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ANNEKS 1)1. 1'El.ERINAGE traders and Japanese girls. In;i Blagoveshchensk brothel, as a letter to Suvorin shows, Anton was happy: a nice clean room, sentimental in an Asiatic way, furnished with bric-a-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 widi her teeth a sheet of cotton wool from her sleeve, catches you by the 'boy'… gives you a massage, and die cotton wool tickles your belly. And all this is done widi coquetry, laughing, singing and saying ø.ú 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.
THIRTY-TWO Ô
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 II 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 o°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).
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ANNl':i:s DE I'El.KRINAGE They lived in a dream world. General Vladimir Kononovich, the island's governor, promised full cooperation16 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 liberaclass="underline" 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 surJUNE-DECEMBER 189O veyed the west coast around Aleksandrovsk and the Òóò 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 murder 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