Chekhov had begun to see increasing numbers of Chinese from Irkutsk onwards (they reminded him of the old monks his brother Nikolai used to paint), and on the Muravyov he shared a cabin with an opium-smok'ng Chinaman who inscribed the margin of one of his letters with some beautiful hieroglyphics which read 'I'm going to Nikolaevsk. Hello.' Chekhov was rewarded for having been bitten continuously by gadf/es on the Yermak by now seeing meteors flying round his cabin - fireflies which were just like electric sparks. After following the path of the Amur south to Khabarovsk, the Muravyov then turned north, arriving in Nikolaevsk on 5 July. It was at this point that his letters home stopped, and his book began.
The Island of Sakhalin has a reputation for being a rather dry and impersonal book, with a style dictated by the need for its central message of human injusi :ce to be delivered with the utmost efficiency. This does not stand true of its opening chapters, however, which describe the final leg of his journey and the history of the discovery of the island in conversational and sometimes intimate tones. Nikolaevsk, which stands where the mouth of the Amur delta meets the narrow Tatar Strait separating Sakhalin from the mainland, was the location for Russia's first fortress in these parts, and was named patriotically after Tsar Nicholas I. It had seen a fair amount of nternational traffic during the pioneer years earlier in the century, but the little town was not well- equipped to receive visitors now: there was no hotel, and Chekhov felt that the unframed windows of its hundreds of abandoned houses were staring at him il ke the eye-sockets of a skull. He was forced to spend the next two nights sleeping on the Muravyov, and when it weighed anchor aga n, he was for a time left completely stranded. Just as the sun was going down, and he was succumbing to a certain amount of panic, a local Gilyak agreed to row him out to the Baikal, the steamer which would carry him on to Alexandrovsk, the main port of Sakhalin. After the rhythmic combination of long and short sentences in Chekhov's short stories, with their clusters of adjectives, and sentences trailing off into dots, the sober clarity and tautness of the prose in The Island of Sakhalin is indeed marked, but occasionally gives way to a lyricism more reminiscent of his fiction:
On the right-hand shore there was a forest burning; the wall of green was throwing up crimson flames; clouds of smoke fused into a long, black, motionless strip which hung over the forest... It was a huge fire, but there was silence and calm all around because it was no one's concern that forests were perishing. Clearly the green riches here belong only to God.24
As the Baikal chugged slowly south, Chekhov began believing he was at the end of the world, and that there was nowhere further to sail to. Into his soul rushed the sensations he felt Odysseus must have experienced when, dimly expecting to encounter extraordinary creatures, he had sailed into unknown waters - the waters that one day Chekhov would gaze out to when he was growing up. Accompanied by a pair of whales blowing fountains of spray into the air, in warm clear weather, on 11 July the Baikal reached the coast of Sakhalin, whose taiga was also on fire. Whatever poetic frame of mind Chekhov had been in earlier was now replaced by anxiety and foreboding:
Through the smoke and darkness spreading over the sea, I could not see the jetty or any buildings and could only make out the dim lights of the post, two of which were red. The awful picture which was crudely cut out of the darkness, the silhouettes of mountains, the smoke, the flames and the sparks from the fire seemed quite fantastic.25
It seemed to Chekhov that he had already arrived in hell. The next twenty chapters of his book, clearly not written in such leisurely circumstances as the first three, take the reader on a tour of Sakhalin's main settlements, and describe with unflinching detail the lives of the hard-labour convicts, exiles and officials, as well as those of the island's aboriginal peoples. Chekhov's arrival co'ncided with an official visit by the Governor General of the Amur reg' >n, Baron Andrei Korf. Exile was not imposed for life, he assured Chekhov during their meeting, the hard labour assigned to the convicts was not excessively onerous, and there were neither sentbes nor chains. Cnekhov took pains to assure the reader that the very opposite was the case, and exposed prostitution, starvation and brutal corporal punishment in flat contrad'ction of the baron's Panglossian optimism. The Governor General's visit was accompanied by speeches, dinners, music and fireworks, but Chekhov found it all depiessing. No amount of Bengal flares could turn the river in AJexandrovsk from a cook's daughter into a society lady, as he put iц and the cannon which blew up when it was fired seemed somehow symbolic. There nr.ght have been a party atmosphere at the Governor's residence, but elsewhere the mood was sombre:
Nevertheless, it was miserable on the streets, despite such merrymaking. There were no songs or accordions or a single person getting drunk; people were wandering about like shadows, and were as silent as shadows. Hard laboui is still hard labour even when it is illuminated by Bengal flares, and music only inspires a deathly longing when it is heard from afar by a person who will never return to his homeland.26
By the cime Chekhov made his historic visit, Sakhalin was the largest and most notorious penal settlement n Siberia, but it had not always been a penal colony, and it had not always been Russian. The sterlet- shaped sland, twice the Size of Greece, had first been explored by the Japanese,» .Who found it was already inhabited by aboriginal peoples, prmo cally G.lyaks and Ainu. Russians had started pushing eastwards into Asia from the sixteenth century onwards, lured both by the riches to be obtained in the fur trade and the possibiUty of escaping bondage to Ivan the Terrible. When the government began seriously expanding its eastern frontiers in the ni leteenth century, Sakhalin naturally loomed i lto view due to its strategic importance tn relation to Japan and China. In May 1805, the naval officer who captained the fi^st Russian circumnavigation of the world suggested that it be taken for the empire, and confidently asserted that two cutters with sixteen gans and sixty men would be sufficient to sink the entire Japanese fleet.27 It was not until the late 1840s, however, that the first Russian flag was raised on Sakhalin, with the first settlements following in 1853. After a flurry of diplomatic visits, Japanese resistance to the notion that Sakhalin belonged to Russia was finally overcome. In 1875 Japan agreed to exchange Sakhalin for the Kurile Islands. Six years later Russia founded a penal colony on the island, intending to use convict labour to excavate its rich coal deposits. Its population was then ust a couple of thousand. By 1904, the population of Sakhalin had swelled to over 40,000, About a quarter of this figure were conv'cts serving terms of hard labour in the island's six prisons, with about a thousand exiles arriving each year on vessels of the Volunteer Fleet. The latter had been founded by voluntary public subscription n 1878 as a buttress against the furkish navy and to protect Russia's Asian coastlines, but was largely subsidized by the government. The original three steamers which participated in the Russo-Turkish War had been joined by eleven other ships, some of which were converted so that they could be used to transport convicts to Sakhalin and other penal institutions, as well as freight to Vladivostok.