Siberia by exiles had all along been part of the official strategy to develop the Asian territories. Ironically, the route taken by his Imperial Highness's frigate, the Memory of Azov, was very similar to the one plied by the steamers of the Voluntary Fleet, which ferried thousands of convicts to Sakhalin from Odessa each year. Chekhov's yellow- funnelled boat, the Petersburg, had been launched as the Thuringia in the Scottish shipyards of Greenock in 1870, having been built to make the crossing between Hamburg and New York. It was adapted for the conveyance of convicts in 1889, and, like others in the fleet, made the journey from Odessa to Vladivostok twice a year in the summer months, before navigation north of Vladivostok was closed by ice. Before Chekhov embarked in 1890, the vessel had just discharged its final cargo of sixty-eight men and women destined for a life of exile on Sakhalin.
Chekhov's interest in Siberia and the Far East should certainly be seen in the context of Russia's intense preoccupation with Asia in the latter part of the nineteenth century – but not confused with it, despite his reverence for Nikolai Przhevalsky, the explorer and military officer who championed Russian imperialist expansion in Asia so aggressively. It is hard to square Chekhov's somewhat schoolboyish enthusiasm for a man of jingoistic, and sometimes downright racist, views with the humanitarian impulses which inspired the book he was to write about the convicts and indigenous tribes of Sakhalin, but Przhevalsky was a major inspiration. Chekhov undertook his journey to Siberia at a crossroads in his life. He had with ease become the leading writer of his generation, but that was a contributing factor to the deep sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness he felt in 1889: with the exception of the shining beacon of Tolstoy, there was no one else to compete with or look up to on the literary scene. Chekhov needed to be stimulated, but in the rather dull years of Russian literature under Alexander III, no other writer of his stature emerged, and he clearly found this dispiriting. As he was to put it famously in a letter a few years later, 'nothing being written today contains any alcohol' – it was all lemonade. He was willing to concede that in science and technology the age may have been one of greatness, but for people like us, he continued, '. . . it's a stodgy, sour, dull sort of time':
We definitely lack that 'je ne sais quoi', and so when the skirts of our muse are lifted up nothing is to be seen there but an empty space . .. We have neither immediate nor distant goals, our souls are empty. We have no politics, we don't believe in revolution, we have no God, we're not afraid of ghosts, and personally I don't even fear blindness or death. A man who desires nothing, hopes for nothing and fears nothing cannot be an artist.5
Chekhov could not but be affected by the despondency which descended like a cloud on the Russian intelligentsia when censorship tightened and attempts were made to undo the 'damage' of the 1860s reforms. 'I have grown indifferent to reviews, to conversations about literature, to gossip, to success and failure, to earning big fees,' he wrote to Suvorin in May 1889; 'in a word I have become the fool of fools. It's as though my soul has gone into hibernation. The only explanation I can
find for it is that my personal life has also gone into hibernation. I'm not frustrated or worn out or depressed, I've simply become somehow less interesting. I need someone to put a bomb under me.'6
Chekhov's malaise in 1889 was also attributable to the fact that his brother Nikolai was dying from the disease which he knew would also kill him sooner or later. He clearly wanted to go on an adventure and do something extraordinary with his life before it was too late. Apart from his commitment to literature and medicine, his own frail health and his family obligations prevented him from travelling the world and becoming a full-time explorer like Przhevalsky, but he was unwilling to capitulate completely to a sedentary life. And as a man with a deeply ingrained sense of moral duty, he also wanted to do something worthwhile. The obituary he wrote of Przhevalsky in 1888 makes it clear why this was important to him:
Such people have had a huge educational impact, quite apart from their services to scholarship and the state. One Przhevalsky or one Stanley is worth a dozen educational institutions and a hundred good books. Their ideas and their noble ambition, which has the national and scholarly honour at its heart, their stubborn, invincible striving towards a certain goal, no matter what privations, dangers and temptations for personal happiness are entailed, the wealth of their learning and industry, their acclimatization to heat, hunger, homesickness, wasting fevers, their fanatical faith in Christian civilization and in science make them ascetics in the eyes of the populace, personifying the highest moral strength.
Chekhov's obituary of Przhevalsky is an extraordinary document, defining with crystal clarity the strong ethical values of a writer often condemned as unprincipled by his contemporaries. The personalities of people like Przhevalsky, Chekhov maintains, were like 'living documents', showing society that there still existed people of ascetism and faith besides all those 'conducting arguments about optimism and pessimism, writing banal stories, unnecessary projects and cheap dissertations out of boredom', and besides the 'sceptics, mystics, psychopaths, Jesuits, philosophers, liberals and conservatives' (in other words, all his contemporaries). Przhevalsky's last great spiritual feat, Chekhov notes, was to suppress his homesickness and ask to be buried in Central Asia, where he had conducted his fieldwork.7
Chekhov gets so caught up in hero worship that what he does not do in his obituary is discuss Przhevalsky's achievements, namely the collection he assembled of extensive geographical, ethnographical and meteorological data about huge areas of Inner Asia, large numbers of invaluable zoological specimens, and the discovery of the wild camel, and the horse which now is known by his name. Przhevalsky undertook four main expeditions in the 1870s and 1880s. First, he travelled across Siberia to Mongolia and China, then south-east over the Tien Shan mountains, then towards Lhasa and finally into the Gobi Desert. He found the emptiness of the Gobi Desert particularly entrancing, and vowed that he would not exchange it for all the gold in the world.8 The books he wrote about his travels won him national fame back in Russia as an intrepid hero, and an adoring audience of swooning females to whose attentions he was, as a homosexual, completely immune. Before he departed on his last expedition with renewed hopes of reaching Lhasa, the Asian 'Rome', Przhevalsky was promoted to Major-General and given an audience with the Tsar. Alexander Ill's then teenage son, Nicholas, meanwhile, had been receiving thrilling dispatches from Przhevalsky about his skirmishes with the natives which, bearing in mind their political slant, can have only fanned the flames of his passion for the Orient. Przhevalsky assured the heir apparent that the peoples of Asia longed to become subjects of the Tsar, whose name, he wrote elsewhere, appeared in the eyes of the Asiatic masses 'in a halo of mystic light'. As an unashamed apologist for Russian chauvinism, Przhevalsky's attitude to these peoples was one of complete contempt.
It is easier to understand Chekhov's uncritical admiration for this Russian Livingstone, heralded as the most famous traveller in Asia since Marco Polo, when one remembers the torpidity and stagnation of Russian intellectual life under Alexander III: Przhevalsky's energy was simply electrifying.9 Chekhov would have surely travelled more in his lifetime if he had been able to, and if he had not felt such a deep sense of duty towards his needy family. No writer seems to lament being bored more often; certainly no Russian writer shared his wanderlust. In his letters, he speaks of wanting to travel to countries as diverse as Sweden and Egypt, and advised one young writer that the best thing he could possibly do at his age was travel. The reference in his obituary of Przhevalsky to ten-year-old schoolboys wanting to run away to accomplish heroic feats in America or Africa suggests that his longing
for adventure was very deep-rooted; back in 1887 his story 'Boys' had actually depicted a foiled attempt of two school friends to run away to America:
. .. they both opened up an atlas and started studying a map in it: 'First we go to Perm,' said Chechevitsyn quietly .. . 'then Tyumen.. . then Tomsk. . . then … then … to Kamchatka … and from there the Samoyeds can take you by boat through the Bering Straits .. . And then you are in America .. . There are lots of furry animals there.'10
When he set out for Sakhalin, following this very route, Chekhov was still dreaming of returning via America, a dream which he was unfortunately forced to abandon. One of his favourite books as a teenager was a travel book:
