quickly. I asked him if he had money, he said yes. He spoilt my mood with his tears. He reminded me of certain things, and anyway I'm sorry for him. Of the many forces that pursued Chekhov to the Hades of Sakhalin, 'certain things' - i.e. Kolia's ghost - were the most persistent, if not the avowed motives.
From intimations of mortality Anton was rescued by Lika Mizinova. She and Anton began to exert a pull on each other. Granny Sofia's diary traces day by day Lika falling in thrall: 5 March. Monday. Lika at 8 p.m. went to the Chekhovs, she came back at 3 a.m., very pleased that she had been mere…
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10 March. Saturday. Lidia [Lika's mother] is writing… advice for Lika, to bring her to her senses, to pull her back from an idle, disorientated life, she is never home and every night comes back late; she doesn't like the house or home life. This upsets us terribly, especially her mother, and it's impossible to talk to her, she starts yelling immediately and it ends widi her walking out angry with family life, saying tliat it's hell, not life. 13 March. Tuesday. Lika has been out and about until 2 a.m., she went to the Rumiantsev museum to make notes about Sakhalin island… 28 March. Wednesday. I happened to make the acquaintance of die mother of Maria Chekhova, Lika and I met her in the arcade, very nice, simple manners, we were introduced and had a chat there and then. 29 March. Thursday. Lika was to go to All Night Vigil at some nunnery with her girl friends. She deceived us! She went with the Chekhovs and came back at 1.30 a.m. 31 March. Saturday. The brazen Kundasova appeared to ask us to let Lika come to the Chekhovs, to which Lidia [her mother] said that we had a long-standing custom of a family Easter at home… 5 April. Thursday… We liked Anton very much - he's a doctor and a writer, such a nice personality, simple manners, considerate… 21 April. Saturday. Today, finally, Anton Chekhov is setting off. So Lika will have some rest. At 1 Anton came to say goodbye. His family and many friends, among them Olga Kundasova, she really is infatuated, are off to the station at 7 to see him off. He spent half an hour with us and set off with Lika… I'm afraid, is our Lika involved with him? It looks very like it… But he's a fine man, an alluring personality.' Anton was swamped with affection on the eve of his departure. He told Suvorin 'such girls that if I rounded them all up to my country cottage I'd have a really wild ball, pregnant with consequences.'
It was easier to part with his brothers and men friends: he promised to bring back Manila cigars and ivory carvings of naked Japanese girls. Shcheglov, Ezhov and Gruzinsky lauded Anton's courage. Pavel Svobodin declared that he would be called Chekhov of Sakhalin. Anton fobbed off Misha, who fancied meeting in Japan and returning to Russia together. Lily Markova's husband, Sakharov, asked to be the expedition's artist (for a fee of 1000 roubles): the husband of an ex-mistress was no travelling companion for Anton in Siberia: he begged Suvorin to put Sakharov off the idea.
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Suvorin could not see the point of the crusade, of expense, suffering and wasted time. To him Anton addressed a fiery missive: You write that Sakhalin is of no use, no interest to anyone. Can that be true? Sakhalin can be useless and uninteresting only to a society that does not exile thousands of people there and spend millions on it. After Australia in the past and Cayenne, Sakhalin is the only place where criminal colonization can be studied… Sakhalin is a place of the most unendurable sufferings free or enslaved man can endure… I'd say that places like Sakhalin should be visited for homage, as Turks go to Mecca… We have rotted alive millions of people, rotted them for nothing, without thinking, barbarically; we have herded people through the cold in fetters tens of thousands of miles, infected them with syphilis, debauched them, bred criminals and blamed all this on red-nosed prison warders. All educated Europe now knows that it's not the warders but all of us that are guilty, but we don't care, we're not interested. Rarely had Anton been so emotionally stoked up. He felt mortally insulted by a reviewer's phrase 'priests of unprincipled writing like Mr Chekhov' in the March issue of the radical monthly Russian Thought, and raged to Vukol Lavrov, its editor: I would not reply even to slander were it not that I am soon leaving Russia for a long time, perhaps never to return, and I have not the strength to refrain from replying… After your accusation not only are business relations but the most ordinary nodding acquaintance between us is impossible. Had Chekhov perished on Sakhalin, Russian Thought would have been blamed, as Burenin was blamed for killing Nadson. It was to take two years' diplomacy by Pavel Svobodin to undo the damage done to Chekhov and to Russian Thought by a careless remark and Anton's pride. Anton left in high dudgeon and high spirits.
On 21 April, fortified by three glasses of Santurini wine from Dr Korneev, he took the train to Iaroslavl. Here he took a river boat down the Volga and up the Kama into the Urals. He left his mother Masha and Lika weeping at the station. (He had told them he would be back in September, knowing well that he would be away until December.) Lika was left a photograph inscribed: 'To the kindly creature I am running from to Sakhalin and who scratched my nose… P.S. This inscription, like an exchange of cards, obliges me to nothing.'
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Chekhov dropped hints in Siberia that he and Lika were betrothed. Friends travelled with Anton the first thirty miles to the St Sergei monastery: his brother Vania, the Levitan menage a trois - the mistress Sofia Kuvshinnikova and her husband Dr Kuvshinnikov (who gave Anton a bottle of cognac to open on the Pacific Ocean). Olga Kunda- sova stayed on the train as far as Iaroslavl and accompanied Anton down the Volga. Next day, when they had passed Kineshma, she disembarked. Anton was at last truly alone, travelling into unknown territory.
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Crossing Siberia 22 April-June 1890 STEAMING DOWN THE VOLGA to Nizhni and up the Kama to Perm, his stomach churning from the farewell, Chekhov wrote greetings to friends and instructions to family. At Perm the river journey ended; here, on the slopes of the Urals, heavy rain turned the snow to mud. Chekhov arrived at Perm at 2.00 a.m.; the train across the Urals left at six in the evening. A 200-mile train journey took all night to Ekaterinburg. Here Anton had the addresses of his mother's relatives. One visited Anton in the American Hotel, but did not invite him to dine.
Anton stayed three days in Ekaterinburg reconnoitring. The railhead ended another 200 miles east at Tiumen. America had been joined coast-to-coast for twenty years; Russia had no Trans-Siberian railway. From Tiumen Chekhov hoped to spare himself 1000 miles overland through blizzards and floods to Tomsk: ships went down the Tobol and the Irtysh and then upstream, southeast up the Ob and the Tom, to Tomsk, from where travellers had to go overland. Siberia's major rivers flow from south to north, and travellers head from west to east. The great Siberian road was a rutted belt of mud, snow or dust (depending on the season), interrupted by ferry crossings over wide, dangerous rivers. Prisoners and exiles and the crude birch-pole carts (tarantasy) of officials and carters were the traffic.
To reach the Russian Far East - Vladivostok, Kamchatka or Sakhalin - by sea a Voluntary Fleet had been launched by public subscription. Anton, in Nikolai Przhevalsky's footsteps, was crossing the hard way. Arriving in Ekaterinburg on 28 April, he was told that until 18 May no passenger ships could leave Tiumen: ice obstructed the Tobol, but the Irtysh had already melted and flooded for miles. He had left two weeks too early or four weeks too late. Nevertheless, on 1 May Chekhov took the train, pursued by furious blizzards,
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to Tiumen. Here he bought a cart, and hired horses to Tomsk.
Anton kept a pencilled diary. He wrote few letters: he was too bruised and exhausted, wet and cold, and the post to Russia took weeks. He was also ill-equipped. Misha had bought him a wooden trunk which crashed about the cart as it bumped over the ruts and lumps of ice and nearly brained him. Others had soft leather bags as mattresses to sleep on or cushions to brace against. Only the thick leather coat that Aleksei Kiseliov had provided protected Anton's body from hypothermia and broken bones when he was flung from the cart. The revolver he had brought he never even drew. Though Siberia was full of prisoners, escaped and settled, its lonely roadhouses were cleaner and friendlier than European Russia's inns. He starved. On Russia's rivers he gorged himself on sterlets. In Siberia, in spring, there was only bread, wild garlic and coarse powdered tea. Evgenia had given Anton a portable coffee stove and coffee: it took him three weeks to learn how to brew up.
On 7 May, paying his drivers double or treble the standard tariff, he reached the shores of the Irtysh, 450 miles in four days by cart from Tiumen. He was now stranded: the roads were so flooded that he could not turn back, and the winds so furious that the ferryman would not row across. He wrote not to his mother, who feared for his life, but to Maria Kiseliova, who had in her letters been hinting for years that suffering would do him good: A
