"Are you a former officer?" I asked.
"Not at all, your worship, I am a priest," he said.
I do not know why he was sent to Sakhalin. I did not even ask him. When a man stands before you who until recently was called Father loan and Batiushka [Little Father], and whose hands had been kissed by the people, when such a man stands before you in a pitifully worn jacket, you do not think of his crime.
In another hut I observed the following scene. A young, dark-complexioned convict, with an unusually sorrowful face, dressed in an immaculate blouse, sits at a table clutch- ing his head in his hands. A convict woman clears the samovar and the cups from the table. When I ask him if he is married, the young man answers that his wife and daughter have voluntarily followed him. However, it is two months since she left with the child for Nikolayevsk and has not returned, although he sent her a number of telegrams. "And she won't come back," says the convict woman maliciously. "What can she do here? Perhaps she hasn't seen your Sakhalin, eh? It's not easy!" He remains silent, and again she says, "She won't come back. She is a young woman, free, why should she? She took off like a bird and flew away, and not a sign of her. She's not like you and me. If I hadn't murdered my husband and if you hadn't been a firebrand, we too would still be free. And now you sit and wait hopelessly for your wife, and your heart is breaking." He is suffering. Obviously his soul is as heavy as lead, but shc keeps on nagging and nagging him. I leave the hut and can still hear her voice.
I was accompanied on my visits to the huts in Korsa- kovskoye by a very strange convict, Kislyakov. The court reporters have probably not forgotten him. This is the same Kislyakov, a military clerk, who battered his wife to death with a hammer on Nikolayevskaya Street in Peters- burg and reported his crime to the authorities. He said his wife had been a beauty and he had loved her madly, but once when he quarreled with her, he vowed before the icon that he would kill her. Since that time up to the actual murder an evil spirit seemed to whisper constantly, "Kill, kill!" He was detained in the St. Nikolay Hospital until his trial, which is probably why he considers himself a psychopath and explains why he kept asking me to use my influence with the authorities to have him ruled insane and committed to a monastery.
His only penal work in the prison consists of making wooden pegs for strengthening the brackets for holding loaves of bread. The work is not difficult, but he hires someone else to do it and "gives lessons," which means he does nothing. He is dressed in a canvas suit and presents a pleasant appearance. He is a dim-witted fellow, but loquacious and a philosopher. "Where there are fleas, there are children," he says in a sweet, velvety baritone whenever he sees children. When they asked me in his presence why I am taking a census, he answered, "So they can send us all to the moon. Do you know where the moon is?" During our walk back to Alexandrovsk each evening he often repeated to nobody in particular, "Revenge is the most noble sensation."
Farther along the Duyka lies the Novo-Mikhaylovka settlement, founded in 1872, and so named because Mitsui's first name was Mikhail. Many authors call it Verkhnoye Urochyshche [Upper Boundary], while the settlers call it Pashnya [Plowland]. It contains 520 settlers, 287 males and 233 females. There are 133 households, of which two have cohouseholders. Arable land is possessed by all the householders according to the records; there are eighty-four head of livestock. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, the huts are depressingly impoverished and the inhabitants unanimously declare "there is no way" to survive on Sa- khalin. They told me that in former years when the poverty in Novo-Mikhaylovka was acute, a path was trod- den to Due by the convicts and free women who wanted to sell themselves to the prisoners in Due and Voyevodsk for copper pennies. I can testify that the path is still not overgrown.
The settlers here, like those of Korsakovskoye, have larger plots of arable land, from three to six and even eight desyatins, and they are not impoverished. However, there are only a few of them and with each passing year they grow fewer. At the present time more than half of the settlers have only one-eighth to one and a half desyatins, which means that agriculture to them is a complete loss. The experienced old settlers only sow barley and plant potatoes on their land.
The land here is discouraging and not conducive to settling. No householders remain of those who were settlers in the first years of the settlement's existence. There are nine who have been here since 1876; seven since 1877; two
since 1878; four since 1879. The remainder are newcomers.
Novo-Mikhaylovka contains a telegraph station, a school, a prison for the destitute and the skeleton of an unfinished wooden church. It has a bakery where bread is baked for the convicts building roads in the Novo- Mikhaylovka region. The bread is made without any official supervision and is abominable.
Everyone passing through Novo-Mikhaylovka is bound to meet the local peasant, formerly-an-exile, Potemkin. If any important person comes to Sakhalin, Potemkin presents the traditional bread and salt. When they wish to prove that the agricultural colony is a success, they use Potemkin as an example. The homestead list shows that he owns 20 horses and 9 head of cattle, but people say he has twice as many horses. He owns a store here, and another in Due which is run by his son. He gives the impression of being a businesslike, intelligent and prosperous sectarian. His chambers are clean, the walls are wallpapered, and on the wall hangs a picture: "Marienbad, Sea Bathing near Libov."
He and his wife are sober, judicious and politically minded. When I was taking tea with them, they told me that it is possible to live on Sakhalin and that the land is fertile. The problem is that the people today are lazy, spoiled and do not work hard enough. I asked him whether it was true that he had served watermelon and muskmelon from his own gardens to an important guest. Without bat- ting an eye he said, "That's true. At times melons ripen here."4
There is another Sakhalin celebrity in Novo-Mikhay- lovka—the settler Tersky, a former executioner. He coughs, hugs his chest with pale, bony hands and complains that he is ruptured. He began coughing on the day when, by order of the administration, he was flogged by the present execu- tioner, Komelev. Komelev did such a good job that he had "almost knocked the soul out of him." But one day it was Tersky's turn. He gave full rein to his whip and beat his colleague so mercilessly and vengefully that to this day people say his body is still rotting. They say that if you place rwo venomous executioners together in one room they will devour each other.
Until 1888, Novo-Mikhaylovka was the last settlement along the Duyka, but today we also find Krasny Yar and Butakovo. A road is being built to these settlements from Novo-Mikhaylovka. I traveled half the way to Krasny Yar, three miles, over a smooth new road, straight as a ruler; the second half I rode over a picturesque path cut through the taiga, where the tree stumps had already been re- moved and the ride was as easy and pleasant as though we were traveling along a good country road. Large construc- tion timbers had already been cut down, but the taiga was still imposing and beautiful. Birches, aspens, poplars, wil- lows, ashes, elders, bird cherries, spiraeas and hawthorns abound. Among them were grasses which grew man-high and higher; gigantic ferns and burdocks, whose leaves were more than an arshin in diameter, merged with the bushes and trees into a dense and impenetrable thicket, a sanctuary for bears, sables and deer. On both sides where the valley ends and the foothills begin, there arc coniferous forests of silver firs, pines and larches forming a green wall, while above thcm again lies a deciduous forest, and the tops of the mountains arc bald or covcrcd with bushes. I never saw such enormous burdocks in Russia as those I found here, and it is primarily due to thcsc leaves that the local thickets, the forest glades and the meadows take on a spe- cial aspect. I have already written that at night, especially in the moonlight, they look fantastic. This display is sup- plemented by another magnificent plant of the umbellifer- ous family which does not seem to have a name in Russian. It has a straight stem some ten feet tall and about three inches thick; it is purple-red in its upper part and carries an umbrella about a foot in diameter. Around this main umbrella are grouped four to six smaller umbrellas which make the plant look like a candelabrum. In Latin this plant is called Angelophyllum ursinuvi [bear root].!i