Chekhov gets so caught up in hero worship that what he does not do in his obituary is discuss Przhevalsky's achievements, namely the collection he assembled of extem;ve geographical, ethnographical and meteorological data about huge areas of Inner As^a, large numbers of invaluable zoological specimens, and the discovery of the wild camtl, and the horse whi- h now is known by h's name. Przhevalsky undertook four main expeditions in the 1870s and 1880s. First, he travelled across Sibe. a to Mongol1! and China, then south-east over the Tien Shan mountains, then towards Lhasa and finally into the Gobi Desert. He found tile emptiness of the Gobi Desert particularly entrancing, and vowed that he would not exchange it for all the gold in the world.8 The books he wrote about his travels won him national fame back in Russia as an intrepid hero, ana an adoring audience of swooning females to whose attentions he was, as a homosexual, completely immune. Before he departed on his last expedition w^th renewed hopes of reaching Lhasa, the Asian 'Rome', Przhevalsky was promoted to Major-General and given an audience with the sar. Alexanaer Ill's then teenage son, Nicholas, meanwhile, had been receiving thrilling aispatches from Przhevalsky about his skirmishes with the natives which, bearing in mind the;r pobnral slant, can have only fanned the flames of his passion for the Orient. Przhevalsky assured the heir apparent that the peoples of Asia longed to become subjects of the Tsar, whose name, he wrote elsewhere, appeared in the eyes of the Asiatic masses 'in a halo of mystic light'. As an unashamed apologist for Russian chauvinism, Przhevalsky's attitude to these peoples was one of complete contempt.
It is easier to understand Chekhov's uncrlcical admiration for this Russian Livingstone, heralded as the most famous traveller n Asia since Marco Polo, when one rememDers the torpidity and stagnation of Russian intellectual life under Alexander III: Przhevalsky's energv was simply electrifying ' Chekhov would have surely travelled more in his lifetime if he had been able to, and if he had not felt such a deep sense of duty towards his needy farrily. No writer seems to lament being bored more often; certainly no Russian writer shared his wanderlust In his letters, he speaks of wanting to travel to countries as di ferse as Sweden and Eg/pt, and advised one young writer that the best thing he could possibly do at his age was travel. The reference in his obituary of Przhevalsky to ten-year-old schoolboys wanting to run away to accomplish heroic feats in America or Af -ica suggests that his longing for adventure was very deep-rooted; back in 1887 his story 'Boys' had actually depicted a foiled attempt of two school friends to run away to America:
... they both opened up an atlas and started studying a map in it: 'First we go to Perm,' said Chechevitsyn quietly ... 'then Tyumen ... then Tomsk .. . then ... then ... to Kamchatka ... and from there the Samoyeds can take you by boat through the Bering Straits ... And then you are in Ame ica .. There are lots of furry animals there.'10
When he set out for Sakhalin, following this very route, Chekhov was still dreaming of returning via America, a dream which he was unfortunately forced to abandon. One of his favourite books as a teenager was a travel book: Goncharov's The Frigate Pallada, an account of the Russian seafaring diplomatic mission to Japan led by Admiral Putyatin in 1852. This is where Chekhov would have first read about Sakhalm.
We should also approach Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin i the spirit of Fridtjof Nansen's quest for scientific knowledge and adventure. A few months before Chekhov set off for Sakhalin, Nansen arrived back n Norway from his first epic voyage across Greenland's 'ce cap, having first completed a doctorate in zoulogy. Chekhov may not have completed the doctorate he planned himself, but his book about Sakhalin and its prison colony was conceived with one vaguely in mind, and certainly written to repay what he felt was his debt to medicine. Nansen wrote a book about Eskimos, having spent a winter living among them dur ig his Greenland exploration; Chekhov's book (this being Tsarist Russia) was about convicts, but also about Sakhalin's aboriginal population. In 1913, Nansen was himself to write a book about Siberia, having travelled extensively through it.11 His career provides an irwic contrast to that of Przhevalsky: he would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his international relief work, having organ zed the introduction of special passports to help the thousands stranded after the collapse of the great European empi-es in the 1920s. Chekhov was inspired by similar humanitarian goals, and might very well have been a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize had it been founded during his lifetime. Before he set out on his journey, he wrote an impassioned letter to Suvorin about why it was so mportant to think about Sakhalin:
You say, for instance, that nobody needs Sakhalin or finds it of the slightest interest. Can this really be so? Only a society that does not deport thousands of people to it at a cost of millions could find Sakhalin entirely devoid of usefulness or interest. Sakhal" к the only place, except for Australia in times gone by, and Cayenne, where one can study a place that has been colonized by conv;cts. All of Europe is ;nterested in it, so how can it be that we are not? A mere twenty-five or thirty years ago our own Russian people performed amazing feats exploring Sakhalin, enough\to make one glorify the human spirit, but we don't care about any of this, we don't know anything about these people, we just sit inside our own four walls complaining that God made a mess when he created mankind. Sakhalin is a place of unbearable suffering, on a level of which no other creature but man is capable of causing, whether he be free or in chains. People who have worked there or in that region have faced terrifying problems and responsibilities wl ich they continue to work towards resolving. I regret that I am not sentimental, otherwise I would say that we ought to make pilgrimages to places like Sakhalin as the Turks go to Mecca, and sailors and penal experts ought to exam-ie Sakhalin the way soloiers examine Sevastopol. It is quite clear from the books I have been reading and am still reading that we have let millions of people rot ;n jail, and let them rot to no purpose, treating them with an indifference which is little short of barbaric. We have forced people to drag themselves in chains across tens of thousands of miles in freezing cond tions, infected them with syphilis, debauched them, vastly increased the ciim' lal population, and heaped the blame for the whole thing on red-nosed prison supervisors. All of Europe now knows that the blame lies not with the supervisors, but with all of us, but we sti'l think it is none of our business, we're not interested. The much-vaunted sixties did nothing whatsoever for sick people or for pr soners, and thus violated che principal commandment of Christian civilization. These days we do at least try to do something for tne sic'^, but for prisoners we do notning at all; the way our prisons are run holds absolutely no interest for our judiciary. No, I assure you, Sakhalin ts necessary ana nteresting, and my only regret is that it is I who am go ng there and not somebody more experienced in the field and more able to generate interest in society at large. Personally, my reasons for going are trivial.12
Of course, Chekhov's reasons for going to Sakhalin were far from trivial, even if they did include his desire for a big adventure. The research he carried out before departing showed that.13 Feeling he needed to acquire expertise, not only in Sakhalin's geology, but in its botany, zoology, meteorology and ethnography, he pored over every book about the island he could lay his hands on, starting with the memoirs of Admiral Voin Rimsky-Korsakov, elder brother of the composer and first commander of the Siberian fleet. He studied maps, memoirs and dry tomes about the Russian penal code. His sister and his new friend Lika Miz.nova made notes for hm in Moscow's main research library He wrote letters and had meetings with government officials, and even got hold of a samizaat copy of the American journalist George Kennan's newly published and celebrated book Siberia and the Exile System, which was officially forbidden in Russia owing to its frankly critical stance. He started writing about Sakhalin's history even before he left. The preparatory work Chekhov undoubtedly most enioyed was reac' ng the books by explorers like Krusenstern and La Perouse, who had completed heroic round-the- world voyages. The Russ an translation of Darwm's account of his voyage on the Beagle was also very useful.14