At Sretensk he boarded a river steamer for the thou- sand-mile journey on the Amur to the Pacific. He had a first-class cabin to himself, and now at last he could enjoy the companionship of his fellow travelers or lose himself in solitary dreams as he pleased. Summer had come, the heat and the wild shores stimulated him, and he was de- lighted with the frankness of speech of the people on the boat, now so far from St. Petersburg that they could say anything chat came into their heads without fear of punish- ment. For hours he gazed through his binoculars at the wild duck, wild geese, loons and herons. For the first time he met the Chinese, for the Amur was the frontier between China and Russia. He thought them a good-humored and happy people, and speaks about them with a kind of envy. But it was the landscape which absorbed him, all cliffs and crags and a wilderness of forests, and he confessed that he was awestruck before its beauty and could nm even begin to describe it. He had the feeling that he had escaped from Russia altogether: it was like being in Texas or Patagonia.
\\!hen he reached Nikolayevsk, there remained only the shart passage w Alexandrovsk, the administrative cap- ital of Sakhalin Island. On July 10, on a brilliant sunny day, he set sail on the S.S. Baikal across the Gulf of Tartary. On that day the real wrment began, for there were chained convicts on the ship and he saw the five-year-old daughter of a convict helping her father by holding up his chains, while she climbed the gangway.
When Sakhalin came in sight, it looked like Hell, for five enormous forest fires were burning, and there were more fires reddening the sky from behind the mountains. That flamc-lit inferno seemed to be ideally chosen for a prison colony. h was evening, there werc flames every- where, and no people in sight—only the belching flames and the dark clouds of smoke over an inhospitable island. He spent the night on board ship, and the next morning, July ii, he was taken by cuuer w the port of Alexandrovsk.
Altogether he had spent nearly three months—cxactly cighty-two days—on the journey from Moscow, and now he fclt like someone who had passed an examination and could go on to beuer things. He was elated with all the vast prospects which now opened out to him, and ready for the hardest work he had ever done in his life.
Ill
h is a mistake w believe that a writer cannot come to grips with a small country in a short space of time. In three months he may learn more than he will learn in three years. He comes with eyes which are not dulled with familiarity, with a sense of passionate involvement, with a devotion which remains intense even when he works calmly and systematically. The antennae of his mind spread out to capture the urgent and important, and skillfully avoid the transiwry and impermanent. Chekhov spent only three
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months on Sakhalin, and wrote a four-hundred-page book on his observations. Most of the time he was like a harpooner poised for the kill.
Although he had feared that the authorities might prove to be unsympathetic and uncooperative, he was pleasantly surprised by the assistance they gave him. They permitted him to go nearly everywhere he wanted to go and to see nearly everyone he wanted to see. He was not permitted to meet political prisoners. The officials sometimes told lies, but they were palpable lies. They lied mechanically, system- atically and senselessly, like bureaucrats everywhere, and Chekhov came in time to regard them as well-meaning peo- ple who seemed not to realize the intolerable stupidity of their actions. He was permitted to quote from their official documents and did so with a fine relish: some of the more fantastic passages in the book come from the official docu- ments quoted without comment.
Chekhov spent the first days in Alexandrovsk as the guest of a bewhiskered doctor who bore a curious resem- blance to Henrik Ibsen. He was a cantankerous man, always fighting against the administration, and he had in fact sent in his resignation only a few hours before Chekhov's ar- rival on the island. The doctor painted an alarming picture of the administration, and said the authorities would not be particularly pleased to learn that Chekhov was staying with him. But a visit with General Kononovich, the com- mandant of the island, proved on the contrary that the au- thorities were mildly amused by the presence of two unruly doctors in their midst. When Chekhov paid his courtesy call on General Kononovich, he was told: ''I'm glad you are staying with our enemy. You will be able to learn our short- comings." The general was very suave, very kind, very intel- ligent, and totally inefficient.
General Kononovich was an experienced administrator who performed the rituals of government in a polite vacuum. Like Baron Korf, the Governor-General, he spoke about "the civilizing mission" of the penal colony as though these words possessed an independent existence of their own. In fact, as Chekhov soon learned, the colony was an inferno and every prison was a shambles. "The civilizing mission" consisted of reducing the prisoners to the lowest common denominator of human indignity. Prisoners were flogged for no reason at all, or because it amused the guards, or because they had committed some minor infrac- tion of the rule book. Those who were not sent out in working parties lived in loathsome squalor, guarded by ignorant and sadistic guards. Some prisoners amassed small fortunes through the institution of the maidanshchik, a kind of pawnbroker's shop which was tolerated and even encouraged by the administration, and sometimes these rich prisoners became the real rulers of the prison. The most terrible fate of all was reserved for the "free" women who accompanied their husbands to Sakhalin. They received no assistance from the government and could only survive by selling themselves or their young daughters. Thirteen- year-old prostitutes were common. Any warden or govern- ment official could obtain a woman simply by requisition- ing one. In the same way he could requisition a whole flock of servants, and Chekhov mentions a warden who acquired a seamstress, a chambermaid, a children's nurse, a laundress and a scrubwoman, and in addition to these five female servants he acquired a footman, a shoemaker and a chef. In 1872 the use of convicts as servants was expressly forbidden by the Governor-General, but General Kononovich on his own authority permitted their employ- ment in order to maintain the supervision and upkeep of government property. "This is not penal servitude," Chek- hov commented. "It is serfdom."