Whatever dictated the choice of Sakhalin, once having made the decision Chekhov felt impelled to justify it both to himself and to mystified friends. No doubt their positive objections to what seemed to them a senseless, arduous, and even dangerous undertaking were partly responsible for forcing Chekhov, in his own defense, into formulating a plan for a well-rounded scientific investigation of the convict population on Sakhalin. As he plunged into the necessary reading and preparation, the developing scope and purpose of the plan gripped him. He had returned to his first love, that of science — this elaborate investigation seemed like a compensation for the aborted dissertation on the history of medicine of six years ago.2 Now he had a practical objective and he' was happy over it. Disturbed thoughts and vague inner urges had coalesced into a concrete plan of action and one with a useful purpose.
By early March Chekhov, with evident satisfaction, felt able to answer the protesting Suvorin with a firm defense of his reasons for going to Sakhalin. Modestly he began by saying that he did not believe his expedition would yield anything valuable in the way of either literature or science. "I want to write one to two hundred pages and in this way repay in some small part the debt I owe to medicinc which, as you know, I've treated in swinish fashion." Already the research he had done had taught him a great deal, he wrote. "Moreover, I suppose the trip will be an uninterrupted six months of labor, physical and mental,
2 Years later Chekhov stated this as a fact. In complying with the request of S. P. Diaghilev to list his works chronologically, he noted in the letter (December 20, 1901): "The Island, of Sakhalin was written in 1893 — this was in place of a dissertation I had planned to write after finishing Medical School in 1884." and for me this is also essential, for I'm a Ukrainian and have begun to grow lazy. I must become my own animal trainer. Though the trip may be nonsense — stubborness, a whim — consider the matter and tell me what I have to lose by going? . . . For example, you write that Sakhalin is of no use or interest to anybody. Is that really so? Sakhalin is useless and uninteresting only to a society that does not exile thousands of people to it and spend millions to maintain it. . . . Sakhalin is the only place where one can study the colonization of convicts; all Europe is interested in it; then is it of no interest to us? . . . From the books I've read and am reading, it is clear that we have sent millions of people to rot in prison, we have let them rot casually, barbarously, without giving it a thought; we have driven people in chains, through the cold, thousands of miles, have infected them with syphilis, made them depraved, multiplied criminals, and we have thrust the blame for all this on red-nosed prison officials. Now, all educated Europe knows that the officials are not to blame, but rather all of us; yet this has nothing to do with us, it is not interesting? . . . No, I assure you, Sakhalin is of use, and is interesting; and I regret only that it is I who am going there and not someone else who knows more about the business and would be more capable of arousing public interest." (March 9, 1890.)
Suvorin, with his carefully nurtured government contacts, must have blinked when he read this tirade. However, that apostle of social change, Mikhailovsky, would have cheered and announced that Chekhov had at last come of age. Both the concern of one and the expectation of the other would have been quite misdirected.
« 3 »
Once having decided upon a scientific study of Sakhalin Island's penal colonies, Chekhov spared no efforts to prepare himself for the task. He journeyed to Petersburg to collect a bibliography, do some reading, and, hopefully, to make government contacts that might facilitate the work of an unofficial investigator. The most important of these was Mikhail Galkin-Vrasky, head of the national prison administration. This official and the others he appealed to listened politely to Chekhov's explanation of the scientific and literary purpose of his proposed trip, but no helpful advice or letters of recommendation were forthcoming. In fact, it was discovered, years later when the Soviet government opened the archives of the prison administration, that Galkin- Vrasky had sent a secret memorandum to instruct the head of the
Sakhalin prisons to prevent Chekhov from interviewing certain categories of political prisoners and exiles.
Though as usual Chekhov stayed with the Suvorins in Petersburg, he shunned excessive hospitality, keeping pretty much to his room, conning various issues of The Maritime Miscellany, and compiling a preliminary bibliography on Sakhalin of sixty-five titles. His only relaxation was seeing a few plays, attending a dog show, visiting Repin's studio, and forgathering occasionally with intimate friends such as Leontiev- Shcheglov and Pleshcheev. He returned to Moscow highly pleased with his labors and strangely unconcerned over the annoyance of the many friends he had failed to see. Let them be angry, he wrote Suvorin. In a month in Petersburg, he declared, he had done more than these friends could accomplish in a year.
Chekhov had timed his departure for Sakhalin in the early spring when the ice in the Siberian rivers would be melted. He had calculated that this ought to get him there in the summer, which would allow several months of work on the island so that he could ship out before the winter set in. However, he soon began to feel that such a schedule left precious little time for all the reading he must still do to prepare himself. He set sister Masha and her girl friends to work in the Rum- yantsev Library, copying out passages from books, and brother Alexander in Petersburg was pestered for material from old newspaper files. Suvorin's office he turned into a kind of lending library to procure books and magazines. "In my Sakhalin work," Chekhov enthusiastically wrote him in the middle of February, "I shall prove myself such a scholarly son of a bitch that you'll throw up your hands. I've already stolen much thought and knowledge from the books of others which I shall pass off as my own. It is impossible to do otherwise in our practical age."
He had to turn himself into a geologist, a meteorologist, and an ethnographer, Chekhov complained, and he had to learn about the price of coal per ton in Sakhalin in 1862 and all about the soil, the subsoil, sandy loam and loamy sand. He read books on criminal law, prisons and exile in Russia, colonization on Sakhalin, and he piled through official reports of the head of the administration of prisons and numerous books and articles on travel in Siberia.
Though he had nothing in his head except Sakhalin — "Mania sachalinosa," he wrote Pleshcheev — and had even drafted an introductory five pages of the beginning of a book on the island, financial needs compelled him to squeeze out some time for fiction. His seventh book, 214 I frustration, travel, literary maturity 1889 - 1892
Gloomy People, dedicated to Tschaikovsky, a collection of ten published tales, all carefully reworked and including such masterpieces as An Attack of Nerves and A Dreary Story, appeared at the end of March. Since he had heard that the Northern Herald was going out of business (actually it only changed ownership), he sent in to New Times a longish story, The Devils.3 It is an account of how two horse thieves, strikingly portrayed, victimize a pompous braggart of a medical assistant. The tale's effectiveness is heightened by Chekhov's characteristic impartiality which not only quite realistically permits crime to triumph, but also allows the cozened medical assistant to imagine how wonderful his life might be if he could only pursue the dashing, carefree existence of his cozeners.