There is nothing else amusing in Derbinskoye. It lies on a flat and narrow piece of land, once covered with a thick birch and ash forest. Below, there is a wide stretch of marshland, seemingly unfit for settlement, once thickly cov- ered with fir and deciduous trees. They had scarcely finished cuning down the forest and clearing stumps in order to build the huts, the jail and the government storehouse, and draining the area, when they were forced to battie with a disaster which none of the colonizers had foreseen. During the spring, the high water of the Amga stream flooded the entire settlement. They had to dig another bed and re- channel it. Now Derbinskoye has an area of more than a square verst and resembles a real Russian village.
You enter by a splendid wooden bridge; the stream babbles, the banks are green with willows, the streets are wide, the huts have plank roofs and gardens. There are new prison buildings, all kinds of storehouses and ware- houses, and the house of the prison warden stands in the middle of the settlement, reminding you not so much of a prison as of a manorial estate. The warden is continually going from warehouse to warehouse, and he clanks his keys exactly like a landlord in the good old days who guards his stores day and night. His wife sits near the house in the from garden, majestic as a queen, and she sees that order is kept. Right in from of her house, in an open hothouse, she can see her fully ripened watermelons. The convict gardener Karatayev tends them with indulgence and with a slavish diligence. She can see the convicts fishing in the river, bringing back healthy, choice salmon called sere- bryanka [silver fish], which are then cured and given to the officials; they are not given to the convicts. Near the garden play little girls dressed like angels. A convict dressmaker, convicted for arson, sews their clothes. There is a feeling of quiet contentment and ease. These people walk softly like cats, and they also express themselves softly, in diminu- tives: little fish, little cured fish, little prison rations. . . .
There are 739 inhabitants in Derbinskoye, 442 male and 297 female. Altogether, including the prison popula- tion, there is a total of about I,ooo. There arc 250 house- holders and 58 co-owners. In its outward aspects as well as in the age groups of the inhabitants and, generally, in all the statistics concerning the place, it is one of the few settlements on Sakhalin which can seriously be called a settlement and not a haphazard rabble of people. It has i 2 i legitimate families. Twelve of them arc free, and among the legally married, free women predominate. There arc 103 free women. Children comprise one-third of the popu- lation.
However, in attempting to understand the economic status of the Dcrbinskoye inhabitants, you have to con- front the various chance circumstances, which play their major and minor roles as they do in other Sakhalin settle- ments. Here natural law and economic laws appear to take second place, ceding their priority to such accidental vari- ables as the greater or lesser number of uncmployables, the number of sick people, the number of robbers, the number of former citizens forced to become farmers, the number of old people, their proximity to the prison, the personality of the warden, etc., etc., and all of these conditions can change every five years or even less than five years. Those who completed their sentences prior to i 88 i were the first to settle here, carrying on their backs the bitter past of the settlcment, and they suffered, and gradually took over the better land and homesteads. Those who arrived from Russia with money and families are able to live well. The 220 desyatins of land and the yearly production of 3,000 poods of fish, as shown in the records, obviously pertain to the economic position of these homesteaders. The remainder of the inhabitants, more than one-half of the population of
Derbinskoye, are starving, in rags, and give the impression of being useless and superfluous; they are hardly alive, and they prevent others from living. In our own Russian vil- lages even fires produce no such sharp distinctions.
It was raining, cold and muddy when I arrived in Derbinskoye and visited the huts. Because of his own small quarters, the warden gave me lodging in a new, recently completed warehouse, which was stored with Viennese fur- niture. They gave me a bed and a table, and put a latch on the door so that I could lock myself in from inside.
All evening to two o'clock in the morning I read or copied data from the list of homesteads and the alphabeti- cal list of the inhabitants. The rain fell continually, rattling on the roof, and once in a while a belated prisoner or soldier passed by, slopping through the mud. It was quiet in the warehouse and in my soul, but I had scarcely put out the candle and gone to bed when I heard a rustling, whis- pering, knocking, splashing sound, and deep sighs. Rain- drops fell from the ceiling omo the latticework of the Viennese chairs and made a hollow, ringing sound, and after each such sound someone whispered in despair: "Oh, my God, my God!" Next to the warehouse was the prison. Were the convicts coming at me through an underground passage? But then there came a gust of wind, the rain rattled even more strongly, somewhere a tree rustled—and again, a deep, despairing sigh: "Oh, my God, my God!"
In the morning I wem out on the steps. The sky was gray and overcast, the rain continued to fall, and it was muddy. The warden walked hurriedly from door to door with his keys.
'Tll give you such a ticket you'll be scratching your- self for a week," he shouted. "I'll show you what kind of ticket you'll get!"
These words were intended for a group of twenty prisoners who, from the few phrases I overheard, were pleading to be sent to the hospital. They were ragged, soaked by the rain, covered with mud and shivering. They wanted to demonstrate in mime exactly what ailed them, but on their pinched, frozen faces it somehow came out false and crooked, although they were probably not lying at all. "Oh, my God, my God!" someone sighed, and my nightmare seemed to be continuing. The word "pariah" comes to mind, meaning that a person can fall no lower. During my entire sojourn on Sakhalin only in the settlers' barracks near the mine and here, in Derbinskoye, on that rainy, muddy morning, did I live through moments when I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation, lower than which he cannot go.
In Derbinskoye there is a convict, a former baroness, whom the local women call "the working baroness." She Jives a simple, laborer's life, and they say she is content with her circumstances. One former Moscow merchant who once had a shop on Tverskaya-Yamskaya told me with a sigh, "The racing season is on in Moscow," and then, turn- ing to the settlers, he began to explain what kind of races they were and how many people go on Sundays to the racecourse along Tverskaya-Yamskaya. "Believe me, your worship," he said, his excitement mounting as he discussed the racecourse, "I would give everything, my whole life, if I could see not Russia, not Moscow, but the Tverskaya!"
In Derbinskoye there Jive two people called Emelyan Samokhvalov, who are related to one another, and I remem- ber that in the yard of one of them I saw a rooster tied up by its legs. l1ie people of Derbinskoye are amused by the fact that these two Emelyan Samokhvalovs were by a strange and very complex combination of events brought together from the opposite ends of Russia to Derbinskoye, bearing the same name and being related to one another.
On August 27, General Kononovich arrived in Derbin- skoye with the commandant of the Tymovsk district, A. M. Butakov, and another young official. All three were intelli- gent and interesting people. The four of us went on a small trip. From beginning to end we were beset with so much discomfort that it turned out to be not a trip at all; it was a parody of an expedition.