It was about this time, when he was still recovering from the shock of grief, that he chanced upon a copy of the penal code and observed to his brother Mikhail that when a criminal is arrested and placed on trial, everyone is inter- ested, but when he is sentenced to imprisonment no one cares about his fate. He suffers hunger and cold, leads a life of desolate privation, and no one cares. He is made to perform absurd and useless labors, brutal guards have him at their mercy, but it is as though he had completely van- ished from the world. According to Mikhail it was this chance reading of the penal code which set him off on his journey to the island of Sakhalin, that cold and barren island which the Russian government had chosen as the place of exile for its most dangerous prisoners. Sakhalin lay at the farthest limits of the Russian empire, and could be reached only by a long and difficult journey across the whole length of Siberia. Even to Mikhail the motives for the journey remained mysterious. "Anton Pavlovich," he
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wrote, "began making preparations for the journey to the Far East so suddenly and unexpectedly that at first we scarcely knew whether he was serious, or only joking."
Chekhov himself scarcely knew why he was going there; he knew only that he had to go there, that some im- pulse stronger than himself was driving him to it. At vari- ous times he would offer explanations to his friends, who were anxious for his health and disturbed by the prospect of his long absence. He would turn their questions into a joke, saying he needed "a good shaking-up," or he would explain patiently that he owed a debt to medicine and pro- posed to write a carefully documented dissertation on the medical aspects of the penal colony. To others he would say that he was bored, and an arduous journey relentlessly pur- sued would give him two or three days which he would remember with gratitude for the rest of his life. Or else he would explain that he had grown lazy and needed six months of uninterrupted physical and mental work to keep himself in training. He had so many explanations that the real one eventually vanished in a cocoon of myths, exag- gerations and inventive half-truths, for it amused him to see the bewilderment of his friends and he could deploy whole armies of reasons whenever they were required. It became a kind of game. It was a dangerous game, and he may have known that his life was at stake.
To those who were especially close to him he would hint that there were more serious reasons for the journey. To one he hinted darkly that he did not expect to return, to another he spoke of the need for a Russian writer to venture into the forbidding landscape of imprisonment for his soul's sake, while to a third he spoke of a restlessness which had gripped him by the throat and would not give him any rest—only a long journey would quieten him. But even when he spoke in this way we are made aware of evasions and circumlocutions. These statements were per- haps closer to the truth, but they were not the whole truth.
When the time came for him to make formal applica- tion to the authorities for permission to visit Sakhalin, which was under the administration of the Office of Prisons in St. Petersburg, Chekhov explained that he had only "scientific and literary purposes" in view, and those colorless words appear to have been designed to put the authorities off the scent. The head of the Office of Prisons was a pompous and much-decorated official called Mikhail Galkin-Vrasky, and co chis elderly nobleman Chekhov ac- cordingly wrote a humble letter of petition:
20 January 1890
Your Excellency,
Mikhail Nikolayevich!
Proposing in the spring of the present year to journey to the Far East for scientific and literary purposes, and de- siring among other things to visit the island of Sakhalin both in its central and southern pans, I make bold to present this humble petition to Your Excellency for any assistance it may be possible for you to give me toward the fulfillment of the above-mentioned aims.
With sincere devotion and respect I have the honor to be Your Excellency's most humble servant,
Anton Chekhov
It was the kind of letter one writes with the sweat of one's brow, hoping for the precise degree of required flat- eery, the proper subservience, the necessary bureaucratic cone. The head of the Office of Prisons was suitably im- pressed by the letter and Chekhov was granted an audi- ence, where he explained at some length exactly what he intended co accomplish during the journey. He especially wanted to see the inside of the prisons and to study the industries which were being established on Sakhalin. Galkin-Vrasky could not have been more agreeable and police, and when Chekhov left the Office of Prisons he was under the impression chat all doors would be open co him. The nobleman understood thoroughly the purpose of the journey, congratulated Chekhov on his laudable desire co srudy the prison system, and immediately sene off a letter co Sakhalin, warning the authorities against the forthcom- ing visit of "the noted writer Anton Chekhov," who muse on no account be allowed to have any contact with political prisoners and certain specified categories of prisoners.
Meanwhile Chekhov was spending every available mo- ment studying the history of Sakhalin, the geology, geog- raphy, meteorology, the flora and fauna, the habits of the primitive tribes which still maintained an existence on the island. He pored over maps, and consulted obscure articles in magazines and newspapers, collecting so many books and articles that his rooms were piled high with them. He became an avid collector of statistics, which he copied out in his notebooks, and sketched out whole sections of the book he proposed to write—all those sections which did not depend on direct observation—and already the shape of the book was clear in his mind. What particularly dis- tressed him was the discovery that most of the articles pub- lished on Sakhalin were written by people who had never been there, had nat the least idea of the problems faced by the prisoners on the island, and were interested only in making pontifical statements on the virtues of the penal system and the high moral attitude of the government which kindly offered them a suitable method of expiating their crimes. Such men would enjoy a good meal and then sit down to write a learned discussion on some subject like "The Problems of Prison Management in Sakhalin," and an hour later they would have completed a formidable inquiry into a subject they knew nothing about. To his astonishment Chekhov discovered that there was very little worth reading about Sakhalin, and he had to piece together his knowledge of the island from hundreds of books and articles, finding a fact here and a description there, juxta- posing the impressions of a visitor recorded in some out- of-the-way magazine article with a set of official statistics. He was in no mood to suffer fools gently, and in his letters he railed against the idiocy of the bureaucrats who wrote out of insolence and ignorance on matters which were des- perately serious.
He worked in the libraries of St. Petersburg and Mos- cow, and set his friends working for him. His brother
Alexander was made to work through the old files of the Petersburg newspaper, while his sister Maria went to work in the Rumyantsev library in Moscow, copying out long articles with the help of her girl friends. Chekhov was an exacting taskmaster, for he demanded to see everything that had been written about Sakhalin, and every map, however ancient, which showed the island. "Day after day I read and write, write and read," he wrote to Suvorin in the second half of February. "The more I read, the stronger grows my conviction that in my two months on Sakhalin I shall not be able to accomplish more than a quarter of what I had hoped to accomplish." He had become, he said, "such a scholarly son of a bitch" that everyone will be sur- prised out of their wits, and he added that he had stolen a multitude of ideas from other people which he would later claim as his own. "In a practical age like ours, it is impossible to do otherwise," he wrote, and there was some- thing in his letter which suggested that he was about to write the book to end all books on Sakhalin, a compilation of every known fact and surmi::.e about the island with a twenty-page bibliography. With such a large volume, with so many authorities quoted in so many footnotes, he hinted that he would become what he always hoped to become— a real writer.