The anodyne of travel, of new interests and experiences, was already beginning to work its cure of the mental turmoil and spiritual ache.
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Chekhov left Irkutsk on June 11 for the last leg of his journey to the Pacific. The distance to Lake Baikal was relatively short and he traveled it with the three army officers, for he had sold his carriage at Irkutsk, taking a very considerable loss. As long as he lived, Chekhov- wrote his mother, he would never forget the trip across the vast mirrorlike surface of the lake in brilliant sunny weather. It sent a shiver over him to peer two thirds of a mile down into the crystal-clear turquoise- blue water and see the rock formations at the bottom. And the long road across Transbaikalia (present Buryat Mongolia) to Sretensk, with its varied scenery of forest, plains, and mountains, delighted him. Here he boarded the steamer Yermak on the Shilka River which flows into the Amur. The extensive part of his trip, close to three thousand miles by horses, had ended. It seemed strange not to hear the jingling of bells and to be able to go to bed and stretch his legs out at full length and not wake up with his face covered with dust. However, as he now looked back on this Golgotha of gruesome Siberian roads and gullies which he had traversed, he wrote his mother on June 20: "My journey has been as happy as God may grant to anyone. I have not once been ill, and of the mass of things I had with me I have lost nothing but a penknife, a strap off my suitcase, and a little jar of carbolic ointment." His spirits were high, he declared, as though he had passed an examination.
On the Yermak Chekhov had treated himself to a first-class passage, for he wished to be alone. He had grown weary of the company of his army officers, one of whom chattered incessantly, and besides he feared they would want to borrow more money from him — they had failed to repay a loan of a hundred and fifty roubles which he had unwisely given them.
Chekhov once neatly summed up Siberian scenic attractions by saying that before Lake Baikal one saw mere prose; after it sheer poetry. "I've already come seven hundred miles down the Amur," he exulted in a letter to his sister, "and have seen a million gorgeous landscapes; I feel giddy with ecstasy!" The riverbanks were original and luxuriant, and wild life was visible everywhere. Here was an ideal place for a dacha, he imagined. Near the Cossack village of Pokrovskaya the Yermak ran aground on a sandbank. While the boat was being repaired, another from the opposite direction was forced to halt. A military band on it played, passengers danced, and no one noticed the passage of time in this holiday atmosphere.
The people of the Amur region on the boat and in the towns and villages which he visited, on both the Russian and Chinese sides of the river, fascinated Chekhov. Their conversation largely concerncd gold mines, for nearly everybody seemed to be involved in this occupation, even priests and exiles. They grew rich, he observed, as quickly as they grew poor, and never drank anything but champagne. He treated a miner's pregnant wife; the grateful husband thrust a whole handful of bills on him, and though Chekhov protested that he also was rich, he somehow found himself coming away with fifteen roubles.
What particularly delighted him was the air of freedom these pioneer people exuded. No one bothered to observe religious fast days and both girls and peasants smoked cigarettes. "The air on the steamer is red-hot with the talk that goes on," he wrote Masha. "Here no one is afraid to speak his mind. For there is no one to arrest him and no place to exile him, so one can be as liberal as one likes. All the people are independent, self-reliant, and logical." (June 23-26, 1890.) They were indifferent to what went on in Russia. A captain of one of these river- boats would never dream of surrendering an escaped convict who traveled with him. In fact, Chekhov told Suvorin, "The lowest convict breathes more freely on the Amur than the highest general in Russia." (June 27,1890.)
At Blagoveshchensk Chekhov transferred to another riverboat, the Muravyov, and continued down the Amur to Nikolaevsk, one of the easternmost towns of Russia, only about eighteen miles from where the river flows into the Pacific. There he boarded the liner Baikal, along with a few other civilians, a large party of soldiers, and some convicts. The passage across the Gulf of Tatary began. It seemed to him that he had come to the end of the world. However, as the coastline of Sakhalin loomed in the distance, he remarked that "the delight which I experienced was increased by the proud consciousness that at last I was seeing this shore." The Baikal dropped anchor and on July 11a cutter, towing two barges full of convicts, took Chekhov to the landing at
Alexandrovsk, the principal town and- prison center of Sakhalin.
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The justifiable fears of Chekhov that the authorities of Sakhalin would obstruct or even reject his plan to study the inhabitants of the island were quickly dissipated. General V. O. Kononovich, the experienced and intelligent administrative head at Alexandrovsk, gave him a friendly reception and promised every assistance, even to throwing open the central archives of the prison system and providing him with statistical data. These promises were confirmed a few days later by A. N. Korf, the Governor-General of the whole area, who was on a tour of inspection. He informed Chekhov that he could go wherever he wished and inspect official documents, although he was not to have relations with political exiles. At a large reception in honor of the
Governor-General, given by the administration, Chekhov met most of the officials of Sakhalin.
Quartered at first in the house of the local physician on the main street of Alexandrovsk, a town of about three thousand people, Chekhov was immediately struck by the fact that the typical street noise was the clanking of leg irons as the convicts marched back and forth to work. There were five principal penal settlements on Sakhalin to which criminals, often of the worst type, were sent and employed at hard labor on various projects. Upon release they were confined to the island as colonists, a practise that brought about frequent disorders. For the region was afflicted with a wretched, foggy climate, heavy rainfall in summer, and bitter cold and severe storms in winter, with snow falling from October to May. Fishing, coal mining, and agriculture were the chief occupations, although the poor soil and very short growing season made successful farming almost impossible. Apart from administrative personnel and several thousand prisoners, the rest of the population consisted largely of colonists from among the former convicts. Women, naturally, were considerably in the minority, although many had voluntarily followed their convict husbands into exile.