The famous Sakhalin convict Sofya Blyuvshtein
It took Chekhov a while со accustom his ear to waking to the sounds of clanking chains as convicts marched past his lodgings each morning. When he asked why even cockerels wore shackles, he received the reply that everything was chained up on Sakhalin. The work that he carried out on the island was in ts own way a kind of hard labour. In order to get to speak to the inhabitants, he hit upon the ruse of conducting a census. His aim was to interview every single member of the island's population, filling n a questionnaire for each of them which he could later use as mater al for his book. He was clearly rather taken with this kind of statistical calibrat jn, and he would later ass ist in the national census that was conducted in 1897, but his interest can be dated much earl'er One wonders whether, as he trudged round Sakha1;n's settlements, he ever recalled the irreverent 'Supplementary Questions for the Personal Details Form of the Statistical Census suggested by Antosha Chekhonte' that he had published right at the beginning of his writing career in 1881:
Are you a clever or a stupid person?
Are you an honest person? A swindler? A robber? A rogue? A lawyer?
18 Which columnist is most to your liking? Suvorinf 'LetterAmicus'? Lukin ? or Yuly Shreyer?
Are you a Joseph or a Caligula ? A Susannah or a Nana ?
Is your wife blonde} brunette? black-haired? or a redhead'?
Does your wife beat you or not? Do you beat her or not?
What did you weigh when you were ten years old?
Do you consume hot beverages? Yes or no?
What did you think about on the night of the census?
Have you seen Sarah Bernhardt? or not?28
Chekhov worked flat out for the ninety-five days he spent on Sakhalin, rising at 5 a.m. every morning and walking, mostly alone, from hut to hut where he listened to heart-rending stories of human misery from people who had nothing to live for:
It was a quiet, starry right. A night watchman was tapping, and a stream was gurgling nearby. I spent a long time standing there, staring at the sky and at the huts, and it seemed a miracle to me that I was six and a half thousand miles from home, in some place called Palevo, at the end of the world, where they did not even remember the days of the week, nor had any need to, since it was absolutely the same whether it was Wednesday or Thursday.29
With corruption rife among the guards and officials, what possible hope was there for redemption? Because of the climate and because peasants could never return to Russia at the end of their sentences, Sakhalin had no chance of ever becoming a vibrant colony like Australia. The aboriginal population had shrunk drastically since the Russian occupation. It was no wonder that so many Sakhalin exiles, driven by an overwhelming longing for freedom, attempted to escape, even though they knew the chances of success were slim. The vitality of a colony, Chekhov pointedly remarked, did not depend on prohibitions and orders, but on conditions guaranteeing a life that was peaceful and well-provided for. There was nothing remotely resembling any kind of civilized society when he visited Sakhalin in 1890, as far as he could see. And how could there be when sentries were even posted to stand guard outside churches while convicts prayed, and when the government's idea of Russifying the natives was
to hand out guns and badges? Sakhalin's inhospitable climate rendered most of it unfit for cultivation: 4s east coast was frozen for half the year, and much of its territory was impassable. Ships only called between June and October, and sometimes even the telegraph cable was cut off during the winter months Chekhov was hard-pressed to find beauty on Sakhalin, but was clearly thinking of Levitan when suggesting that landscape artists might find inspiration in the yellow sunflowers, green rye and pink, red and crimson poppies of the Arkov valley.
Gityak storehouses for dried fish, Sakhalin
By the time Chekhov had finished nis work On Sakhalin, 8,719 of the cards he had printed on the island had been filled out. He had clearly had some assistance with the task in one settlement; 584 of the 1,368 cards show the handwriting of someone else - a person who filled out 222 cards on his own. This person was a Buryat priest who Chekhov became friendly with on Sakhalin, and who not only accompanied him on some of hi; travels round the island, but travelled back to Russia with him on the Petersburg and lived for a while with his family in
Moscow. As native Siberians, Buryats were traditionally Shamanists, but Father Irakly had converted to Christianity after being the sole person in his village to survive a flood. He had then become a missionary, after taking holy orders in a monastery in the Transbaikal region where he came from. Almost the only Orthodox monk without a beard and moustache, he had served as a priest for eight years when Chekhov arrived on Sakhalin, and it was he who helped him make contact with some of the political prisoners there. Chekhov had been expressly forbidden from talking to this section of the island's populace, and Father Irakly's'assistance came at a considerable risk to himself.31
It was with a huge sense of relief that Chekhov was finally able to leave Sakhalin. Empty of its convict cargo, the Petersburg started rolling heavily after they left Hong Kong, but there were compensations. The hell of Sakhalin was mirrored by the paradise of Ceylon, where Chekhov had the opportunity to spend some blissful moonlit hours in the company of a bronze-skinned woman in a coconut plantation, and to acquire what he thought were two mongooses (one later proved to be a vicious palm civet).
A year later, back home in Russia, he worked through the trunkful of notes he had brought back with him from Siberia and finished the first eight chapters of his book. He went on to complete it over the following two years. By this time he had patched up his differences with the editors of the journal who had slandered him as 'unprincipled' on the eve of his departure, and The Island of Sakhalin initially appeared in serial form in Russian Thought. He had saved the most harrowing chapters until last, and his account of a flogging was, not surprisingly, initially forbidden by the censor. The Island of Sakhalin was first published as a book in 1895, and was soon creating waves in official circles and nspirmg several other people to write books about the Siberian exile system. One idealistic young ladv from St Petersburg was so deeply affected by Chekhov's book that she even moved to Sakhalin so that she could dedicate herself to alleviating the lot of its benighted population.32 At one point in his book, Chekhov describes a modest white house on the shoreline which turned into a 1 ghthouse at night, its lamp shining brightly as if the red eye of hard labour was Ltself looking out at the world. His book also acted like a lighthouse, drawing attention to one of the worst aspects of the Tsarist regime. In the seventh of the travel pieces he published while travelling out to