He had made his plans carefully and sensibly, and from conversations with people who had made the journey across Siberia he thought there would be no difficulties until he reached Sakhalin. In fact many things went wrong. Most of the time he was lonely, miserable, in a state of settled melancholy. If there had been a companion he liked, if the painter Isaac Levitan had accompanied him as he had once hoped, it might have been more endurable. The journey by train to Yaroslavl was uneventful, but travcling by boat along the Volga and Kama rivers shocked him because he seemed to be sinking into hitherto un- known regions of boredom. His first glimpse of the Volga was spoiled by rain, and when the sun came out he was delighted by the sight of the white churches and monas- teries along the banks and by the water meadows, but afterward when the sun lay hidden behind the clouds, the gray river became a torment. The Kama was no better, and besides, it grew colder the farther they traveled east- ward. There were patches of snow on the banks; ice floes floated down the river. The towns on the Kama seemed to be inhabited by people "who manufactured clouds, bore- dom, wet fences and garbage." He reached Perm at two o'clock in the morning, coughing and spitting blood. It was raining and bitterly cold. He took the train to Tyumen, where he discovered that the first boat did not leave for Tomsk for another two weeks, and so he arranged to hire a coach, a decision which he later regretted. He wore two pairs of trousers, a sheepskin jacket, a leather coat, and still he felt cold. Sometimes he saw straggling files of pris- oners, and the sight of those tragic figures making their way to their place of exile in Siberia only filled him with greater uneasiness, a more intolerable melancholy.
Still, there were some things he enjoyed or found amus- ing during the long journey from Tyumen to Tomsk. At first he enjoyed the sensation of spinning along at great speed in his small coach, a small springless carriage called a tarantass, drawn by a pair of horses. It resembled a wicker basket on wheels, and he liked "to look out on God's earth like a bird in a cage without a thought in the world." But soon the horses wearied and the coachman no longer shouted at them or whipped them. He found himself "groaning and moaning like an Egyptian pigeon."
Chekhov enjoyed the villages they passed through, and he had pleasant things to say about their sweet-smelling cleanliness, the soft beds with feather mattresses and huge pillows, the kindness of the villagers, who were well-man- nered and as clean as their huts. People did not belch or scratch or put their fingers in the glass when they were offering you milk. He liked the white bread, and ate so much of it that "for some days I made a pig of myself." He was entranced by the dignity and good sense of these people. "My God," he exclaimed, "how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for the cold which deprives Siberia of any summer, and the officials who corrupt the peasants and the exiles, Siberia would be the richest and happiest place on earth."
One day not long after he set out from Tyumen he was nearly killed in a fantastic collision, which he related in one of those long letters he wrote regu]arly to his sister Maria:
During the night of May 6th, before dawn, I was being driven by a charming old man in a little tarantass with a pair of horses. I was drowsy, and having nothing more im- portant to do, I watched the gleaming, snakelike flames darting about in the fields and the birchwoods. This is the way people here burn the last year's grass. Suddenly I heard the broken sound of wheels. Coming toward us at full tilt like a bird, hurtling along, was a troika belonging to the mail service. The old fellow quickly turned to the right, the troika flew past, and then I saw in the shadows an enormous, heavy three-horse post wagon with the coach- man making the return trip. Behind this wagon I saw an- other tearing along, also at full speed. We hurriedly turned right, and then to my great amazement and horror this
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troika turned not to the right, but to the left. I scarcely had time to think: "Good God, we're colliding!" when there was a horrible crash, the horses becoming entangled in a dark mass, the yokes fell away, my tarantass rose up in the air, and I lay on the road with all my trunks on top of me. But that was not the end. A third troika came dashing up. This last troika should really have reduced me and my trunks to pulp, but thank God I was not asleep and had not broken any bones in my fall, and so I was able to jump up quickly and run to one side. "Stop!" I yelled to the third troika. "Stop!" The third troika hurled itself on the second and came to a stop. Of course if I had been able to sleep in the tarantass, or if the third troika had flung itself immediately on the second, I would have returned home a cripple or a headless horseman. Results of the collision: broken shafts, torn harness, yokes and baggage on the ground, frightened and exhausted horses, and the terror of having experienced extreme danger. It appears chat the first driver had been whipping up his horses, while the coach- men of the other two troikas were fast asleep, with no one in command. After recovering from the excitement, my old driver and the drivers of the other three mail coaches be- gan swearing furiously at each other. How they cursed! I thought it would end up in a wild battle. You cannot im- agine how lonely I felt amid chat wild, blaspheming horde, in the open country, at dawn, beside the flames far and near which were devouring the grass without making the cold night air any warmer. And my soul was heavy within me! You listen to the curses, gaze down at the broken shafts and your own littered luggage, and you cannot help feeling you are in another world and at any moment you will be trampled to death. . . .
It was a landscape which seemed to have sprung straight out of Chekhov's short stories, at once commonplace and fantastical, where nothing of importance ever happened although at any moment there might be a strange gather- ing of forces, a lonely death, flames running along the grass. The road between Tyumen and Tomsk was a night- mare, full of ruts, so that he was always being jolted, yet flat and straight, seeming to go on forever. After five or six days the rains began, and then there was no end to them. It rained all day and all night, the bridges were washed away, the mud clung to the wheels, the cold wind froze him. The lrtysh was in flood, making strange hollow sounds as though thousands of coffins on the bed of the river were jostling together, lapping against the banks and then with- drawing quickly as though it could not tolerate a land in- habited only by toads and the souls of murderers. The ferrymen were insolent, the ferryboats terrifying with their long sweeps like the pincers of crabs, and there was some- thing about the swollen rivers which was like death on the soul.
\X'hen he reached Tomsk it was still pouring with rain, and the town was so uninviting, so dreary, so unbelievably without any redeeming features that he found himself willingly surrendering to the good offices of an assistant chief of police, who wrote plays and was having an affair with a married woman, on whose behalf he had written a petition to the Tsar pleading for a divorce. Chekhov read the petition, and was solemnly rewarded with an invitation to tour the local brothels. He returned to his lodging at two o'clock in the morning, more miserable and disgusted than ever.
The journey went better after Tomsk. He bought a light carriage for i 30 rubles, expecting to sell it later at a profit. In fact he sold it at a loss, and indeed all his finan- cial arrangements during his travels across Siberia were disastrous, because he was continually bribing his drivers to make up for lost time, paying them twice or three times the proper fee and feeling a great sorrow for them, for their work was as arduous as penal servitude. At intervals the carriage broke down, and in a mood of towering frus- tration he would have to wait until it was mended. But when he reached Krasnoyarsk on the river Yenisei his spirits revived, for the majestic river was like "a mighty warrior," far more powerful than the Volga and spectacu- larly beautiful, and Krasnoyarsk with its clean streets and white churches was like paradise after the muddy villages he had passed through. He felt better, no longer spitting blood. The rain had stopped, the birds were singing, the carriage thundered along well-made roads; he could even sleep in the carriage at night. After Krasnoyarsk came the taiga, the mysterious haunted forests of firs, larches and birch trees, and he would muse for hours on the little path- ways leading to forgotten villages, secret stills, perhaps gold mines, lost in the immensity of the silent forests. He de- lighted in the odor of resin, the blue, pink and yellow flowers bordering the road, the fuming mountains beyond. Lake Baikal, too, enchanted him, and he wrote to his mother that he would never forget his journey across the vast mirror-smooth surface of the lake on a clear sunny day, looking down two-thirds of a mile into the crystal-clear depths of turquoise blue and seeing the rock formations on the bottom. The wooded heights around the lake teemed with bears, sables and wild goats, and he so delighted in the lake and these mysterious mountainous forests that he spent two days on the shore, wildly contenc with a land- scape which reminded him of Finland, Switzerland and the banks of the Don. His spirits revived during these last days of the journey, and he was able to forget the horrors of the earlier days. ' God grant chat everyone make as good a journey as mine," he wrote, and he evidently meant it.