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.'
DECEMBER 1889-APRIL 1890
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 menage a trois - the mistress Sofia Kuvshinnikova and her husband Dr Kuvshinnikov (who gave Anton a bottle of cognac to open on the Pacific Ocean). Olga Kunda-sova 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.
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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 birch-pole 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 the 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,
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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. 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;
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'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 - noo 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.