Goncharov's The Frigate Pallada, an account of the Russian seafaring diplomatic mission to Japan led by Admiral Putyatin in 1852. This is where Chekhov would have first read about Sakhalin.
We should also approach Chekhov's journey to Sakhalin in the spirit of Fridtjof Nansen's quest for scientific knowledge and adventure. A few months before Chekhov set off for Sakhalin, Nansen arrived back in Norway from his first epic voyage across Greenland's ice cap, having first completed a doctorate in zoology. Chekhov may not have completed the doctorate he planned himself, but his book about Sakhalin and its prison colony was conceived with one vaguely in mind, and certainly written to repay what he felt was his debt to medicine. Nansen wrote a book about Eskimos, having spent a winter living among them during his Greenland exploration; Chekhov's book (this being Tsarist Russia) was about convicts, but also about Sakhalin's aboriginal population. In 1913, Nansen was himself to write a book about Siberia, having travelled extensively through it.11 His career provides an ironic contrast to that of Przhevalsky: he would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his international relief work, having organized the introduction of special passports to help the thousands stranded after the collapse of the great European empires in the 1920s. Chekhov was inspired by similar humanitarian goals, and might very well have been a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize had it been founded during his lifetime. Before he set out on his journey, he wrote an impassioned letter to Suvorin about why it was so important to think about Sakhalin:
You say, for instance, that nobody needs Sakhalin or finds it of the slightest interest. Can this really be so? Only a society that does not deport thousands of people to it at a cost of millions could find Sakhalin entirely devoid of usefulness or interest. Sakhalin is the only place, except for Australia in times gone by, and Cayenne, where one can study a place that has been colonized by convicts. All of Europe is interested in it, so how can it be that we are not? A mere twenty-five or thirty years ago our own Russian people performed amazing feats exploring Sakhalin, enough to make one glorify the human spirit, but we don't care about any of this, we don't know anything about these people, we just sit inside our own four walls complaining that God made a mess when he created mankind. Sakhalin is a place of unbearable suffering, on a level of which no other creature but man is capable of causing, whether he be free or in chains. People who have worked there or in that region have faced terrifying problems and responsibilities which they continue to work towards resolving. I regret that I am not sentimental, otherwise I would say that we ought to make pilgrimages to places like Sakhalin as the Turks go to Mecca, and sailors and penal experts ought to examine Sakhalin the way soldiers examine Sevastopol. It is quite clear from the books I have been reading and am still reading that we have let millions of people rot in jail, and let them rot to no purpose, treating them with an indifference which is little short of barbaric. We have forced people to drag themselves in chains across tens of thousands of miles in freezing conditions, infected them with syphilis, debauched them, vastly increased the criminal population, and heaped the blame for the whole thing on red-nosed prison supervisors. All of Europe now knows that the blame lies not with the supervisors, but with all of us, but we still think it is none of our business, we're not interested. The much-vaunted sixties did nothing whatsoever for sick people or for prisoners, and thus violated the principal commandment of Christian civilization. These days we do at least try to do something for the sick, but for prisoners we do nothing at all; the way our prisons are run holds absolutely no interest for our judiciary. No, I assure you, Sakhalin is necessary and interesting, and my only regret is that it is I who am going there and not somebody more experienced in the field and more able to generate interest in society at large. Personally, my reasons for going are trivial.12
Of course, Chekhov's reasons for going to Sakhalin were far from trivial, even if they did include his desire for a big adventure. The research he carried out before departing showed that.13 Feeling he needed to acquire expertise, not only in Sakhalin's geology, but in its botany, zoology, meteorology and ethnography, he pored over every book about the island he could lay his hands on, starting with the memoirs of Admiral Voin Rimsky-Korsakov, elder brother of the composer and first commander of the Siberian fleet. He studied maps, memoirs and dry tomes about the Russian penal code. His sister and his new friend Lika Mizinova made notes for him in Moscow's main research library. He wrote letters and had meetings with government officials, and even got hold of a samizdat copy of the American journalist George Kennan's newly published and celebrated book Siberia and the Exile System, which was officially forbidden in Russia owing to its frankly critical stance. He started writing about Sakhalin's history even before he left. The preparatory work Chekhov undoubtedly most enjoyed was reading the books by explorers like Krusenstern and La Perouse, who had completed heroic round-the-world voyages. The Russian translation of Darwin's account of his voyage on the Beagle was also very useful.14
Chekhov's decision to undertake the journey and complete a census of the prison population on the island came as a shock to his family and friends. He had been to the Crimea and to the Caucasus on summer holidays, but that was not the same as setting out on a journey to the other end of the Russian Empire under inhospitable conditions. (The consensus is that the trip proved extremely detrimental to his health, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.) It took him almost as long to get to Sakhalin as the time he spent on the island, but he relished the opportunity of seeing more of the world, and, in particular, more of the vast country he lived in.
After a short train ride to Yaroslavl there was a boat trip down the Volga on the Alexander Nevsky, with 'water meadows, sun-drenched monasteries, white churches, an incredible sense of space; lovely places to sit and fish wherever you look'. He saw the church that his friend Levitan had immortalized in his most famous canvas, 'Eternal Rest', and tugs pulling along strings of barges, which reminded him of a young man being pursued by his wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law and grandmother. The scenery started to become bleaker on the wilder
Kama River. The weather was bad, and to Chekhov it seemed that the people in the towns he was passing through did nothing but make clouds, wet fences, mud and boredom. There were ice floes on the river still, and none of the birch trees had come into leaf; aesthetics had basically gone to the devil, as he put it in a letter home. At Perm Chekhov transferred to a train carriage, which took him to Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where he sat with his right foot in Europe and his left in Asia. He was coming to the despondent conclusion that all towns in Russia looked the same with their unpaved streets, log houses with carved window frames, high fences, white-walled churches, and bazaars.15 Then came Tyumen, headquarters of the state exile administration, and the gateway to the vast Siberian continent, large enough to contain the entire territory of the United States without its boundaries being touched. At this point, Chekhov transferred to horse-drawn transport, and started the first of the travel pieces he sent back for publication in New Times. Travelling in May brought to mind the nightingales which would be singing in the lush Ukrainian landscapes where he had spent the previous spring, while the bare trees, cold and ice that surrounded him made him think about the sweet-scented acacia and lilac which would be blossoming in Taganrog. Initially he must have had doubts: his body ached from
travelling along such bumpy, uneven surfaces, he was spitting blood, and the tea tasted and smelled as if it was an infusion of sage and cockroach. He was overcome by the huge numbers of ducks, wild geese, sandpipers and swans flying overhead, but the melancholy song of cranes interrupting the silence made him sad. Before too long, Chekhov was also encountering dozens of shackled convicts marching along in convoy, accompanied by soldiers with rifles. They were hardly a mood enhancer.
More than half a million convicts walked along the Great Siberian road to their places of exile during the nineteenth century. Exiling criminals to Siberia was a practice which had commenced in the first half of the seventeenth century, soon after Russia had conquered this vast territory. It became a convenient way for the government to rid itself of troublesome subjects, once it had subjected them to its standard punishments of impaling on stakes, amputation of body parts, branding with irons and so on. But exile gradually came to replace execution and mutilation as it dawned on successive tsars that criminals could perform a useful function in populating its newly acquired territories. The demand for cheap labour after the discovery of minerals in these parts only made this kind of punishment more appealing, and so the list of crimes for which one could be exiled grew longer and longer. Eventually, they included everything from murder, theft and desertion to fortune telling, snuff- taking and vagrancy. Under Catherine the Great, landowners were given unlimited powers to hand over disobedient serfs for exile to Siberia, and even village communities could expel the most troublesome of their members. Until the exile administration was set up in the early nineteenth century, convicts marched eastwards into what George
