This attack on a world that Suvorin had had a proud part in making displeased him. He believed that Chekhov's position was insincere and sent his letter to one of his favorite female contributors to New Times, Madame Sazonova, for the kind of reaction which he fully anticipated, and then conveyed her written comments to him. Chekhov promptly expressed his annoyance over Suvorin's indiscretion in showing his letter to a third person, and also over Madame Sazonova's views. His remarks are significant, for once again, and now more directly, they underscore the disavowal of his earlier belief that a writer must be concerned solely with life as it is and must not allow his own purpose to obtrude on a work of art. Madame Sazonova argues that the purpose of life is life itself; that the artist must value that which is, and that all his misfortunes come from persistently seeking lofty and remote aims. Here is real insincerity, Chekhov scolded. "She believes in 'life,' and that means that she does not believe in anything if she's intelligent. ... I write that aims are lacking, and you realize that I consider aims necessary, and that I would willingly go in search of them; but Sazonova writes that man must not be lured by delights he can never attain. ... If this is not a hag's logic, then surely it is a philosophy of despair. If someone sincerely thinks that high and remote aims are as little necessary to man as to a cow, that in those aims 'are all our misfortunes,' then nothing remains for him but to eat, drink, and sleep, and when he is weary of this, he may rush and dash his brains out against a corner of a box." (December 3,1892.)
Chekhov had actually begun The Tale of an Unknown Man some five years earlier and had put it aside for fear that it would never get by the censor. There was some point in his fears, for one of the leading characters, the Unknown Man himself, is a revolutionary terrorist who takes a position as a butler with a government official, Orlov, in order to effect the assassination of his employer's father, an eminent statesman. His zeal for the cause, however, is undermined by his dawning love for Zina, Orlov's beautiful mistress, who has suddenly deserted her husband and descended upon her lover's bachelor quarters.
There are several palpable weaknesses in the story, especially in the unconvincing characterization of the Unknown Man — possibly caused by Chekhov's efforts to avoid the strictures of censorship — in the excessive intellectual attitudinizing, and in the rather limping conclusion. Orlov, on the other hand, is a brilliant portrayal of the cynical Petersburg man-about-town, for whom nothing is sacred, sincere, or honest. He quickly wearies of his mistress, regards her idealizing, self-sacrificing love for him as a transient infatuation, and shamelessly deceives her. Zina is one of Chekhov's most charming feminine portraits. Endowed with something of Anna Karenina's passionate integrity of the heart, she willingly risks society's harsh condemnation in the cause of illicit love. And like Anna, the realization that her idol has feet of clay inflicts a mortal wound to her self-esteem. Participation in the revolutionary activities of the Unknown Man, with whom she goes to Europe, offers Zina the possibility of revenging herself on the miseries of her past. But this last hope also vanishes when she finally learns that he had lost his revolutionary faith and dreams solely of making her his mistress. Like Anna, again, the only way out of the impasse is death; she poisons herself.
Of his literary friends, only I. Gorbunov-Posadov wrote Chekhov a highly favorable reaction to The Tale of an Unknown Man: "When we finished reading, along with the tears in my eyes at the end, a joyous feeling arose in my soul, a feeling of joy for our literature." Most of the reviewers, especially the liberal ones, wrote unfavorably of the work.
They could hardly fail to observe that the backsliding terrorist, the Unknown Man, no less than the Petersburg rake Orlov, lacked integrity. But in this respect Chekhov, like Tolstoy, had no use for the violence of revolution.
In reply to the skeptical Suvorin about whether he would ever finish and publish his book on Sakhalin, Chekhov wrote him on August 16, 1892: "No, I cannot abandon my baby. When boredom with fiction overcomes me, it is pleasant to take up with nonfiction. The question of when I shall finish Sakhalin and where I shall publish it seems to me unimportant." In fact, despite his absorption in other things at Melikhovo, Chekhov found time to work away at this project, especially over the summer of 1893. suspicion that the head of prisons, Galkin- Vrasky, would use his influence with the censorship to prevent the publication of the book apparently entered into Chekhov's reasons for delaying it — until he had some evidence that this official would soon leave his post.3
Chekhov's need for money, however, as well as the enterprise of the editors of Russian Thought, brought the whole matter to a head. In June, 1893, they pressed Chekhov to publish the work serially in their magazine. He was reluctant to accept serial publication, but the financial terms were advantageous. He now began to concentrate on finishing. All that he had written, he informed Suvorin at the end of July, seemed false, not sufficiently forthright, and weighed down by a heaw pedagogical element. But now that he had begun to describe what a queer fish he had been on Sakhalin and what swine the officials were, the writing went easily and speedily and in spots even humorously.
The Island of Sakhalin began to appear in the last three issues of Russian Thought, 1893, continued through five more issues of this monthly in the first half of the next year. Because of delays by the censor, it was not published in book form until 1895, when it appeared with some changes and with the additions of several chapters at the end. The study of over three hundred pages is a model of the scientific approach, bristling with facts, statistics, citations from authorities, and footnotes. But throughout the book Chekhov never loses sight of his primary purpose —a calm and factual demonstration of the senselessness and often brutal nature of the government's policy of penal servi-
3 Actually, Galkin-Vrasky did offer objections to the appearance of The Island of Sakhalin in print, but he was overruled.
tude on Sakhalin. If he had not had the censorship to contend with, the book would probably have been more outspoken.
Many of Chekhov's admirers, apparently expecting a highly subjective work or perhaps a dramatic and artistic one, such as Dostoevsky's brilliant account of prison life in Siberia in The House of the Dead, showed their disappointment. Nor did The Island of Sakhalin, considering the fact that it came from Chekhov's pen, achieve any great reclame, a fact which has perhaps influenced critics and students of Chekhov to underestimate the significance of the book and to overlook its genuine artistic qualities. For a work of this kind, however, it received a substantial number of reviews and notices in the press, a few of which praised it highly, one of them extravagantly asserting that if Chekhov had written nothing else, his name would still receive an honorable place in the role of Russian literature. The book was widely read, was commented upon most favorably by prison experts in Russia and abroad, and markedly influenced other investigations of Sakhalin. Further, the Russian government, prodded by the study, sent its own officials to survey conditions on Sakhalin, and eventually certain reforms were ordered in the administration of the island and in the conditions under which the convicts lived.