bay was cosmopolitan: Anton picnicked with the Japanese consul, and met shipwrecked American whalers.
The cards that Chekhov distributed to prisoners and exiles recorded name, address, married state, age, religion, place of birth, year of arrival, trade, literacy, source of income, diseases. They provided statistics that the Russian authorities lacked. In poor health, in two regions, each of 10,000 square miles, travelling on foot over treacherous paths, Anton collected data for 10,000 individuals in one short Arctic summer. In August and September 1890 the sun shone exceptionally often on Sakhalin, but Anton’s achievement, nevertheless, was Herculean. He recorded hundreds of conversations with men, women and children of every status and nationality (though he met few aborigines); he inspected farms, mines, hospitals; he watched floggings. If he had the wherewithal, he treated the sick. He arrived too late to witness a mass hanging; the death penalty for mur
der had been abolished in Russia, but on Sakhalin murderers were hanged.
Chekhov’s indignation focused on the plight not of the prisoners or guards, but of the children. The schools were closed for the summer, but, even when they were open, they were clearly as fictitious as the hospitals, where there were no scalpels or medicines and the doctors spent the money on brandy for themselves. Chekhov remonstrated with Kononovich: he made his officials order textbooks from Suvorin and telegraphed Vania to send school programmes and books.
Anton sent a few telegrams home: he accustomed his mother to the idea that he would be back later than he had originally said. At the end of his stay he received a letter from her:
Dear Antosha, look after your health, don’t risk travelling by horse at night, boats are also dangerous … Excuse me Antosha for asking, please bring if you can a collar for Masha, I think it’s called Arctic fox, I don’t know what fashions you have there, and 4 sables for me.2
Anton learnt that he now had no home in Moscow, that Vania had lost his job, that Ezhov was widowed, that Ivanenko was writing to Lika, and that Olga Kundasova had vanished. In two and a half months on the island he sent only one substantial letter to Russia, to Suvorin, as he sailed to the south of the island. It is a wary letter:
I don’t know what will come of it, but I have done quite a lot. There’d be enough for three dissertations. I got up every day at 5 a.m., went to bed late and every day was tense with the thought that I had still a lot to do, and now that I have finished forced labour, I have the feeling I have seen every small detail but missed the elephant … I have visited all the famous. I witnessed a flogging, after which I dreamt of the executioner and the revolting flogging-horse for three or four nights. I chatted with men fettered to wheel-barrows. Once I was having tea in a mine and the former Petersburg merchant Borodavkin, sent here for arson, took from his pocket a teaspoon and gave it to me, and as a result my nerves were upset and I promised never to go to Sakhalin again.
Anton Chekhov Page 28
