Shortly after arriving Chekhov began his investigation with a well- formed plan in mind and some idea of the kind of book he wished to write. Basically his intention was to conduct a census of the island. To facilitate this purpose he persuaded the prison printshop to produce quantities of a questionnaire which he devised, with blank spaces for his own annotations. As he later explained, the intention of this census was to give him an opportunity to meet and talk with people rather than to obtain population statistics.
He began by visiting the prisons, interviewing convicts, and taking down formal statistics and copying out relevant passages from official documents. According to the testimony of one observer, Chekhov was unusually successful in gaining the confidence of even the most hardened criminals. Though they were ordinarily taciturn, suspicious, and deceitful, they conversed with him simply and truthfully.
Next he traveled in all kinds of weather over much of central Sakhalin to interview individual penal colonists and fill out a census card for each. The dimensions of this incredible task for a single investigator may be imagined, for he estimated that he completed close to ten thousand cards, all of which may be found today in the archives of the
Lenin Library.4 He trudged from hut to hut, often alone, but sometimes accompanied by a prison aid and a guard with a revolver. It was necessary for him to arise at five in the morning and work till late at night in order to complete this task in time. Soon he was writing his mother that a strange blinking had developed in his eyes, followed by severe headaches. The material piled up and he informed Suvorin that he had enough of it for three dissertations. However, these innumerable interviews form the basis for the rich sociological data that contributed much to making the book he eventually wrote, The Island of Sakhalin, the valuable and intensely human document it is.
With his acute sensitivity to human suffering, it was not always easy for Chekhov to remain the detached scientific investigator and refrain from voicing a protest against the cruelty, hunger, and desperate conditions of life that he observed everywhere on this island of the damned. If one may judge from the contents of grateful letters which he later received, on more than one occasion he stealthily provided moral and material assistance to some of these unhappy exiles.5 But he fully realized that his "good behavior" would be regarded as a kind of hostage for the official sanctions he needed to be allowed to finish his study. The wretched fate of the women and children in particular deeply pained him. Prostitution had long since become an accepted way of life, even for the "free women" who had come to await the release of their husbands. They often had no other means of existence. And the sale of young daughters by their mothers had become a commonplace. Indeed, women were regarded as mere chattels. Chekhov quotes a sample petition of a colonist to the prison director: "We humbly beg your honor to allow us a cow for milk in the above-mentioned place and a person of the female sex to take care of household matters."
4 The census cards had thirteen entries, such as the settlement where the respondent lived, the number of his house, his name, age, etc. Some of the queries could be answered by underlining, such as "literate, illiterate," "married, widowed, single." Despite the simplicity of the card, it is difficult to imagine that in only three months on Sakhalin, Chekhov could have completed 10,000 of these cards without considerable assistance, and he certainly could not have conducted personally ten thousand interviews in this period of time.
6 Chekhov's letters to convicts and officials on Sakhalin after he left the islnnd have been lost, but a number of their letters to him exist in the manuscript collection in the Moscow Lenin Library. They reveal the extent of his kindness to them and the high regard in which these people held him. An interesting selection of these letters has recently been published: M. V. Teplinskii, "Novye materialy 0 sakhalinskom puteshestvii A. P. Chekhova" ("New Material on A. P. Chekhov's Sakhalin Journey") in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Sakhalin, 1959, pp. 180-225.
Children were the principal victims of these horrible circumstances. Churches and schools were totally inadequate (he wrote his pedagogue brother Ivan to send him a quantity of textbook materials). Children were largely educated by their convict environment. Shackled prisoners were such a commonplace that these undernourished youngsters had built up their games around them and their guards, and around lashings and executions. Girls of thirteen lived as prostitutes and were often pregnant at fifteen; Chekhov interviewed one who had been sold into prostitution at nine. Among completely amoral colonists these children were uncertain of their filial ties. Chekhov tells of visiting one hut and finding in it only a boy of ten, barefoot, with a freckled face, and shoulders hunched as though warding off a blow. He asked the boy what his father's name was.
"I don't know," he answered.
"What do you mean? You live with your father and don't know his name? You ought to be ashamed."
"He's not my real father."
"So, he's not your real father?"
"He lives with my mother."
"Is your mother married or a widow?"
"A widow. She came here because of her husband."
"What does that mean — she came because of her husband?"
"She killed him."
"Do you remember your father?"
"I don't. I'm a bastard."
In his talks with General Kononovich, as well as with Governor- General Korf, Chekhov found them filled with enlightened views on penal practice, yet convicts at hard labor on the island were regularly chained to their wheelbarrows and corporal punishment was by no means infrequent. In The Island of Sakhalin he described a flogging that he witnessed: the physician's examination to determine if it was safe to give the prisoner the ninety lashes of his punishment; the slow, deliberate preparation; the binding of the victim to a bench; the sadistic executioner and the equally sadistic spectators who always asked permission to watch; the prison official's methodical counting of each blow, and the cries and pleading of the victim as his quivering naked body was quickly transformed into a bloody mass of raw flesh. Well before the ninety blows had been administered Chekhov had to flee to the street, where, in his imagination, he could still hear the official mechanically droning away — "Twenty-four . . . Twenty-five . . ." It was long before he could forget this experience. With grief in his voicc and nervously wringing his hands, he told a prison doctor: "Indeed, I remember with horror that, when the lash whistled and struck the condemned man's body, something in me was torn to pieces and .groaned in a thousand voices."
One outlet for Chekhov's feeling of protest was satire. When the spirit moved him he would gather a few trusted families among his friends and read humorous tales he had written which poked fun at Sakhalin officials. But these manuscripts he immediately destroyed after they had served their purpose. There is also some evidence to the effect that he read to a selected group a three-act comcdy he had wrijtten. It was called General Flirt and pilloried a well-known Sakhalin official nicknamcd "The Flirt." Subsequent information several years later indicated that Chekhov intended to rework this play for publication, but it never appeared in print and he apparently destroyed the manuscript.®
Having finished his study of central Sakhalin on September 11, Chekhov journeyed to the southern part of the island (before the Russo-Japanese War, the whole of Sakhalin belonged to Russia) where there were a few more prisons and penal colonies. He centered at Korsakov and continued his investigation, which covered a substantial amount of territory in this southern area.