The truth of the matter is that she appears to have made no particular impression on him at all when they first met, to say nothing of the notion that a passionate love, growing out of this meeting, provoked his sudden decision to run away to Sakhalin. For she wrote him shortly after this meeting. He never answered. And he explains why in a letter to her three years later, after they had met again: "I have only one fault. Here it is. Once I received a letter from you, in which you queried me on the score of an idea in one of my current stories. Since I was barely
1 In a letter to Suvorin's wife (October 19, 1896), in which Chekhov explains why he hurriedly left Petersburg after the performance of The Sea Gull, he wrote: "On this score I had previously decided that I would leave the next day, whether or not the play was a success. The clamor of glorification stuns me and, as after the performance of Ivanov, I did leave the next day." acquainted with you at that time and had forgotten your married name, Avilova, I threw your letter away and pocketed the return stamp — so I generally behave with all queries, especially those of women. Tben, in Petersburg again, you referred to this letter and I recalled your signature and felt at fault." (March 19, 1892.) Of course, if he had been interested, Chekhov could easilv have ascertained the name of Lidiva
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Avilova.
On the other hand, one can easily point to additional evidence in the early months of 1890 which seem to support the belief that Chekhov's initial reason for going to Sakhalin grew out of a feeling of acute dissatisfaction with his life and art. Though he was something of a fatalist and believed that circumstances commanded and possessed men, he never renounced the struggle to improve himself and those around him morally and artistically. When Leontiev-Shcheglov, the ex-staff captain with waxed mustaches, tragic laugh, atrocious handwriting, and misplaced ambition to be a great dramatist, darkly hinted in a letter that he wished to pick a quarrel on matters of morality and artistry, Chekhov promptly responded that his was a normal morality. He did not covet anything of his neighbors, not even his neighbor's wife, he wrote, and though he had wasted his substance, laughed madly, overate, drank to excess, and fornicated, he could not imagine that in these respects he deviated up or down from the norm. As for what is artistic or inartistic, Chekhov declared, he divided all productions into two categories: those he liked and those he didn't like. "I have no other criteria, and if you ask me why I like Shakespeare and do not like Zlatovratsky [a popular author], I cannot tell you. Perhaps in time, when I get smarter, I will acquire a criterion, but meanwhile all talk about 'artistry' only wearies me and seems like a continuation of those scholastic polemics with which people wore themselves out in the Middle Ages." If criticism possessed truth and immutable laws, he added, why has it not revealed them to us? "Then we wouldn't find existence as boring and tedious as it is now. You wouldn't be lured into the theater and I to Sakhalin." And he ended by warning his friend not to build literary hopes over his Sakhalin expedition. "I'm going not for observations or impressions, but simply to be able to live for a half year as I have not lived hitherto."' (March 22, 1890.)
To this confidant Chekhov came as close as he ever did to conveying the inchoate feeling that initially determined him to go to Sakhalin. It is obvious that he identified his spiritual pain with the complaints of his critics about the purpose of his art and life. In this respeet, it is interesting to observe him, shortly before beginning his journey, rising angrily to defend himself against a charge of unprincipled writing made by V. M. Lavrov, one of the editors of the liberal Russian Thought. "As a matter of fact," he wrote, "I would not even reply to slander, except that in a few days I shall be leaving Russia for a long period, perhaps never to return, and I lack the will power to refrain from an answer." After insisting upon his probity as an author and the fact that he had not contributed a single line of which he need be ashamed, he turned to what he no doubt rightly considered to be the basis of Lavrov's charge: "If I were to assume the proposition that by 'unprincipled' you have in mind the melancholy circumstance that I, an educated author and one frequently published, have nothing for those whom I love, that my literary activity has left no trace, for example, on our agricultural governing boards, the new court procedure, freedom of the press, on freedom in general, and so on, then in this respect Russian Thought should in all fairness look upon me as its comrade and not blame me, since up to date it has not done any more than I have in this field, and neither you nor I am to blame for this." (April 10, 1890.)
In making his debater's point, Chekhov's conscience must have bothered him, for he fully realized, whatever may have been his artistic justification, that he deliberately had not waged a battle for social change in his writings. Like Tolstoy, he perhaps wondered whether it was not wiser to turn his back on art and strive for moral perfection, or still better, like his hero, the traveler Przhevalsky, give it all up and go trudging across the whole of Siberia to the Pacific to perform real deeds rather than write about imaginary ones in fiction.
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In satisfying a strongly felt need to escape, however, the choice of Sakhalin may well have been just as haphazard as his brother Misha suggests. The existence of this forbidding island seems never to have occurred to Chekhov previously, but it is possible that a visit to a penal colony now appealed to his aroused social conscience. Discussions about the island had begun to appear in the press at this time, and perhaps he thought that such a trip might serve as an answer to those who criticized his lack of interest in contemporary problems. Further, with his immense curiosity about places and people in his vast country, a journey of these proportions must have captured his imagination. To be sure, there may have been other considerations. Did he think of the glory that had customarily surrounded Russian writers returning from ordeals in Siberia? But these had been exiles, like Dostoevsky and Korolenko. Or perhaps he had in mind the transformation which critics had observed in the art and outlook of writers after their contact with wild' nature and the rough people of primeval Siberia. In his reminiscences, Koronenko tells of discussing this very point with Chekhov in the case of the mentally sick Garshin. Korolenko argued that if Garshin could for a time tear himself away from the Russian reality that tormented him and steep himself in the quiet remoteness of a primitive Siberian existence, it would have a salutary effect. "No," answered Chekhov, "his- is not a situation that can be changed; the molecular particles of the brain have been scrambled, and they cannot be brought together again by anything."