eyes, and in that little head on the long neck, and in her slenderness there was something snakelifc; all in green but for the yellow on her bosom, she looted with a smile on her face as a viper looks out of the young rye in the spring at the passersby, stretching itself and lifting its head.
Aksinya is perhaps the most evil character in Chekhov. In a scene that matches, and, in its shocking unexpectedness, possibly surpasses the horror of the blinding of Gloucester, Aksinya scalds to death a baby who stands in the way of her ascendancy. Natasha comes nowhere near this level of evil-ness. She is unbearable, but she would never commit murder. Aksinya is all in green, Natasha wears only a green sash-a touch of evil. My Sonia-clearly a Natasha rather than an Aksinya-might fittingly have worn a green scarf. However, I am bound to report that she wore a red scarf (over a white angora sweater). Nonfiction may avail itself of the techniques of elision and condensation by which fiction achieves its coherence, but is largely barred from the store of mythopoetic allusion from which fiction derives its potency. Even Chekhov, when writing nonfiction, doesn't write like Chekhov. The book he wrote reporting on a three-month visit to the prison colony of Sakhalin in the summer of 1890, for example, is a worthy and often interesting work, but rarely a moving one, and never a brilliant one.
The Island of Sakhalin isn't an artistic failure, since Chekhov had no artistic ambitions for it. He saw it as a work of social and natural science, and he even considered submitting it to the University of Moscow medical school as a dissertation attesting to his qualifications to teach there. (The idea was broached to the dean of the medical faculty by Grigory Rossolimo, and scornfully turned down.) It ran serially in the journal Russian Thought in 1893, and was published as a book in 1895. There are occasional Chekhov-ian passages, but not many; it is a book largely of information. In 1897, when he was in Nice for his health, Chekhov was asked by an editor to write a story 'on a subject taken from life abroad'; he declined, explaining, 'I am able to write only from memory, I never write directly from observed life. I must let the subject filter through my memory, until only what is important and typical in it remains in the filter.' In the book on Sakhalin, Chekhov wrote from file cards and scholarly books and reports. His customary artist's fearlessness gave way to a kind of humility, almost a servility, before the ideal of objectivity and the protocols of scientific methodology. Like a convict chained to a wheelbarrow (one of the punishments at Sakhalin), he drags along the burden of his demographic, geographic, agricultural, ethnographic, zoological, and botanical facts. He cannot omit anything; his narrative line is constantly being derailed by his data. In his autobiography for Rossolimo, Chekhov registered his awareness that 'the principles of creative art do not always admit of full accord with scientific data; death by poison cannot be represented on stage as it actually happens.' In the Sakhalin book, the conflict between science and art is almost always resolved in science's favor. Chekhov tells it like it is, and allows his narrative to go where his mountain of information pushes it, which is all over the place, and ultimately nowhere. Chekhov's horror at the harshness and squalor of life in the colony, his contempt l'4 «lit- stupidity and callousness of the administration, and his pity for the convicts and settlers sometimes does break through the posture of scientific detachment. But in rendering the sufferings on this island of the damned, Chekhov could not achieve in three hundred pages what he achieved in a four-page passage at the end of his story 'The Murder' (1895) about Sakhalin convicts in fetters loading coal onto a steamer on a stormy night.
If the trip to Sakhalin yielded no work of literary distinction, its personal (and eventual literary) significance for Chekhov was momentous. He needed to go on a journey. In a letter to Suvorin written on May 4, 1889, from a rented dacha in the Ukraine, he wrote, 'There is a sort of stagnation in my soul. I explain it by the stagnation in my personal life. I am not disappointed, I am not tired, I am not depressed, but simply everything has suddenly become less interesting. I must do something to rouse myself.' It is impossible to know, of course, what Chekhov meant by the stagnation in his personal life, but it seems likely that his malaise was connected to the final illness (from tuberculosis) of his brother Nikolai, whom he had been nursing since March, first in Moscow and then at the dacha. The letter of May 4 characteristically makes no mention of the rigors of the death watch, but three glancing references to Nikolai tell the story of Chekhov's sense of stuckness: 'I'm in a good mood, and if it weren't for the coughing painter and the mosquitoes-even Elpes formula is no protection against them-I'd be a perfect Potyomkin,' and, later, 'Bring me some banned books and newspapers from abroad. If it weren't for the painter, I'd go with you,' and, a few lines down, 'Lensky [an actor in the Maly Theater] has invited me to accompany him on tour to Tiflis. I'd go if it weren't for the painter, who's not doing any too brilliantly.' Nikolai died on June 17, and in September Chekhov completed his powerful and long 'A Dreary Story,' about an eminent professor who comes to the end of his life and finds it frighten-ingly meaningless; he realizes that he lacks a ruling idea with which to make sense of his existence. The atmosphere of the work is like a taste of tin in the mouth, the fatigue behind the eyes produced by something unbearable. That it was written by a man in mourning is not surprising; perhaps only a man in mourning could have written a tale of such sour painfulness. Simmons speculates that Nikolai's death from tuberculosis forced Chekhov to confront the probability of his own death from the disease and, further, that 'A Dreary Story' reflects Chekhov's own need for a ruling idea. On October 4, 1888, in a much-quoted letter, Chekhov had written of his independence of any such need: I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms… I regard trademarks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom- freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the program I would follow if I were a great artist.
A year later, Chekhov was no longer so comfortable with his artist's freedom. At the end of 1889, he abruptly dropped literature and began to make preparations for the six-thousand-mile journey to Sakhalin, at the easternmost end of the continent. In letters to his baffled friends, Chekhov gives various high-minded reasons for making the trip-to fulfill his debt to science, to rouse the conscience of an indifferent public-but the explanation that has the greatest ring of truth is the one he gave to Shcheglov in a letter of March 22: 'I am not going for the sake of impressions or observations, but simply for the sake of living for six months differently from how I have lived hitherto.'
The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half-month journey are some of the best he has left us. They permit us to see, as if in a movie with a large budget for special effects, the hardships he endured as he made his way across the continent, first by train and riverboat, and then (for the largest part of the trip-nearly three thousand miles) by frail open horse-drawn vehicles on rutted and sometimes washed-out roads. (The Trans-Siberian Railroad did not yet exist.) He traveled, day and night, in frigidly cold weather and endless spells of rain. He suffered from hunger and cold and painful shoes. Before he became accustomed to it, the jogging and lurching of the open carriage made his bones ache. For a consumptive to undertake such a trip would seem like a form of suicide. But, strangely, Chekhov didn't sicken; on the contrary, he thrived. As the journey progressed, he stopped coughing and spitting blood, and started feeling really well (even his hemorrhoids subsided). In The White Plague, the Duboses devote a chapter to some of the odder forms of therapy that were thought up during the premodern period of tuberculosis. One of these was the horseback-riding cure, popular in the eighteenth century. They cite several cases of patients (one of them John Locke's nephew) who recovered from tuberculosis after strenuous daily riding, and note a Dutch physician's recommendation that consumptives 'of the lower classes who were confined to sedentary occupations endeavor to find employment as coachmen.' They go on to write of a cobbler who did become a coachman. 'He was well as long as he remained in the saddle (on the box) but lost his health when he returned to cobbling.' Chekhov remained well until he returned to Moscow, in the fall of 1890, when his poor health promptly returned. ('It's a strange business,' he wrote to Suvorin on December 24. 'While I was traveling to Sakhalin and back I felt perfectly well, but now, at home, the devil knows what is happening to me. My head is continually aching, I have a feeling of languor all over, I am quickly exhausted, apathetic, and worst of all, my heart is not beating regularly.') In his letters during the trip, he exulted over his endurance. On June 5, during a stopover in the Siberian town of Irkutsk, where he slept in a real bed and had a bath ('The soapsuds off my head were not white but of an ashen brown color, as though I were washing a horse'), he wrote to Leikin: From Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk was a desperate struggle through impassable mud. My goodness, it frightens me to think of it! How often I had to mend my chaise, to walk, to swear, to get out of my chaise and get into it again, and so on! It sometimes happened that I was from six to ten hours getting from one station to another, and every time the chaise had to be mended it took from ten to fifteen hours… Add to all that hunger, dust in one's nose, one's eyes glued together with sleep, the continual dread that something would get broken in the chaise… Nevertheless I am well content, and I thank God that He has given me the strength and opportunity to make this journey. I have seen and experienced a great deal, and it has all been very new and interesting to me not as a literary man, ' but as a human being. The Yenissey, the Taiga, the stations, the drivers, the wild scenery, the wild life, the physical agonies caused by the discomforts of the journey, the enjoyment I got from rest-all taken together is so delightful that I can't describe it…
