The interest in Siberia which Chekhov and Nicholas shared was, of course, inspired by completely different preoccupations. For the young Nicholas, Siberia was a reflection of Russia's imperial grandeur - and perhaps just a stepping stone to further expansion in the Far East. Some have speculated that his Grand Tour may have instilled in him an ambition of one day adding both China and Japan to his colonial portfolio. For Chekhov, Siberia was a place of adventure and of horror. If its endless empty spaces provided him with the opportunity to escape a stifling and humdrum metropc'itan literary world and find fresh air and liberation, its penal color es enabled \' m to perform a humanitarian service by acting as eye-witness ana so justify hi^ travels to such exotic parts.
As a literary celebrity, Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin had attracted a fair amount of attention in the Russian press. New Times had first announced his plans as 'sensat onal news' back in January 1890,3 but it is unlikely they were v ewed as such by the 24-year-old tsarevich (six years younger than Chekhov). As someone with more than a vested interest in preserv ag the status quo, Nicholas was never going to be enthusiastic about the idea of a Russian subject wanting to write about the 'unfortunates' (as they were euphemistically referred to) who had been condemned to hard labour and exne in Siberia. His tour, naturally, also received significant attention in the nai'onal press, and later became the subject of a luxu'.iously produced three-volume book, Travels in the East of Nicholas II, which Chekhov bought at special request for the Taganrog horary, but with a reluctance that was not only due to its exorbitant price.4 The last volume, which appeared in 1897, of course made no menlion of Chekhov's outspoken book about the convicts of Sakhalin which had appeared two years earlier, although the enforced colonization of Siberia by exiles had all along been part of the official strategy to develop the Asian territories. Ironically, the route taken by his Imperial Highness's frigate, the Memory of Azov, was very similar to the one p ied by the steamers of the Voluntary Fleet, which ferried thousands of convicts to Sakhalin from Odessa each year. Chekhov's yellow-funnelled boat, the Petersburg, had been launched as the Thuringia in the Scottish shipyards of Greenock in 1870, having been buiit to make the crossing between Hamburg and New York. It was adapted for the conveyance of convicts in 1889, and, like others in the fleet, made the ourney from Odessa to Vladivostok twice a year in the summer months, before navigation north of Vladivostok was closed by ice. Before Chekhov embarked if 1890, the vessel had just discharged its final cargo of sixty-( ;ght men and women destined for a life of exile on Sakhalin.
Chekhov's interest in Siberia and the Far East should certainly be seen in the context of Russia's intense preoccupation with Asia in the latter part of the nineteenth century - but not confused with it, despite his reverence for Nikolai Przhevalsky, the explorer and military officer who championed Russian imperialist expansion in Asia so aggressively. It is hard to square Chekhov's somewhat schoolboyish enthusiasm for a man of jingoistic, ana sometimes downright racist, views with the humanitarian impulses which . lspired the book he was to write about the convicts anc indigenous Ш bes of Sakhalin, but Przhevalsky was a major inspiration. Chekhov undertook his journey to Siberia at a crossroads in his life. He had v ;th ease become the leading writer of his generation, but that was a contiibuting factor to the deep sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness he felt in 1889: with the exception of the shining beacon of Tolstoy, there was no one else to compete with or look up to on the literary scene. Chekhov needed to be stimulated, but in the rather dull years of Russian literature under Alexander III, no other writer o^ his stature emerged, and he clearly found this dispiriting. As he was to put it famously in a letter a few years later, 'nothing being written today contains any alcohol' - it was all lemonade. He was willing to concede that in science and technology the age may have been one of greatness, but for people like us, he continued, .. it's a stodgy, sour, dull sort of time':
We definitely lack that ,e ne sais quo;', and so when the sk.rts of our muse are lifted up nothing is to be seen there but an empty space ... We have neither :mmediate nor distant goals, our souls are empty We have no politics, we don't believe _n revolution, we have no God, we're not afrj id of ghosts, and personally I don't even fear blindness or death. A man who desires nothing, hopes for nothing and fears nothing cannot be an artist.5
Chekhov could not but be affected by the aespondency which descended like a cloud on the Russian intelligentsia when censorship tightened and attempts were made to unao the 'damage' of the 1860s reforms. 'I have grown indifferent to reviews, to conversations about literature, to gossip, to success and failure, to earning big fees,' he wrote to Suvorin in May 1889; 'in a wora I have become the fool of fools. It's as though my soul has gone nto hibernation. The only explanation I can find for it is that my personal life has also gone into hibernation. I'm not frustrated or worn out or depressed, I've simply become somehow less interesting. I need someone to put a bomb under me.'6
Chekhov's malaise in 1889 was also attributable to the fact that his brother Nikolai was dying from the disease which he knew would also kill bim sooner or later. He clearly wanted to go on an adventure and do something extraordinary with his life before it was too iate. Apart from his commitment to literature and medicine, his own frail health and his family obligations prevented him from travelling the world and becoming a full-time explorer like Przhevalsky, but he was unwilling to capitulate completely to a sedentary life. And as a man with a deeply ingrained sense of moral duty, he also wanted to do something worthwhile. The ob tuary he wrote of Przhevalsky ;n 1888 makes it clear why this was important to him:
Such people have had a huge educational impact, quite apart from their sendees to scholarship and the state. One Przhevalsky or one Stanley is worth a dozen educational institutions and a hundred good books Then ideas and thei noble ambition, whi :h has the national and scholarly honour at its heart, their stubborn, invincible striving towards a certain goal, no matter what privations, dangers and temptations for personal happiness are entai'ed, the wealth of their learning and industry, their acclimatiza., :on to heat, hunger, homesickness, wasting fevers, thei' fanatical faith in Christian civilization and in science make them ascetics in the eyes of the populace, personify ng the highest moral strength.
Chekhov's obituary of Przhevalsky is an extraordinary document, defining with crystal clarity the strong ethical values of a writer often condemned as unprincipled by his contemporaries.rГ le personalities of people like Przhevalsky, Chekhov maintains, were like 'living documents', showing society that there still existed people of ascetism and faith besides all those 'conducting arguments about optimism and pessimism, writing banal stories, unnecessary projects and cheap dissertations out of boiedom', and besides the 'sceptics, mystics, psychopaths, Jesuits, philosophers, liberals and conservatives' (in other words, all his contemporaries). Przhevalsky's last great spiritual feat, Chekhov notes, was to suppress his homesickness and ask to be buried in Central As;a, where he had conducted his fieldwork.7