"''ll give you such a ticket you'll be scratching yourself for a week," he shouted. 'Tll show you what kind of ticket you'll get!"
These words were intended for a group of twenty pris- oners who, from the 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, though 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. . . . I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation, lower than which he cannot go.
xxxii
The sight of the prisoners miming their illnesses on that rainy morning afflicted Chekhov more deeply than any act of physical brutality he saw on the island. He saw men being flogged within an inch of their lives, he saw pris- oners chained to wheelbarrows, but a man in chains can possess a human dignity, and a man who is flogged and drenched in his own blood also possesses dignity; but the poor devils miming their illnesses had none. They were whining silently, begging the merciless to give them mercy, more like dogs than human beings. Chekhov was not re- volted by them. He was revolted by the machine which in- evitably produced them.
He had studied human degradation and knew it well. Acutely sensitive to suffering, he was equally sensitive to the degradation of the human spirit. In his book he de- scribes a flogging with an almost clinical detachment, but there was no detachment when he spoke about the strange miming in the rain-swept courtyard. Only a few years be- fore he had written his credo in a letter to his friend Alexey Pleshcheyev: "My Holy of Holies are the human body, health, intelligence, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom from violence and lying in whatever forms they may manifest themselves." Against those who degraded men, he was prepared to wage implacable war.
So he spent his days on the island, looking keenly at the evidence of a degradation so complete that he some- times hoped the whole island would be swept off the face of the earth. He spent two months in the central part of the island and another month of exploring in the south- ern part, which was to belong to Russia for a few more years, coming under Japanese domination at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War. Having visited all the prisons and settlements except a few very small and isolated com- munities, he would claim that he had talked to every settler and convict, studied all the church records, all the regula- tions and all the laws, and there was no aspect of life on Sakhalin which was foreign ro him. The claim was very nearly true, and it only remained to put all his notes in order and write the book.
On October 13, on a cold, blustery day, he was rowed from the Korsakov landing to the S.S. Petersburg anchored in the Tatar Strait, and a few hours later he saw the moun- tains of Sakhalin sinking below the horizon. The ship was bound for Odessa with pors of call at Hong Kong, Singa- pore and Ceylon, where there was time to make a journey into the interior. Ceylon was paradise; he enjoyed the palm groves and the sight of the bronze-hued women walking in the paddy fields, and in later years he liked to remember a brief romance with a Ceylonese girl in the moonlight. It was here in Ceylon that the journey really came to an end. He wrote to his friend Leontiev-Shcheglov in December when he reached Moscow: "I am so filled with joy and satisfaction that it would not bother me in the least if I succumbed to paralysis or departed this world by way of dysentery. I can say: l have lived! l have had et:erything l want! I have been in Hell, which is Sakhalin, and in Paradise, which is the island of Ceylon!"
IV
Chekhov was never a social reformer, and had no in- terest in revolutionary theories. \X'hile he hoped to be instrumental in changing the penal system in Sakhalin, he had no illusions about the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise. The roots of the system lay deep in Russian his- tory, in the peculiar forms of brutality which had been en- couraged by generations of autocrats for their own protec- tion. Not only the monarchy and the bureaucracy were implicated; the Russian character and the Russian people were equally responsible. There were no easy panaceas, and soon Chekhov resigned himself to the knowledge that at the very best he could only help to change the situation a little. If he had lived to see the Bolsheviks come to power, he would have learned that the system was virtually unchangeable.
Because the system was evil, and because he was deter- mined to fight it with all his available energy, he gave him- self up to the book with passionate absorption. But the form escaped him. He complained that he had seen so much, and had so much to say, that it was difficult to know how to begin. The truth was that he was never quite sure whether he was writing a treatise or a book for popular consumption, and until the end he hovered uncertainly between two entirely different kinds of book. In May, 1891, when he was engrossed in the early chapters, he wrote to Suvorin that he was having difficulties. "Still, I was able to get the devil by the tail. I have described the climate so well that you will shiver with cold when you are reading it. How unpleasant it is to have to give statistics." Unpleasant or not, Chekhov insisted on giving them in abundance. He offers the reader every statistic he can lay his hands on, compares them, adds them up, and not having a mind which moves easily among numbers, he sometimes reduced them to bathos. Writing again a few days later to Suvorin, he said he had discovered the main cause of the trouble. "I had the illusion that my Sakhalin book was intended to teach certain things," he wrote. "I realized I was holding something back, not letting myself go. But no sooner had I begun to recount the funny things I saw on Sakhalin—the pigs, too—the work went splendidly." He added regret- fully that he found some difficulty in getting any humor into the book.
He planned to complete the book and see it through the press by the autumn of 1891, but fate was against him. There were stories to be written, and there were delays caused by the purchase of a small estate in Melikhovo, fifty miles south of Moscow. Then he fell ill. In 1892 there was a cholera epidemic, and he became a doctor superin- tending relief work in an entire district. Sakhalin was forgotten in the presence of an even more dangerous tribula- tion, and since the epidemic continued well into the follow- ing year, many months passed before he could return to his manuscript. Chapters from the book appearec:l. in a volume of essays and stories called Help for the Starving, published in aid of victims of the famine which followed the cholera epidemic, and in the magazine Russian Thought, but the complete work was not published until the summer of 1895. Writing to Suvorin in the spring when the last pages were being written, he said: "Well, it mrns out to be a very fat book, with a lot of notes, anecdotes, statistics, etc. Per- haps it will do well. And if not, it's nothing to worry about —death will come anyway."
In this mood, half hopeful, wholly detached, Chekhov gave his book to a world which preferred his short stories. It is a strange work, brilliant and wayward, scrupulously honest and unpretentious, lit by a flame of quiet indigna- tion and furious sorrow. The horror is made all the more credible because he refuses to dramatize it. This is how it is, he says, leaving to the reader the task of changing the conditions on the island, for he has presented all the evi- dence—the geography, the geology, the ecology, all the statistics in the prison records and the very souls of the people suffering under a ferocious administration—and there is nothing left for him to do. It was perhaps his greatest work, and certainly he expended more energy and affection on it than on any other. "It gives me joy," he wrote, "that this harsh convict's robe shall have a place in my literary wardrobe."