described the hissing as being so venomous it was as if a million bees and wasps had filled the auditorium. No matter that the subsequent performances were well received, and that provincial theatres were soon clamouring to stage the play. Attempting to defend Chekhov in the review he wrote for his own newspaper, Suvorin deplored the relish with which the critics had described the previous night's catastrophe.59 Leikin decided it was time for another Chekhov front-page special. On the cover of Fragments for 26 October 1896, Chekhov was depicted sitting astride a seagull flying over a marsh, being shot at by huntsman-critics.60
A month after the premiere of The Seagull, Chekhov received a letter from Nemirovich-Danchenko, who spoke of his growing antipathy towards St Petersburg 'with its newspapers, actors, celebrities of the moment, and banal attempts at literature and public life'.61 In his reply, Chekhov said that he understood what he meant. Despite his recent ordeal, however, he still felt there were many good things about St Petersburg, if only Nevsky Prospekt on a sunny day or Vera Komissarzhevkaya, whom he now regarded as a very fine actress.62 All the same, it was with little enthusiasm that he agreed to go back to the capital the following March to sit for a portrait that had been commissioned for the Tretyakov Gallery. In the event, just before his planned departure his lungs seriously haemorrhaged, keeping him in Moscow, so the artist came to him instead. Chekhov went on his last proper visit to St Petersburg that July, staying as usual with Suvorin, with whom he discussed love, death and friendship.63 Three days after he arrived, Suvorin left for Paris, having failed to persuade his friend to accompany him. Before Chekhov left the following day, he took a ferry down the Neva to visit Leikin's estate.64
Olga Knipper, who was later to become very important to Chekhov, could not entirely be blamed for thinking that he did not like Petersburg when she later challenged him about it in 1901. By the time she became acquainted with him in 1898, he had essentially stopped visiting the city. This was not solely due to his illness, nor to the deterioration in his relations with Suvorin which took place at around this time, although both were factors. Chekhov confessed to Olga in 1901 that it was the theatre in St Petersburg that he did not like or respect, not the city itself, adding the revealing comment 'I reject it completely.' It had felt as if he himself had failed, not just his play, when The Seagull had been performed at the Alexandrinsky. His surprisingly vehement language reveals feelings that were clearly still very raw. Chekhov did make two more very brief visits to St Petersburg, but neither was undertaken with enthusiasm and both were concerned exclusively with the publication deal that he had drawn up with a new publisher. In 1899 he left on the same day that he had arrived, and in 1903 he stayed only one night.
Chapter 6 SIBERIA AND THE WEST
I Sakhalin
I do not like it when an educated exile stands by the window and looks silently at the roof of the neighbouring house. What is he thinking about? I do not like it when he talks to me about trivial matters, while at the same time looking at me with an expression that seems to say: 'You are going home, but I am not.' I do not like it, because I feel unbearably sorry for him.
From Siberia, 18 May 1890
If a purse is almost indispensable in Regent Street, a revolver is absolutely so on Sakhalin.
Charles Hawes, In the Uttermost East, 1903
On 21 April 1890, Chekhov set out on what would prove to be a momentous journey across Siberia. Travelling for almost three months, partly by rail, partly by rickety horse-drawn tarantas, and partly by boats of varying sizes, via Kazan, Ekaterinburg, Omsk, Tomsk and Blagoveshchensk, his destination was one of the Russian Empire's most remote eastern points: the island of Sakhalin. In the early hours of 14 October, after ninety-five gruelling days spent making a study of the penal colony on the island, which lies just north of Japan, he set off on his journey back home, this time travelling by sea. The route navigated by his Russian steamship took in Vladivostok, Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, Port Said and Constantinople (cholera in Japan had prevented the Petersburg docking in Nagasaki) and lasted almost two months. Shortly after Chekhov embarked on his voyage, Grand Duke Nikolai Alexandrovich, the future Tsar Nicholas II, also set off on a
journey halfway round the world to the Far East, and the two travellers crossed paths in the Suez Canal.1 Chekhov was glad to see land after eleven boring days at sea but, to judge from the silence in his correspondence, he could muster no enthusiasm for the pageantry marking the first official stop on the tsarevich's Grand Tour – hardly surprising, bearing in mind his recent intimate acquaintance with one of the more putrid efflorescences of the Romanov regime. As for Nicholas, his letters reveal that he was far more interested in pyramids and belly dancers than in making the acquaintance of the young writer who had spent three months probing the underbelly of Russian life.2
On 5 December, Chekhov finally disembarked in Odessa, and boarded a train for Moscow. The fleet of imperial vessels bearing the future Tsar, meanwhile, continued on its journey to India, Ceylon, Singapore, Siam, China, and finally Japan. There had been tension in Russia's relationship with Japan in recent decades over competing claims to Sakhalin, and the fact that diplomatic feathers were only slightly ruffled when the tsarevich was attacked by a Japanese policeman with a sword indicates the level of official cordiality that had been reached by 1890. Once safely back on Russian territory, Nicholas proceeded to return home to St Petersburg overland, and his route, via Blagoveshchensk, Omsk and Tomsk, retraced the path that Chekhov had taken twelve months earlier. The crown prince was the first member of the Romanov family to cross the entire Siberian continent. Alexander III envisaged an important role for his son in bringing Siberia 'closer to the rest of the Empire'. In Vladivostok Nicholas launched the construction of the eastern part of the famous railway that would soon link up the Asian and European halves of the enormous country he would unexpectedly rule just three years later. It is significant that the tsarevich's Grand Tour took him to Asia rather than to the more traditional capitals of old Europe. Siberia was Russia's Wild West; it was the continent of the future, and, apart from the mild irritation of a very un-Californian climate, it had everything to offer. The Trans-Siberian Railway was built with the aim of exploiting all those untapped resources in Asia, and opened in 1900 to great fanfare.
The interest in Siberia which Chekhov and Nicholas shared was, of course, inspired by completely different preoccupations. For the young Nicholas, Siberia was a reflection of Russia's imperial grandeur – and perhaps just a stepping stone to further expansion in the Far East. Some
have speculated that his Grand Tour may have instilled in him an ambition of one day adding both China and Japan to his colonial portfolio. For Chekhov, Siberia was a place of adventure and of horror. If its endless empty spaces provided him with the opportunity to escape a stifling and humdrum metropolitan literary world and find fresh air and liberation, its penal colonies enabled him to perform a humanitarian service by acting as eye-witness and so justify his travels to such exotic parts.
As a literary celebrity, Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin had attracted a fair amount of attention in the Russian press. New Times had first announced his plans as 'sensational news' back in January 1890,3 but it is unlikely they were viewed as such by the 24-year-old tsarevich (six years younger than Chekhov). As someone with more than a vested interest in preserving the status quo, Nicholas was never going to be enthusiastic about the idea of a Russian subject wanting to write about the 'unfortunates' (as they were euphemistically referred to) who had been condemned to hard labour and exile in Siberia. His tour, naturally, also received significant attention in the national press, and later became the subject of a luxuriously produced three-volume book, Travels in the East of Nicholas II, which Chekhov bought at special request for the Taganrog library, but with a reluctance that was not only due to its exorbitant price.4 The last volume, which appeared in 1897, of course made no mention of Chekhov's outspoken book about the convicts of Sakhalin which had appeared two years earlier, although the enforced colonization of
