Chekhov's deusion to undertake the journey and complete a census of the prison population on the island came as a shock to his family and friends. He had been to the Crimea and to the Caucasus on summer holidays, but that was not the same as setting out on a journey to the other end of the Russian Empire under inhospitable conditions. (The consensus is that the trip proved extremely detrimental to his health, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.) It took him almost as long to get to Sakhalin as the time he spent on the island, but he relished the opportunity of seeing more of the world, and, in particular, more of the vast country he lived in.
After a short train r 'de to Yaroslavl there was a boat trip down the Volga on the Alexander Nevsky, with 'water meadows, sun-drenched monasteries, white churches, an incredible sense of space; lovely places to sit and fish wherever you look'. He saw the church that his friend Levitan had immortalized in his most famous canvas, 'Eternal Rest', and tugs pulling along strings of barges, which reminded him of a young man being pursued by his wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law and grandmother. The scenery started to become bleaker on the wilder
Kama River. The weather was bad, and to Chekhov it seemed that the people in the towns he was passing through did nothing but make clouds, wet fences, mud and boredom. There were ice floes on the river still, and none of the birch trees had come mto leaf; aesthetics had basically gone to the devil, as he put it in a letter home. At Perm Chekhov transferred to a train carriage, which took him to Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where he sat with his right foot in Europe and his left in Asia He was coming to the despondent conclusion that all towns in Russia looked the same w. tfl their unpaved streets, log houses 'with carved window frames, high fences, white-walled churches, and bazaars.15 Then came Tyumen, headquarters of the state exile administration, and the gateway to the vast Siberian continent, large enough to contain the entire territory of the United States without its boundaries being touched. At this point, Chekhov transferred to horse-drawn transport, and started the first of the travel pieces he sent back for publication in New Times. Travelling in May brought to mind the nighti igales which would be singing in the lush Ukrainian landscapes where he had spent the previous spring, while the bare trees, cold and ,-ce that surrounded him made him think about the sweet-scented acacia and lilac which would be blossoming in Taganrog. Initially he must have had doubts: his body ached from
."■Ы Ыра-шш «бора...
Ykuterinburg
travelling along such bumpy, uneven surfaces, he was spitting blood, and the tea tasted and smelled as if it was an infusion of sage and cockroach. He was overcome by the huge numbers of ducks, wild geese, sandpipers and swans flying overhead, but the melancholy song of cranes interrupting the silence made him sad. Before too long, Chekhov was also encountering dozens of shackled convicts marching along in convoy, accompanied by soldiers with rifles. They were hardly a mood enhancer.
More than half a million convicts walked along the Great Siberian road to their places of exile during the nineteenth century. Exiling criminals to Siberia was a practice which had commenced in the first half of the seventeenth century, soon after Russia had conquered this vast territory. It became a convenient way for the government to rid itself of troublesome subjects, once it had subjected them to its standard punishments of impaling on stakes, amputation of body parts, branding with irons and so on. But exile gradually came to replace execution and mutilation as it dawned on success ve tsars that criminals could perform a useful function in populating its newly acquired territories, "he demand for cheap labour after the discovery of minerals in these parts only made this kind of punishment more appealing, and so the list of crimes for which one could be exiled grew longer and longer. Eventually, they included everything from murder, theft and desertion to fortune telling, snuff-taking ana vagrancy. Under Catherine the Great, landowners were given unlimited powers to hand over disobedient serfs for exile to Siberia, and even village communities could expel the most troublesome of their members. Until the exile administration was set up in the early nineteenth century, convicts marched eastwards into what George Kennan called a 'chaos of disorder, in which accident and caprice played almost equally important parts'.16 Chekhov had vowed not to follow in the footsteps of the American journalist who had exposed the Russian government's -'nhumane practices so mercilessly, but he did not shrink from writing about the exiles he came across during his journey.
In mid-May, the traveller arrived in Tomsk, where he bought his own tarantas to travel in, and some chocolate from sheer boredom. He spent a week recuperating at Tomsk. He was exhausted, having travelled non-stop through the night several times, and the wind and rain had made the skin on his face erupt like fish scales. It was not until he reached the mighty Yenise Ri/er that he began to feel truly inspired by the landscape. If the Volga was a self-effacing beauty, whose sadness would turn all your hopes into Russian pessimism, he wrote in the ninth and last of his travelogues, the fast, strong currents of the Yenisey had quite the opposite effect. The mountains on its far bank, moreover, reminded him of the smoky, dreamy peaks of the Caucasus, and he mentally cursed Levitan for not having accompanied him^ Chekhov-was intoxicated by his first Siberian spring as" he travelled through a forest of firs, pines, larches and birches that seemed to have no end: here was the magnificent taiga, which he had heard so much about. Birch trees had darker leaves in Siberia, he noticed, and were not as 'sentimental' as in Russia. Spring had indeed arrived, and for the first t'me Chekhov's spirits began to soar as his body began to warm up in the sunshine. It was not true that the taiga was silent and had no smell, he discovered: the air was thick with the scent of sun-drenched pine res' n; he was surrounded by birdsong and the incessant buzzing of insects. And the sides of the road he travelled were covered w. h pink, yellow and pale-blue flowers that were a feast for the eye.17
As well as his travel pieces, Chekhov wrote some exuberant ana
Я*»***»?» f, ШттЛ,
Krasnoyarsk and the Yemsey River
very lengthy letters back home to his family and friends. Signing himself Homo Sachaliensis, he sent one letter to his family from Krasnoyarsk in May 1890, in which he happened to mention that Yukhantsev and Rykov were resident there.18 Both men had been convicted of bribery and embezzlement in high profile cases in the late 1870s and early 1880s (in Yukhantsev's case to the tune of two million roubles) and had been the butt of incessant jokes in the comic journals to which Chekhov contributed. In mentioning their names, he would have certainly been thinking about the court reportage he filed from Moscow to The Petersburg Newspaper about the Rykov case in 1884, and perhaps also, with a wry smile, he was remembering some of the sooof items in an irreverent 'Bibliography' he had published back in January 1883: