On June 20, Chekhov exulted again to Leikin from a ship on the Amur River: I have driven with horses more than four thousand versts. My journey was entirely successful. I was in good health all the time and lost nothing of my luggage but a penknife. I can wish no one a better journey. The journey is absolutely free from danger, and all the tales of escaped convicts, of night attacks, and so on are nothing but legends, traditions of the remote past. A revolver is an entirely superfluous article. Now I am sitting in a first-class cabin, and feel as though I were in Europe. I feel in the mood one is in after passing an examination.
Chekhov arrived at Sakhalin on July 11, and remained there for three months, traveling all over the island and using the device of a census to gain entrance into prisons and settlers' huts. (Simmons theorizes that the project of a scientific investigation of the colony was itself an after-the-fact rationale to justify his journey to his friends-and to himself.) Chekhov set about his work with characteristic energy and zeal. He managed to interview thousands of people; along with the convicts and settlers, he interviewed the indigenous Gilyaks and Ainus. By October, he was more than ready to leave.
Back in Moscow in December (he made the return journey by ship from Vladivostok-through Hong Kong, Ceylon, India, Egypt, and Turkey-to Odessa) he wrote to Suvorin, 'I know a great deal now, but I have brought away a horrid feeling. While I was staying in Sakhalin, I had only a bitter feeling in my inside as though from rancid butter; and now, as I remember it, Sakhalin seems to me a perfect hell. For two months I worked intensely, putting my back into it; in the third month, I began to feel ill from the bitterness I have spoken of, from boredom, and the thought that the cholera would come from Vladivostok to Sakhalin, and that I was in danger of having to winter in the convict settlement.' But a week later he wrote to Suvorin, 'How wrong you were when you advised me not to go to Sakhalin… what a sour creature I would be now if I had sat at home. Before my journey The Kreutzer Sonata seemed to me to be an event, but now it seems to me absurd and ridiculous. Either I've grown up because of my journey or I have gone crazy-the devil knows which.'
On the eve of Chekhov's heroic journey a complication had arisen that almost ruined it. An artist named N-, 'a nice but tedious man,' wanted to travel with him. Chekhov enlisted Suvorin's aid, writing, 'To refuse him my company I haven't the courage, but to travel with him would be simple misery.' Chekhov went on, 'Be my benefactor, tell N- that I am a drunkard, a swindler, a nihilist, a rowdy character, and that it is out of the question to travel with me, and that a journey in my company will do nothing but upset him.' 'When one is traveling one must be absolutely alone,' Chekhov wrote to his sister on June 13, concluding his complaints about a trio of traveling companions-an army doctor and two lieutenants-he had picked up somewhere along the way and now wished to shed. He had begun to complain about the trio in a previous letter to Masha (June 7): 'I like silence better than anything on the journey, and my companions talk and sing without stopping, and they talk of nothing but women.' Chekhov finally shed the officers by traveling first-class on the Amur River steamer, where they had booked second-class.
That he had picked them up in the first place is consistent with his lifelong inconsistency in regard to solitude. (On the boat, he actually sought out the officers and had tea with them.) He liked silence, but he also didn't like it. He complained about trying to write in a room where someone was banging on the piano, a baby was crying, and someone else was asking his advice about a medical matter; but when the house was silent he would ask his brother to play the piano. 1 le complained about the number of guests at Melikhovo, but also said he couldn't live without guests. ('When I'm alone, for some reason I become terrified, just as though I were alone in a frail little boat on a great ocean,' he wrote to Suvorin in June 1889.) At the end of his life, when he felt stuck in Yalta, as he had felt stuck with the dying Nikolai, he complained about the crowd of visitors he had-and about his feeling of isolation. He was a restless man-perhaps because he understood too well what rest represented. 'Life is only given us once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty,' the consumptive narrator of 'An Anonymous Story' (1893) says. Chekhov lived only forty-four years, and during the last third of his life he was surely conscious of the likelihood of a premature death. Those of us who do not live under such a distinctly stated sentence of death cannot know what it is like. Chekhov's masterpieces are always obliquely telling us. Nine
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hekhov's decision to write a book of nonfiction about his journey to Sakhalin, instead of allowing the trip to develop into fiction in his interior darkroom, may have been influenced by the fact that he had already written a masterpiece of fiction about a journey. This was the long story 'The Steppe' (1888), the first Chekhov story to appear in a literary journal (as opposed to a newspaper) and the work that catapulted him into the ranks of major Russian writers. The story chronicles a summer journey across the steppe of a oia-year-old boy named Yegorushka, accompanying his merchant uncle, Ivan Ivanitch Kuzmitchov, and an old priest, Father Christopher Sireysky, who are taking a convoy of wagons filled with wool to a distant town, where the wool will be sold and the boy put in school. Along the way, they search for a mysterious, powerful entrepreneur of the Ittppe named Varlamov, on whom the sale of the wool obscurely depends. 'I describe the plain, its lilac vistas, the sheep breeders, the Jews, the priests, the nocturnal storms, the inns, the wagon trains, the steppe birds and so on,' Chekhov wrote to Grigorovich on January 12, 1888, while composing the story. But he was nervous about it:
… I'm ending up with something rather odd and much too original. Since I'm not used to writing anything long and am constantly, as is my wont, afraid of writing too much, I've gone to the other extreme. All the pages come out compact, as if they had been condensed, and impressions keep crowding each other, piling up, and pushing one another out of the way. The short scenes… are squeezed tightly together; they move in an unbroken chain and are therefore fatiguing; instead of a scene I end up with a dry, detailed list of impressions, very much like an outline; instead of an artistically integrated depiction of the steppe, I offer the reader an encyclopedia of the steppe. Chekhov sounds as if he could not quite come to terms with his own originality. He is like a resistant reader of an avant-garde work. The compression about which he frets is, of course, the compression that is the signature of his mature work. The writing that is 'very much like an outline' is precisely the writing that demands 'the attention accorded poetry.' It is prose as pared down-and as charged-as poetry. Early in 'The Steppe' (subtitled 'The Story of a Journey') Chekhov draws a crucial contrast-one that will hover over the story-between the merchant and the priest as travelers. Kuzmitchov is like the businessmen one sees today on planes and trains working on laptops and talking on cell phones. He is oblivious of his surroundings. He only wants to get there. 'Fanatically devoted to his work, Kuzmitchov always, even in his sleep and at church when they were singing 'Like the cherubim,' thought about his business and could never forget it for a moment; and now'-the men are taking a nap-'he was probably dreaming about bales of wool, wagons, prices, Varlamov.' Father Christopher, in contrast, had never in all his life been conscious of anything which could, like a boa constrictor, coil about his soul and hold it tight. In all the numerous enterprises he had undertaken in his day, what attracted him was not so much the business itself, but the bustle and the contact with other people involved in every undertaking. Thus in the present expedition, he was not so much interested in wool, in Varlamov, or in prices, as in the long journey, the conversations on the way, the sleeping under a chaise, and the meals at odd times… He must have been dreaming of… all sorts of things that Kuzmitchov could not possibly dream of. How should one live? Like a Kuzmitchov or a Father «In iitopher? The story is borne like a canopy on these two poles of possibility. Kuzmitchov is desperate to find Varlamov, who has always just left the place at which the travelers have arrived. He searches for him the way we search in dreams for someone we will never find. Father Christopher is calm: 'A man isn't a needle-we shall find him.' As Kuzmitchov looks at him 'almost with hatred,' the priest faces east and for a quarter of an hour Kuzmitchov must wait while he recites his psalms for the day. The quest for Varlamov threads its way through the pages of 'The Steppe' with a similar lack of urgency, as though Chekhov were reluctant to allow a conventional plot device to coil about his narrative. But when Varlamov finally comes into view-a short, gray older man on a small horse, showing his displeasure to a subordinate who has not followed orders-he is a figure of electrifying authority. 'It's people like that the earth rests upon,' a peasant says of him. Varlamov's face has the same expression of businesslike coldness as Ivan Ivanitch's face, the same look of fanatical zeal for business. But yet what a difference could be felt between him and Kuzmitchov! Uncle Ivan Ivanitch always had on his face, together with his businesslike reserve, a look of anxiety and apprehension that he would not find Varlamov, that he would be late, that he would miss a good price; nothing of that sort, so characteristic of small and dependent persons, could be seen in the face or figure of Varlamov. This man made the price himself, was not looking for anyone, and did not depend on anyone; however ordinary his exterior, yet in everything, even in the manner of holding his whip, there was a sense of power and habitual authority over the steppe.
You will have noted the word 'Uncle.' It is Yegorushka who has been observing Varlamov and whose thoughts Chekhov records. The consciousness of the boy-who is not yet either a Kuzmitchov or a Father Christopher, but possesses both the former's hysterical anxiety and the latter's capacity for pleasure-is the lens through which most
