The following new books have been published and are on sale:
On the abolition of tax payable on bamboo sticks imported from China. Brochure. Price 40 kopecks.
Guidebook to Siberia and its surrounding areas. With a map and a portrait of Mr Yukhantsev. Part 1: The best restaurants. Part 2: Tailors, coach-builders, salons de coiffure. Part 3: Addresses of 'those ladies'. Part 4: Index of rich young sp: nsters. Part 5: Excerpts from Yukhantsev's notebook (anecdotes, vignettes, ded. cations).
Is there any money in Russia and where is it? By Rykov. Price 1 rouble. 9
As they read his letter from Krasnoyarsk, Chekhov's family may well have pondered the extraordinary changes that had taken place in their lives since they had burst out laugh)ng when this p iece appeared seven years earlier.
On 5 June, Chekhov wrote to Nikolai Leikin from Irkutsk that coping with freezing weather, biting winds, interminable waits for ferries across flooded rivers, npassable mud and day-long delays while his tarantas was mended, had been awful. He had suffered from sleeplessness, hunger and fear (there had been one frightening collision with five mail carriages coming tne other way at great speed one night) and he had dust permanently in his nose, but he regretted nothing:
The city of Irkutsk
All the same I am happy and I thank God for giving me the opportunity and the strength to embark on this journey. I have seen and experienced a lot, and everything is exceptionally interesting and new for me, not as a writer, but simply as a human being. The Yenisey, the taiga, the stations, the drivers, the landscape, the wildfowl, the physical torments caused by discomforts on the road, the enjoyment from getting some rest - all this together is so good I don't have the words to describe it. Just being day and night in the fresh air for over a month is interesting and healthy; for a whole month I have seen the sun rise and go down every day.20
By the time Chekhov reached Irkutsk, he was so filthy that the brown suds which poured off him when he went to the bathhouse made him feel as if he was a horse. Irkutsk was the best town he had yet seen in Siberia, and he spent a week recuperating there, and enjoying its amenities, which included a theatre, a museum, good hotels, wooden pavements and municipal gardens.
After Irkutsk, where he sold his tarantas, came a short journey along the Angara River to the steep, tree-covered shoreline of Lake Baikal, which the locals referred to as a sea. Chekhov had heard that you could see almost as far as a mile down in some of the lake's deepest places, and he told his family that he had seen rocks and mountains drowning in its delicate turquoise waters that had made his skin come out in goosebumps. n he picturesque scenery and its warm and gentle colours again made Chekhov long for Levitan to be there enjoying it with him. Siberian poetry began with the mirror-smooth waters of Lake Baikal, he wrote to a friend; it was just prose up until then. Seeing bears, sables and wild goats was also pretty thriUing. After the trip across Baikal, which he described as wondrous and utterly unforgettable, came the last leg of the journey by horse-drawn transport. Ъе drivers were now Buryat rather than Russian, and their horses very wild. The weather was by this time very warm, arid Chekhov felt he was in paradise; the scenery of the TransbaikaJ seemed to contain all his favourite landscapes:
I found in one place everything I have ever dreamed of: the Caucasus, the Psyol valley, the area round Zvenigorod, the Don. In the afternoon you can be rolling along in the Caucasus, by nightfall you are in the Don steppe, next morning you wake from a doze and find yourself in Poltava - and all within six hundred and sixty miles.21
At Sretensk, Chekhov boarded the steamer Yermak (named after the Cossack who had begun Russra's conquest of Sibera in the late sixteenth century), and travelled further east along the Shilka and Amur rivers. The first-class cabin felt luxurious and rather strange after all that time travelling by road, spending cramped nights in the tarantas together with two travelling companions making the same journey. He missed the jingling of the harness bells, but it was a joy to be able to stretch out his legs fully. Progress was initially slow along the shallow waters of the Shilka River, and at one point came to a complete halt when the boat ran aground, necessitating lengthy repairs to its hull. Chekhov had intended to continue with his travel pieces, but the engine of the Yermak shuddered so badly that writing was simply out of the question. All he could do was eat, sleep, talk, and gaze through his binoculars at the immense numbers of wild birds and the luxuriant and wild foliage they were passing through. He had fallen totally in love with the Amur. 'It is quite beyond my powers to descrbe the beauties of the banks of the Amur,' he wrote to Suvorin:
... I can but throw up my hands and confess my inadequacy. Well, how to describe them? Imagine the Suram Pass in the Caucasus moulded into the form of a river bank, and that gives you some idea of the Amur. Crags, cliffs, forests, thousands of ducks, herons and all kinds of fowl with viciously long bills, and wilderness all around. To our left the Russian shore, to our right the Chinese. If I want I can look into Russia, or into China, just as I like. China is as wild and deserted as Russia: you sometimes see villages and sentry huts, but not very often. My brains have addled and turned to powder, and no wonder, Your Excellency! I've sailed rriore than six hundred miles down the Amur, and before that there was Baikal and Transbaikal ... I have truly seen such riches and experienced such rapture that death holds no more terrors for me.22
On board the Yermak, Chekhov reported to his family, the talk was all about the gold which had been discovered in the region. Every peasant seemed to be prospecting for gold, he discovered, and nouveau riche Russian gold-dealers were drinking champagne ±ike water, he noticed. The conversation flowed as freely: when in S beria, with no one to make arrests, and nowhere further to be exiled, people could be as liberal as they liked and say exactly what they thought. So different were the mores out in Asia that Chekhov felt as if he were somewhere
An Amur River steamer similar to the one Cbetzhov travelled on
like Texas or Patagonia; everything was utterly foreign. The disregard for conventional European values led to Orthodox priests in the Far East wearing white silk cassocks and openly engaging in gold smuggling (not to mention disregarding the fasts), men handing over women for cash while at the same time treating them with utmost chivalry, and also shooting vagrants without any compunction - all accompanied by a total absence of interest in Russian culture. The writer Chekhov? Who was he? The locals barely knew who Pushkin was.
On 26 June, after a week of swimming in the warm waters of the Amur and din;ng with gold smugglers (one of whom tried to press an enormous wad of cash on b m for treating his pregnant wife), Chekhov reached Blagoveshchensk, the main administrative town in the region. The newfound wealth brought by the discovery of gold nearby had increased the town's population rapidly since its foundation in 1856, and along with the smart new brick buildings traditionally to be found in boomtowns were amenities like brothels. If Blagoveshchensk itself did not make much impression on Chekhov, his experience with a Jaoanese prostitute certainly did, to judge from the graphic account he gave Suvor;n (which prudish Soviet censors swiftly excised from editions of his correspondence). In Blagoveshchensk, Chekhov transferred from the Yermak to the Muravyov-Amursky, a passenger boat named after the charismatic Governor General of Eastern Siberia who had spearheaded Russia's colonialist expansion into China. It was Muravyov whose far-sighted vision had led to the acquisition of the Amur territory in the 1850s, and the consequent annexation of Sakhalin. With his eye on the lucrative tea trade with China, Muravyov knew Russia had to find a waterway.to the Pacific or lose out to the British. A rmjor breakthrough was the belated discovery in 1849 that Sakhalin was an island, which meant that Siberia was connected both to the Sea of Japan and the Pacific through the Amur.23