Then there were the many last-minute farewell visits and letters to friends and the unfinished business of a number of his petitioners to clear up. An impeccable conscience would not permit Chekhov to leave such matters undone. Only a short time before departure, his young protege, the writer Yczhov, visited Chekhov, bringing his wife who was desperately ill with tuberculosis — he had to take her to the warm climate of the south of Russia. Chekhov at once hurried off a request to Suvorin to send him a hundred roubles. He explained that he would present the money to Yezhov on the eve of his journey as an advance against a story, with the delicate suggestion that he procure a first-class ticket for his very sick wife. The effort succeeded. Even three days before his own departure, bedeviled with a multitude of fussy details, Chekhov found time to write Suvorin again to urge him to publish in New Times the piece of his old friend Gilyarovsky.
Finally the twenty-first of April arrived. That evening at eight o'clock the family, the Kuvshinnikovs, Lika, Semashko, Ivanenko, and Levitan accompanied Chekhov to the Yaroslavl Station. In the midst of the gay, nervous small talk of leave-taking there was an undercurrent of sadness. Dr. Kuvshinnikov hung over Chekhov's shoulder a flask of cognac in a leather sheathing, and elicited from him the promise that he would drink the contents only on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. • The train pulled out and the journey into the unknown began.
•Journey
CHEKHOV'S JOURNEYS In Russia and Siberia
0 100 300 600 miles
from Moscow to Sakhalin-
« >
Upon arriving at Yaroslavl, Chekhov boarded a steamer for Perm, which he rcached by way of the Volga River, and the Kama, and there he took a train for Ekaterinburg. This initial leg of the journey, which required seven days, was uneventful. He noted the sun-drenched monasteries on the banks of the Volga and they reminded him only of pleasant places to sit and fish. During his first day on the boat he felt neither sad nor gay and sat motionless and silent. His soul, he remarked, seemed to be made of gelatin. The Kama, however, he described as the dullest of rivers, and the gray towns on its banks seemed to be filled with people who manufactured lowering clouds, boredom, wet fences, and street filth. A few of the passengers aroused his curiosity, especially a group of lawyers, one of whom was reading In the Twilight and talking with his colleagues about the author.
At Ekaterinburg Chekhov stayed at the American Hotel for a couple of days, for he wished to rest and to fulfill his mother's request to seek out a relative of her sister's and patch up their ancient quarrel. After one try with the relatives, he decided they had no use for each other. Nor did Chekhov have much use for Ekaterinburg. All Russian cities seemed alike to him, he said, and to make matters worse the place was assailed by rain, snow, and hail. After doctoring his coughing and hemorrhoids, he was happy to leave by train for Tyumen where he arrived on May 3.
At Tyumen in the Urals Chekhov strangely thought of his far-off native town of Taganrog. For he wrote a letter to an official there to say that he had fulfilled the library's request for signed copies of his books and had also sent an inscribed copy of Tolstoy's play, The Power of Darkness. Obviously pleased by the request and the recognition it implied, Chekhov indicated that he intended to build up a special collection of autographed books for Taganrog — a town, he added, to which he owed much. Actually this was only the beginning of a series of extensive benefactions to the Taganrog library which continued during the remainder of his life.
From Tyumen, on May 3, Chekhov began the long, arduous push of about a thousand miles to Tomsk in a hired basketwork chaisc drawn by two horses which were driven by an ancient coachman. He sat in this cage like a goldfinch, lie mused, looking at God's world and thinking of nothing. Twelve wretched days of rain, winds, and occasional snow flurries ... for though it was May, there was as yet no sign of approaching summer in this part of Siberia. Dressed in two pairs of trousers, wrapped in his new sheepskin coat, his freezing feet under the leather overcoat, Chekhov drove on fearfully exhausted by the cold, by the bumping of the chaise over extremely rough roads, and by the constant jingle of bells. His cheap new boots soon pained him so much that he had to stop and take them off to relieve his chafed heels. Finally, he had to buy felt boots. After three days of such travel his collarbone, shoulders, and vertebrae ached from the ceaseless jolting so that he could neither stand, sit, nor lie in comfort. As the days passed, however, his body grew used to the lurching and bumping, grinding and creaking, and his headaches, hemorrhoids, coughing and slight bloodspitting mysteriously vanished in this rugged existence in the open air.
Soon Chekhov began to observe with interest life along the Siberian road and in the villages and stations where he stopped for refreshments and changes of horses. He passed a group of thirty or more convicts, worn out from hundreds of miles of plodding in clanking leg irons, escorted by weary soldiers with rifles. The chaise overtook occasional tramps with pots on their backs. They would murder a poor old woman to take her pctticoat for their leg-wrappers, Chekhov explained in a letter, or knock out the eyes of some brother exile, but he learned from his driver that they never harmed regular travelers. In fact, he commented, there was no basis for the popular notion back home of the dangers of the road. Even stealing in these regions was almost unheard of, he wrote.
The mixture of peoples in the villages intrigued him —emigrant Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, exiled Poles and Jews. And he marveled at how well they got along together. "My God," he wrote his sister, "how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for the officials who corrupt the peasants and exiles, then Siberia would be the richest and the happiest of lands." (May 14-17,1890.)
Food became a problem on the road and Chekhvov soon realized that he had made a mistake in not taking along a quantity of provisions, especially tea, for he loathed the local substitute which he described as a concoction of sage and beetles. For days he went without a regular dinner, preferring to fill up on the fine Siberian bread, pies, and pancakes rather than submit to traditional dishes of vile roasted salt meat, fish cooked with scales, and "duck broth," a perfectly disgusting dish, he said, composed of a muddy-looking liquid with bits of wild duck and uncooked onions floating in it.
Very late one night, on the fourth day out, Chekhov drowsily watched serpentine tongues of flame on both sides of the road fitfully illuminating the darkness as they sprang up and swiftly died down — the peasants were burning last year's grass. Suddenly a heavy, three- horse mail coach thundered down on the chaise. His driver quickly pulled over to the right to let it pass. But a second mail coach, racing immediately behind the first, plunged into Chekhov's vehicle. He was thrown to the ground with all his baggage tumbling on top of him. A third carcening coach fortunately was stopped by the wreckage of the second. Chekhov picked himself up. The light chaise was badly damaged, the horses hurt, and soon a violent altercation, almost ending in a fight, took place between the coachmen as they blamed each other. In the cold dawn of this open alien country, the air rent by the savage swearing of the crew, a feeling of terrible isolation came over Chekhov. Eventually the broken shaft of the carriage was mended, with the help of the straps of Chekhov's luggage, and they crept along gingerly to the next station.