noted their skill at demonstrating the beauty of thighs without undressing or kicking up their legs… Chorus girls felt awful; they went hungry, whored out of poverty, it was hot, stifling, people smelt of sweat, like horses. If even an innocent girl had noticed and described that, then you can judge their position… On literature Chekhov sounded as embittered as his dying professor in 'A Dreary Story' or his neurotic The Wood Demon. On 27 December 1889 he berated the intelligentsia to Suvorin: The best modern writers, whom I love, serve evil, since they destroy. Some of them, like Tolstoy, say 'Don't have sex with women, because they have mucous discharges; woman is revolting because her breath smells.'… these writers… help the devil multiply the slugs and woodlice we call intellectuals. Jaded, apathetic, idly philosophizing, a cold intelligentsia, which… is unpatriotic, miserable, colourless, which gets drunk on one glass and visits 50-kopeck brothels. Anton defended only medical science: A society that doesn't believe in God but is afraid of omens and the devil, which denies all doctors and then hypocritically mourns Botkin
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THIRTY O
Arming for the Crusade December 1889-April 1890 BY THE END OF 1889 Anton had resolved to make a long journey -from which he thought he might not return - over Siberia to the edge of the Russian empire, the island of Sakhalin, Russia's grimmest penal colony. His family and friends had hints - his ardent obituary of the explorer of Central Asia, Nikolai Przhevalsky; his reading of Misha's old law-lecture notes, geography textbooks, maps, political journalism; contact with administrators of Siberia's prison empire. Ever since childhood Anton had been an avid reader of explorers' biographies and geographers' descriptions. Now, shaken by Kolia's death, he was seeking to emulate Przhevalsky's heroic exploits. After The Wood Demon, the writer felt humiliated, and the doctor-scientist in his personality took the lead. Not for the last time, Anton's entangled love life made the life of a solitary wanderer seem particularly alluring to him.
After the first performance of The Wood Demon friends expected Chekhov to flee, as he had after both premieres of Ivanov, to the other capital city, but Anton put off his New Year visit to Petersburg. The Suvorins drank Anton's health in his absence. He had fled to the Kiseliovs at Babkino. He composed for Maria Kiseliova an opening line of a story 'On such and such a date hunters wounded a young female elk in the Daragan forest' and left the rest for her to write. Anton, however, had an ulterior motive for going back to Babkino: he needed to talk to Maria's brother-in-law, a Senator Golubev, who could get him a berth on a ship that returned via China and India from Sakhalin to Odessa. In exchange for the Kiseliovs' help he agreed to examine Maria's father who was dying in Petersburg.
Around 4 January 1890, Chekhov took horses from Babkino and rejoined the railway north: he went to Petersburg with Maria Kiseliova and her younger daughter. In Petersburg, too he had business: he
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ANNIES Dl' I'fc I.HIIINAGE wanted to ask the Department of Taxes to give his brother Misha a job, and Kleopatra Karatygina asked him to persuade Suvorin to give her work. Above all, he needed official support for his journey to Sakhalin.
Anton spent a month lobbying in the city. Suvorin's name opened the doors of ministries and the prison administration, but Suvorin disapproved of Chekhov's journey: it was hazardous, and would take his closest friend away for a year. Chekhov saw the director of prisons, Galkin-Vraskoi, who, when Anton undertook to review his report, promised that Siberia's prison gates would be opened to Chekhov (and then sent a secret telegram to ensure the opposite). Suvorin gave Anton a newspaper correspondent's card.
Chekhov's plans were praised in the newspapers. Many Russian writers had made involuntary, often one-way, journeys to Siberia; none had undertaken voluntary exploration. This journey to the heart of evil was a Dantean exploit that rehabilitated Chekhov in radical eyes. They hoped Chekhov would discover on Sakhalin a set of coherent 'ideals'. Perhaps Anton's main reason for making this suicidal journey was to silence accusations that he was indifferent to the suffering he portrayed. The Russian Zolas - Korolenko and Ertel - withdrew their strictures. The animals in the literary zoo were envious of Chekhov's limelight; some of them were even glad that he would be out of the way for the rest of the year. From Petersburg Gruzinsky wrote to Ezhov (in Moscow playing whist with Vania and Misha): 'It's excellent that Chekhov is going; Sakhalin is not the point, the point is travelling the great oceans and meeting prisoners.' The right wing, however, sneered: before Anton set off, Burenin wrote: The talented writer Chekhov To distant Sakhalin trekked off. He searched its grim quarries For ideas for stories, But finding there a total lack, Took the earliest steamboat back. Inspiration, says this fable, Lies beneath the kitchen table. Obsessed with his expedition, Anton lost interest in his elder brother. When Suvorin asked, Anton demurred:
DECEMBER 1889-APRIL 189O
I don't know what to do with Aleksandr. It's not just that he drinks. That would be all right, but he is inextricably stuck in surroundings where it is literally impossible not to drink. Between us: his spouse also drinks. Grey, nasty, gloomy… And that man since he was 14, practically, has wanted to marry. All his life he's been marrying and swearing that he'll never marry again. Anton alternated hard work with frivolity. He read everything about Siberia. Suvorin had a collection of forbidden books, which included pamphlets on political prisoners, as well as Tolstoy's diatribe against sex and marriage, The Kreutzer Sonata - a book it was hard to ban, since Tsar Alexander III had liked it. Anton went to Shcheglov's name-day party; he went with the Suvorins and their Tresor to the Petersburg Dog Show. Shcheglov was exhausted by the parties until three or four in the morning. Anton had surreptitious encounters with Kleopatra Karatygina. He channelled her energy into making notes on Siberia and Sakhalin, some from the Public Library, some from her own experience. She gave him lists of friends to tap for hospitality; she taught him Siberian etiquette - never ask why anyone is in Siberia; she gave him the dates for navigation on Siberia's rivers; for his birthday she made him a travelling pillow - 'for when you're sick on the boat'. In return she wanted affection. Her weapon was Anton's anxiety not to be found out: 'Where did I put the letter to you? Which envelope did I put it in?… The letter to my sister!'9 When Anton's family did find out, Kleopatra denied responsibility: 'If your mama and sister find out your secret d'un polichinelle of course it isn't my fault. You did ask me not to blurt things out in Moscow.' Like Olga Kundasova, Kleopatra resigned herself to being unloved. She wrote dozens of notes, some in doggerel, some reproachful. She touched Chekhov for loans that she never repaid. She hoped that his dream of 'a room to share with Lika Mizinova' would prove a curse.
Anton and Suvorin clung to one another: they travelled back to Moscow together, and Suvorin took a room in the Slav Bazaar. They discussed illness, real and imaginary. One night they watched Racine's Phedre; the next they went to the Literary Society's fancy dress ball; the following night they dined with Grigorovich, and healed the breach between him and Chekhov. As Anton recuperated from his 'Sakhalin fever', his women, and libraries, he summed up his Petersburg month to Pleshcheev: 'I think of the sins I have committed, of the thousand
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barrels of wine I have drunk… In one month in Petersburg I committed so many great and petty deeds that I should be both promoted to general and hanged.'
The Suvorins left. Anton lacked congenial company. Levitan was in Paris, from where he complained of 'psychopathic' impressionists and women 'overworked by centuries of screwing'.10 Anton studied atlases, ancient and modern, and dreamed of river boats. 'I feel like crossing 12 or 18 months out of my life,' he told one journalist. He wrote just one story for New Times: 'Devils', later 'Thieves', portrays a nest of horse thieves in the steppes. Suvorin was upset that Chekhov romanticized criminals. Anton just edited Suvorin's unsolicited manuscripts, and compiled a geographical introduction to a future book on Sakhalin. In Moscow he sent Masha, Olga Kundasova and Lika Mizi-nova to the Rumiantsev Museum (now the Russian State Library) to copy what he had marked about Sakhalin and Siberia in hundreds of journals and books. From Petersburg, from Aleksandr and from Kleopatra, came facts, opinions and pleas. Karatygina reverted to a motherly style: Forgive me for poking my Roman Catholic profile where I shouldn't, but I am awfully reluctant to have you in my Siberian kingdom playing the part of a hopeless floating point (out of boredom and ignorance) and therefore I have taken it on myself, my bold child, without your knowledge, to get for you letters of recommendation. Anton was deeply upset that February by a reminder of Kolia's death: Ezhov was sitting at the table crying: his young wife is ill with consumption. He has to take her south
