Of all the great nineteenth-century literary figures, Chekhov is one of the few not to have had his reputation debunked. This may be because he did the job himself: a travel-book about Siberia?—a far-fetched literary gag indeed.
In early 1890 Alexei Suvorin, newspaper tycoon, editor of Novoye Vremya (New Times) and sponsor for the trip to Sakhalin, the prison colony off the pacific coast of Russia north of Japan which, with its mean annual temperature of zero Celsius, rude geography and ten months of winter, was a cold, inhospitable place to sustain any kind of reforming programme, wrote to Chekhov in bafflement—‘no one needs Sakhalin, and it possesses no interest for anybody’. Chekhov replied, in a tone of feigned affront, that his work would yield nothing for literature or science, although he wished to repay medicine ‘towards which [...] I have been a real swine’, and that in any case he ‘had been growing indolent for some time now’ and really had to take himself in hand.
Convinced? Chekhov wasn’t. He concedes, ‘none of this is convincing’, and then asserts, jauntily: ‘personally I’m going out there for the most trivial of reasons’. It was as if, to quote from A Boring Story, written not long before he hatched the Sakhalin scheme, he was about to acquire the ‘ability to preserve his dignity on a wild-goose chase’.
Sakhalin is off the map, a fleck on the flank of Asia. The island had officially become Russian territory after a dispute with the Japanese in 1875, though the Russian government had long been sending convicts there. Tundra over much of its northern half, forested with spruce, birch and pine in the south, this long mountainous backbone in the sea of Okhotsk is about as far away from Moscow within Russia as Chekhov could get: 5000 miles. And it wasn’t just that. Chekhov’s decision to go overland—the first sleepers for the Trans-Siberian Railway would be sunk ten years later—rather than follow the usual shipping route from Odessa around the coast of Asia (which is how everyone got there, except the chain-gangs) is just as odd as deciding to go at all. He seems to be making an ordeal out of an epic: the Great Siberian Highway was little better than an unsealed dirt track.
Opting for sackcloth and ashes, even if only for the space of a summer vacation, would have been too much like his childhood in Taganrog to appeal to Chekhov; and it is difficult to match the self-imposed rigours of a coach journey to Siberia with the philosophy of idleness he espoused but never practised until his tuberculosis made it unavoidable: ‘My ideal: to be idle, and love a fat girl.’
Chekhov had no legal qualifications, and he was certainly not a bleeding-heart liberal. If anything, he tended to mock ‘do-gooders’; he steered clear of the vocal, politically radical faction in the Moscow literary scene and disliked the often crudely stereotypic way Enlightenment and Reaction were portrayed in contemporary novels. Although he’d been writing since his student days, Chekhov’s own claim to be a serious writer was at best a few years old: his collection In the Twilight was published in 1887 and his most ambitious story The Steppe had appeared in a ‘thick journal’, the Petersburg monthly Severny vestnik (The Northern Herald) in March 1888. Much of the ‘eighties had in fact been taken up with what he called ‘balderdash’—captions and advertisements, gossipy sketches of street life, comic calendars, literary parodies, questionnaires and even a detective novel. Chekhov was writing for the newly literate clerks and those who, like himself, took the train from Melikhovo, where he purchased a small estate in 1892, to the capital.
Of all his published fiction, 528 items—not including his weekly gossip column and other occasional journalism—were written between 1880 and the watershed year 1888; a mere 60 would be written in the remaining sixteen years of his life.
Contemporary events don’t clarify motives either. Chekhov had been deeply shaken by the ‘white plague’ from which his brother Nikolai (‘Kolia’) died in June 1889 and sister-in-law Anna the year before; and six of his medical year were to succumb to cholera and typhus epidemics around the same time. Torpor and morosity might have been more easily understandable. His own health, too, was increasingly undermined by paroxysms of coughing and bouts of haemoptysis, telltale signs of the TB that was formally diagnosed only in 1897 (and from the complications of which he died in 1904). Regarding which, his insouciance seems flip and forced: his letter to Suvorin of 1888 is a classic in denial of a peculiarly professional kind—‘by itself, haemorrhaging from the lungs is not significant…’
In the background was Tolstoy, his literary Moses. Tolstoy had cast something of a spell over Chekhov from the mid-1880s; he had been involved, as a precedent, in the visit to the wretched residents of the Lyapin and Rzhanov Lodging Houses that he describes in What Then Must We Do? (1886). No book, perhaps, has better exposed the unhappy relationship between philanthropy and pity in action. Resenting the contempt of the housekeeper who supposedly looks after them, Tolstoy’s words in defence of the prostitutes suddenly brings the place to life, in a scene he compares with Ezekiel’s field of bones quivering at the touch of the spirit (a Biblical image that crops up too in the final paragraph of the final volume of Charles Booth’s massive statistical survey of poverty in Victorian London); and yet their expectation of his saying more—‘as though they had only been waiting for that word to cease to be corpses and to become alive’—suddenly makes him feel fraudulent. Abashed, he can say nothing at all.
‘Only a very unhappy man’, wrote Wittgenstein, ‘has the right to pity someone else.’
Tolstoy’s grip on the younger writer was on the wane before Sakhalin, but the journey may be seen as the final shadow cast by that influence. Yet Chekhov cheerfully neglects Tolstoyan principles throughout the journey; in his letters to his family he worries about running out of cigarettes or vodka, and from the shores of Lake Baikal complains to his sister Masha about the lack of fresh meat and liquor. A philosophy of self-reliance must have seemed an armchair absurdity to Chekhov in Siberia, where settlers either depended on each other or didn’t depend at all. The son of a shopkeeper who went bankrupt when he was sixteen, Chekhov had few illusions about the appeal to Tolstoy of what were, in effect, noble savages. ‘Muzhik [peasant] blood flows in my veins,’ Chekhov commented apropos of Tolstoy’s idealising of the Russian peasantry, ‘and you can’t astonish me with muzhik virtues.’ The peasants he writes about after his return are drunk, flatly unimprovable, aggressively themselves, and have none of the extenuating character traits or dubious sancta simplicitas attributed to them by the older writer.
‘Devil take the great philosophies of this world!’ was how he dismissed the subject of the Russian soul; and he admitted to Suvorin that Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata—which he had thought a great book before he left for Sakhalin—now seemed ‘ridiculous and incoherent’. It exposed Tolstoy, in his opinion, ‘as an ignorant man who has never at any point in his long life taken the trouble to read two or three books written by specialists’. The difference between them is apparent in their attitude to medicine: although he never romanticised science in the grand style like Pasteur or Pavlov, Chekhov had hopes for the future of his profession and remained a meliorist about social progress.
The sage of Yasnaya Polyana, on the other hand, thought doctors were scoundrels who put cleanliness before godliness. Chekhov would be a better writer, he once remarked to Gorki, if medicine didn’t stand in his way.
The rebuttal of Tolstoy’s moralistic agenda for the ascetic life is developed in his short story Ward No.6, written a couple of years after Sakhalin, when Chekhov was busy helping to build new schools on his estate at Melikhovo and doing a fair bit of doctoring on the side—much like Dr Pascal in Zola’s novel, which was serialised in Russia in 1893. Ward No. 6 offers a critique of the doctrine of non-resistance to evil: Dr Andrei Yefimich Ragin is committed to his own mental ward after he becomes the victim of an ambitious colleague’s intrigue.
The story’s turning point is Ragin’s acknowledgement of something he had been staring at for years without ever noticing it: his patients have feelings—dear God, even he has feelings! Monotony and futility have evidently taken their toll on Dr Ragin, who initially began his career in this provincial hospital as a diligent and purposeful practitioner. He has allowed the hospital to go to seed; retreated from his duties; guarded patients rather than treated them.
One day, a thirty-three-year-old man named Gromov, incarcerated because of his persecution mania, stirs Ragin’s interest. For the first time, he has extended conversations with a patient. Gromov bluntly points out to him that doctors don’t know much about suffering since they attempt to understand objectively something that can only be felt. They live, if they live at all, vicariously. ‘Why, it’s so obvious! The man’s a doctor and doesn’t even know a little thing like that! Contempt for suffering, permanent contentment, never being surprised… it just means sinking to that condition.’ Ragin is a Pharisee exposed, the hypocrite who tells patients how virtuous it is to be stoical.
He takes to visiting the ‘mad ward’ daily, not because Gromov’s words have cut him to the quick but because he finds their chats ‘original’. After twenty years of not visiting his patients, this departure from the routine is enough to get tongues wagging elsewhere in the hospital. Asked to ‘take a holiday’, he is finally tricked into entering the asylum by his successor. Dr Ragin is now a patient himself.
Chekhov makes this change in status utterly believable, and absolutely comfortless. For it is only after being punched in the face by the orderly whose casual brutality he had for so long tolerated (and who used to call him ‘Your Excellency’) that Ragin grasps the grim reality of his situation; the next day he is dead of a stroke. Russia’s supine history is in that story, wrote a certain Vladimir Ulianov, who as a young revolutionary thought he himself had been locked up in Ward 6.
Thomas Mann wrote that Chekhov’s argument with Tolstoy had forced the former to raise irony to open rebellion.
Chekhov’s instinct was not misplaced: he had to extend himself physically, in an absurdly pedestrian manner, in order to win clarity for himself as a writer. A frail Gogol travels on a hazardous expedition to Jerusalem, in 1848, in search of inspiration; a hardly more robust Chekhov skirts the pot-holes on the road to Sakhalin. His trip in fact cost him the best part of his health. No other piece of writing posed him such difficulties: he spent nearly four years revising his account, and his earnings took a dive, since his absence from the Moscow scene deprived him of literary and medical income.
Yet if anything was ever going to count in backward Russia, it was the work of individuals. There are still things to do in the world, he tells his friends. Who were his models? Not the great thinkers. Chekhov was fascinated by men of action; with the African explorers and Stanley’s In Darkest Africa in particular. The 1880s was the decade of unbridled European enthusiasm for adventure in Africa, the decade Germany got the ‘African bug’ and infected by Torschlusspanik—fear of missing the bus—started out on its own imperial enterprise, while giving the go-ahead to the cruellest imperial farce of all: Leopold II’s ‘humanitarian’ project in the Congo Basin, the backdrop to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
In 1888, Chekhov had written an enthusiastic unsigned obituary of Nikolai Przhevalsky, the explorer of China and Tibet and the discoverer of Przewalski’s horse, for New Times: his imagination was fired by the spectacle of the explorer who had abandoned his family and died in harness, by a remote lake on the Kirgizian border. ‘When European societies are seized by indolence,’ he had written, ‘heroes are as necessary as the sun.’
All of which suggests a rather different Chekhov from the well-mannered, distant writer who chimes the dinner gong in the Gardens of the West—this is a Boy’s-own Chekhov. His journey to Sakhalin, which gets only a passing mention in many older biographies, controverts the standard view of him, in D. S. Mirsky’s words, as someone who completely rejected ‘what we may call the heroic values’. It makes him, rather piquantly, god-father to the humanitarian grand gesture which has absorbed so many of Europe’s disaffected, idealistic or unemployed doctors since 1968, the kind of publicity-hungry NGO action associated with a group like Médecins sans Frontières.
Having set his mind on going to Sakhalin, and more or less convinced his family and friends that he really had no choice in the matter, Chekhov prepared himself thoroughly. He read over a hundred publications on the island and the penal system, as well as books on botany, geography and tiresome government reports. He writes to Pleshcheyev: ‘All day I sit reading and making extracts. In my head and on paper there is nothing except Sakhalin. Mania sachalinosa.’
The need to seek official permission from suspicious administrators was a bug-bear. The unctuous Galkin-Vraskoy, head of the Prison Services, while apparently giving the go-ahead, actually circulated a memo to his regional directors forbidding Chekhov access to the political prisoners. Suvorin, on the other hand, clearly a forerunner of the twentieth-century newspaper magnate in his attitude to officialdom, ignored the political sensitivity of the mission and despite his quite reasonable personal misgivings about the whole venture gave Chekhov a press card and the financial resources needed to complete his journey. Chekhov’s method of repaying Suvorin was to send sketches to Moscow from his overland journey east of Tyumen, across the Yenisey to Irkutsk and the last stretch along the Amur River to Nicolayevsk; these were published in instalments in New Times as they were written.
His association with Suvorin had always aroused fierce jealousy on the part of Chekhov’s contemporaries, who accused him of being Suvorin’s ‘kept woman’. No one ever accused Chekhov of being politically small-minded, but New Times was an instrument of reaction; and for some of his contemporaries—the liberal reformer and engineer Garin-Mikhailovsky, for one—Suvorin was the devil incarnate. Chekhov was astute about people. Accused of being ‘unprincipled’ by an editor, he replied: ‘I have never toadied, nor lied, nor insulted.’ Nor, he added for good measure, had he ever written a line he was ashamed of. Though several of his family found employment thanks to Suvorin, he never allowed this debt to impinge on his freedom to speak his mind. Their letters are frank, and reveal a more outspoken man than the rather respectable writer cultivated by three generations of Soviet censors; at times Chekhov is bawdy, and even frankly misogynistic. Politically, he and Suvorin agreed about almost nothing in their letters, and were poles apart temperamentally—yet their relationship lasted until the dispute that fanned across Europe in the wake of Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus affair.
Chekhov almost managed to convince his close friend, the painter Isaak Levitan, to accompany him at least part of the way to Siberia. Levitan finally backed out, saying that he didn’t want to abandon his mistress for such a long time. He was a landscape painter who liked to include elements of social history in his work: one of his widescreen paintings, Vladimirka (1892), depicts the bare dirt track on which so many convicts died on their way into exile. Chekhov was no less an enthusiast of the steppe: ever since his childhood in Taganrog, where ‘those boundless plains of waving grasses, streams and gullies’ started on the far side of the cemetery, it had represented freedom for him.
What is most noticeable about Levitan’s painting, however, is that the giant outdoors itself is a kind of prison.
The nine instalments Chekhov wrote for Suvorin’s paper and posted back to Moscow from Tomsk, Irkutsk and the Baikal region (they are collected under the title Across Siberia) are breezy travel sketches. Chekhov recounts how his horse-driven tarantass, an uncomfortable springless carriage, came within a hair’s breadth of colliding with three post troikas racing in the opposite direction, drivers asleep at the reins. Thomas de Quincey’s giddy exercises in divagation come to mind: ‘We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.’
Siberia, no less than Sakhalin, was less a physical place than an imaginary topos for most Russians, and Chekhov takes an almost perverse delight in stressing its humdrum qualities, the bandits and wild animals conspicuously absent, his revolver unneeded. Floods and ferries slowed his progress. Once he had to wait fifteen hours before his tarantass could be repaired. Boredom, not fear, seems the taiga’s prevailing quality: ‘The Siberian Highway is the longest, and I should think, the ugliest road on earth.’ But there are expansive moments too: ‘The power and enchantment of the taiga lie not in titanic trees or the silence of the graveyard, but in the fact that only birds of passage know where it ends.’ The Yenisey River, he thought, was a ‘mighty, raging Hercules’.
The high point of the journey seems to have been the last stretch: a thousand miles by steamer on the river Amur to Nikolaievsk on the Pacific coast. As if to confound his own intention of demystifying Sakhalin, he notices that the captain of the boat, The Baikal, taking him over the Tatar Strait to the Alexandrovsk, the island’s main port, ‘does not trust the official charts and follows his own, which he draws up and corrects while sailing’.
Perhaps the captain had been supplied with one of the maps in Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, which advertises a group of strangely named islands in the north Pacific between the coasts of Japan and California. The legend of Belovode, a kind of divine realm located in an archipelago at the edge of the known world, persisted in Russian religious memory until well into the twentieth century: it periodically attracted the attentions of members of a sect called The Wanderers, and of parties of religiously-inspired peasants.
A distant bush fire makes Chekhov’s first impressions of the island sound quite ominous: ‘I could not see the wharf and buildings through the darkness and the smoke drifting across the sea, and could barely distinguish the dim lights at the post, two of which were red. The horrifying scene was compounded of darkness, silhouettes of mountains, and beyond the mountains, a red glow which rose to the sky, from remote fires. It seemed that all of Sakhalin was in flames.’ We were wanderers on prehistoric earth: this is the tone of Marlow’s slow symphony of eeriness as he penetrates further and further into the heart of darkness.
If Chekhov is crossing over into a territory that is also a place of the mind, it is not a landscape out of Dante or one of Swift’s previsions of a totalitarian society, but something like the heath in a Shakespeare play, that unpatrolled tract of land beyond the city walls where not even a wandering Cynic philosopher would venture. Convicts are bare men living on the floor of basic need. Abject, badly clothed, foul-smelling, they are poor Toms. At this level their needs are animal. Chekhov seems to be pursuing the question that humbles Lear when he loses his crown: what is natural man? What is a human being anyway, outside the walls of the city?
When he disembarked on 9 July 1890, having left Moscow on 21 April, Chekhov found that his visit coincided with the quinquennial visit of the Governor of Eastern Siberia. He also had the luck to meet a junior doctor at the hospital who was a fierce critic of the administration. ‘I’m glad you’re staying with our enemy,’ the island commandant remarked to him, ‘now you’ll learn about all our little shortcomings.’ Then he set to work.
Where a present-day epidemiologist would save his feet by using applied statistical techniques on representative subgroups, Chekhov had ten thousand index cards printed in the local police sweat-shop. He had come like the biblical census-taker. Each card comprised entries for legal status—convict, settled-exile (those who had completed their prison term but had to remain on the island), and peasants-in-exile (who could leave Sakhalin but had to remain in Siberia)—and items for surname, patronymic, settlement, age, religious persuasion, occupation and married status. Diseases were recorded; diet and financial support; the mortality rate. Why they had been convicted was not his concern.
Seven-and-a-half thousand of these cards can still be consulted in the Chekhov Archives in Moscow.
For the next few months, he went from shack to barracks and on to the next settlement accompanied by a single guard who carried his inkstand and warned the householders of his imminent arrival. ‘The people who live there are a tattered and famished bunch of Russian, Polish, Finnish, Georgian rogues, thrown together by chance, like the survivors of a shipwreck.’ Most of the settlements were scattered along the river Tym, and in the western and southern parts of the island; by September 10, having visited all the settlements in the north, Chekhov joined The Baikal to sail down to Korsakov, the main town in the milder south.
His work schedule was gruelling, starting at five in the morning and continuing until late at night. He wrote to Suvorin that when he went to bed he was in a state of extreme tension, haunted by what still remained to be done. When he wasn’t gathering information he was busy studying the prison records, or drawing up an inventory of equipment lacking in the hospitals. He appears to have enjoyed carte blanche from the Governor General, who asked Chekhov to pay a visit: they hit it off, which was just as well, since Galkin-Vraskoy hadn’t bothered to inform him that a troublesome writer was on his way.
Only the political prisoners, a mere forty out of the island’s population of ten thousand, were out of bounds to Chekhov, a fact which irked him but didn’t stand in the way of his main objective: to document the island’s penal conditions. At the end of his stay, he was able to say, with only slight exaggeration, that ‘there is not a single convict or settled-exile on Sakhalin who hasn’t had a chat with me’. Many of them continued to correspond with him long after his departure.
Writing it all up proved more difficult, indeed turned out to be his own ball-and-chain; which must have baffled him, since his apprentice work had itself been a concession to the documentary. He warns a friend his report will be ‘tedious, specialised, and consist of nothing but figures’: in fact, the few statistics in his book seem largely incidental to the burden of a narrative which keeps the reader, like the obliging inkstand carrier, fully in view. Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that Chekhov had a poor dictionary and only a few verbal effects, yet managed to be one of the most subtle writers.
Chekhov was appalled that lip service should be paid to reform, while actual conditions showed up the blatant lack of interest in ‘civilising’ the prisoners. Some prisoners were assigned to fell and lug timber, a gruelling occupation which exposed them, because they were shackled to the logs, to the risk of freezing to death. How were these men to become good householders on completing their prison terms, he wondered, if the brutalising conditions of their prison sentence forced them to abandon any domestic habits they had acquired in their earlier life?
More than once he mocks himself as the ‘write-write man’ (as the indigenous Galyaks call him): disembarking at the pier he noted that ‘all 50 [convicts] took off their caps—very likely no such honour has ever been accorded a single literary figure to this day’. Reasonable, unruffled, not put out by circumstances—Chekhov’s journey might hint at his wish to earn the right to mock himself ‘doing time’.
That impression should not go unchallenged. Our conviction that life lived at the extremes is somehow more authentic than ordinary life (a revival of Hobbes’ belief in mortal danger as the ideal condition for self-knowledge) wouldn’t have been Chekhov’s. ‘Only in the settlers’ barracks near the mine and here in Derbinskoye, on that raining, muddy morning,’ he wrote in this abyss of neglect, ‘did I live through moments when I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man’s degradation.’
The moral lesson of human life lived at the zoological level—Lear’s lesson—is dreadfully simple: it has none to offer. It isn’t sympathy and respect that attend the spectacle of natural man, but revulsion. Natural man is the shame of nature.
For all that he attempted to suppress subjective turns, a lyric surge is never far from the lull of Chekhov’s prose. His descriptions of the kale-gatherers on the coast and the simple funeral ceremony in Alexandrovsk where the gravediggers talk ‘about some business of their own’ and a recently bereaved orphan laughs grotesquely at his mother’s graveside reveal him trying to suppress his own narrative gift.
Soon after his arrival, for example, he visits the Alexandrovsk hard-labour prison, reserved mostly for prisoners who had done a runner from the island across Siberia. In winter they could escape over the pack ice that joined Sakhalin to the mainland, and risk frostbite and death by exposure; in summer they had to stow away on a boat. It seems an utterly desperate act; Chekhov estimates that two out of three prisoners had tried to escape at one time or another. Hope, as the Russian proverb goes, is always last to die. Most would be recaptured within a few weeks, or perish in the wilds. Those who were recaptured got the lash. In his history of Australia’s settlement, The Fatal Shore (1986), Robert Hughes mentions that whenever the early Botany Bay convicts escaped inland they often headed north, thinking they would come eventually to ‘China’: the geographic sense of prisoners on Sakhalin was probably no more acute.
Yet even in such dingy, stunted circumstances Chekhov’s lists are exuberant with ordinariness, with what the British Empire’s version of deportatio in insulam called bags and iron: ‘On the boards lie caps, boots, bits of bread, empty milk bottles stopped up with a bit of paper or old rag, and shoe-trees; under the boards are chests, filthy sacks, bundles, tools and various bits of old clothing [...] On the walls hang clothes, pots and tools, and on the shelves are teapots, loaves and boxes of something or other.’
Further down the west coast, in Dooay—‘a dreadful, hideous place, wretched in every respect, in which only saints or profoundly perverse people could live of their own free will’—hardened prisoners were chained to wheelbarrows. The company of five men in St Petersburg who ran the mines, he notes, was guaranteed an annual profit of 150,000 roubles.
For all Chekhov’s evident disgust at the kulakism of its coal-quarries, the moral censure and sensationalism that stalk so many contemporary Victorian philanthropic reports on urban living conditions are quite alien to his approach. ‘Their crimes’, he remarks, looking at these supposedly hardened recidivists, ‘were no more clever and cunning than their faces’.
Even unspeakable places can become home. Walking down Main Street with him, it is hardly the penal reformer we hear:
It is always quiet in Dooay. The ear soon grows accustomed to the slow, measured jangling of the fetters, the thunder of the breakers on the sea and the humming of telegraph wires, and because of these sounds the impression of dead silence grows still stronger. Severity and rigorousness lie imprinted not merely on the striped posts. If somebody should unexpectedly burst into loud laughter in the street, it would sound harsh and unnatural. Life here has taken on a form which can be communicated only through hopeless and implacably cruel sounds, and the ferocious cold wind which on winter nights blows in the cleft from the sea is the only thing which sings precisely the right note.
Chekhov’s interest in other people’s lives never flags. Underlining the island’s parodic relationship to metropolitan Russia, he lists the convicts’ adopted or acquired names: Ivan don’t-remember-my-name and Man-whose-title-no-one-knows, or epithets like the names of the devils in Dante’s hell: Limper, Stomach, Godless, Bone-idle. Gogol has names like those too, in Dead Souls.
These epic names are followed by an exploded-view drawing of the Russian water closet and the theory of ‘reverse draught’. To his disgust there was no latrine at all at Kosov, where the prisoners were led out in groups to relieve themselves on the street. His descriptions of giant burdocks and umbellates in Novo-Mikhailovka are lengthy and botanically exact. On one occasion, straying into Dostoevskian territory, his account of the flogging of a vagabond called Prokhorov contrasts fascinatingly with the other writer’s sensationalism, and is chilling in its spareness:
‘Prokhorov does not utter a single word, but simply bellows and wheezes; it seems as if, since the punishment began, a whole eternity has passed, but the overseer is calling only: “Forty-two! Forty-three!” There is a long way to go to ninety. I walk outside.’
Most other writers would have lingered on the voyeuristic scope of an incident like that—not Chekhov. This is a foretaste of the mature writer who has learned that less is more. Chekhov’s intention to immerse us, and himself, in the grittiness of life on Sakhalin fails him completely at one point in the book. The fact-gatherer gets his pockets picked, as it were, by the lyric dramatist. An unexpected safari view of the island rears out of the dark on an evening drive above Alexandrovsk: ‘the gigantic burdock leaves seemed like tropical plants, while the dark hills loomed in on all sides. Away in the distance were fires where people were burning coal, and there would be a light from a forest fire. The moon would rise. Suddenly, a fantastic picture: trundling to meet us along the rails, on a small platform, a convict leaning on a pole, dressed all in white.’
This passage escaped the revisions of what he called his ‘purple patches’; it is one which gets close to the heart of what makes A Journey to Sakhalin so compelling.
Expanding his comments on Chekhov’s language, Nabokov wrote that he ‘keeps all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of grey, a tint between the colour of an old fence and that of a low cloud’. Low-wattage moments of odd intensity are to be found in the mature œuvre too, mingled with a weight of felt experience that is all the more painfully vivid for its drab and formless surroundings: at the close of Ward No.6, on the afternoon after being beaten up, Dr Ragin grasps that he is dying: suddenly he sees dart past in the gathering dark, ‘a herd of deer, extraordinarily handsome and graceful, of which he had been reading on the previous day’. His consciousness does not end there. ‘A peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter.’ But its contents are not revealed, either to us or to Dr Ragin.
‘You need equanimity in this world’, Chekhov told Suvorin, ‘only people with equanimity can see things clearly, be fair and work’. Work is what Conrad’s Marlow calls ‘efficiency’, the device for getting through a life with dignity. Chekhov’s insight—part-social, part-psychological—into that ‘grey, ordinary’ life was to see it as a kind of bookkeeping that never really adds up. ‘You confuse two things,’ he wrote to Suvorin, ‘solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.’
Yet literature must have form, even a literature of loose ends. Like Turgenev, Chekhov understood that life has its own forms of being, and that they are more complex than our schemes for understanding them—‘for all things in nature influence one another, and even the fact that I have just sneezed is not without its influence on surrounding nature’. This was the attentive contemporary of Henri Poincaré whose famous article in Acta Mathematica in 1889 anticipated what is now called chaos theory; Chekhov himself asserted often enough that his medical training had moulded him as a writer. It is surprising that so few critics have taken him at his word, though one who did, the philosopher Lev Shestov, accused him of ‘killing human hopes’.
Randomness and contingency are major forces in Chekhov’s art, in its almost brutal lack of sentimentality: the great crisis of Victorian theism was already behind him—he saw no compelling reason to deny the existence of God because he never saw any overriding reason to affirm it. As he told Suvorin, a writer should know better than to speculate about the existence of God. It was left to Tolstoy, the involuntary egoist, to wonder what humans might be if only they could realise their essential nature in the light of the Sermon on the Mount; Chekhov remained an unworried child of Hume. It would be wrong to suggest that he was a man without faith: Russia without faith would be unendurable. Work was the answer.
His attitude to life can best be described as a distrust of attitudes to life; it is surely scepticism that bestows upon him his equanimity and wry amusement, and general lack of resentment about the doings of time. To put it another way: if Tolstoy saw the lie, Chekhov saw what seeing the lie occluded.
Chekhov returned from ‘hell’ on October 13, sailing on the liner St Petersburg, which called in at Vladivostock, Hong Kong (‘a glorious bay’), Ceylon (‘a heavenly place’) and the Suez Canal; he travelled with two mongooses, a palm civet and a hairless Buryat priest. All were to lodge with him in his Moscow flat for varying lengths of time, and the mongoose eventually became quite domesticated, if something of an annoyance for the friends who stopped by to visit him in his flat in formal clothes—it liked to chew hats.
After recovering from a deterioration in his general condition over the winter, he began work towards publication of his Sakhalin book in his ‘out-of-surgery’ hours, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, a period in which he combined clinical work on his own estate at Melikhovo with civic duties as an unpaid medical inspector during an outbreak of cholera. Guests and family harried him for all sorts of favours, and often he had to stonewall them to secure time for writing.
The year after Sakhalin he went on a grand tour of some of the great European cities, including Vienna and Venice, and took in their opulence and architecture with the same fascination he had shown, under rather different conditions, for the people of Siberia. Being a prison island inspector was just one of Chekhov’s many parallel lives; in those years he even tried to set up a scheme to rescue a financially ailing journal of surgery.
Relatively few stories emerged from his Siberian trip—Gusev, In Exile, The Murder (which, in its four pages, does what he couldn’t achieve in his report’s three hundred pages, according to Janet Malcolm) and Peasant Woman—as though insisting to his detractors, who had accused him of going in search of novelty, how serious he was about his objectives. His was to be a book outside the charmed codex of literature.
When Journey to Sakhalin appeared three years later, some of it having been serialised by the journal Russian Thought, the Russian delegate at the Fifth World Prison Congress in Paris had to answer repeated questions about carceral conditions on the island. The notoriety of the American reporter George Kennan’s investigation Siberia and the Exile System, published in New York in 1891, had fanned the interest. Perhaps his own book didn’t achieve everything Chekhov had hoped of it, but its publication certainly dispelled the utopian fantasy of transforming Sakhalin into an agricultural colony. The extended passage in his book that describes the lashing of the unfortunate Prokhorov caused a public outcry. A government commission was sent to investigate prisoners’ conditions on the island in 1896; and corporal punishment of women was abolished the following year (and of men in 1904). Chekhov himself organised a dispatch of thousands of books for use in the local schools. On 2 January 1894, finished with his corrections, he wrote to Suvorin:
‘Medicine can no longer reproach me with being unfaithful: I’ve paid a proper tribute to erudition, and to what old writers call pedantry. And I’m happy that a convict’s rough smock is hanging in my literary wardrobe too. Let it hang there!’
Journey to Sakhalin is a work of a quite different order from the The Seagull or The Cherry Orchard or any of the marvellous stories, but it deserves a place alongside them, rather than being consigned to the mere paragraph it gets in some biographies (William Gerhardi’s, for instance): it is Chekhov’s most militantly hopeful book. It is also by far his longest work. He was protesting against injustice in his own way—a writer who happened to be a doctor, whose formative training had been in the empirical methods of the natural sciences.
Chekhov never doubted individuals could make a difference. Pages are blank like tundra, and freedom is our ability to surprise ourselves by leaving a mark on them. The essayist Hubert Butler once observed of Chekhov’s individualism that ‘his faith is so soberly expressed as to be proof against all disillusionment.’ It is a sound observation. In his desire to civilise Russia by modest improvements—he once accused the Moscow intellectuals of being blinded by their grand utopian schemes and scientifically organised dreams of society to the real achievements of the zemstva, those local government bodies set up in the 1860s to build hospitals and other civic amenities (and which in the last days of tsardom employed that other brilliant doctor-writer Mikhail Bulgakov)—his visit to Sakhalin looks like an excursion to a century that will be remembered not just for its material improvements but for revealing what utopia means: internment camps and total surveillance. When Humanity becomes a perfect transcendent unity, humans don’t just lose their civic status and end up as poor Toms—they become superfluous. The twentieth century showed beyond doubt that philanthropy, as Edmund Burke suggested in one of his pungent asides, has homicidal tendencies too.
Perhaps Chekhov’s visit to the prison colony at the back gates of Russia explains why his theatre sets seem so empty, abandoned to the implicating dimension of time—recalled a dozen times at the opening of Three Sisters—and the shelter of an enclosed garden extending into the wings, out of our field of vision. Moonlight glints on the shards of bottle-glass strewn along the crest of the wall. ‘If only we could know’, Olga’s cry concludes that play, ‘oh if only we could know’.
Sakhalin stands in the same haunting relationship to Chekhov’s literary work as the darker meanings that hover over the garden wall.