Kennan called a 'chaos of disorder, in which accident and caprice played almost equally important parts'.16 Chekhov had vowed not to follow in the footsteps of the American journalist who had exposed the Russian government's inhumane practices so mercilessly, but he did not shrink from writing about the exiles he came across during his journey.
In mid-May, the traveller arrived in Tomsk, where he bought his own tarantas to travel in, and some chocolate from sheer boredom. He spent a week recuperating at Tomsk. He was exhausted, having travelled non- stop through the night several times, and the wind and
rain had made the skin on his face erupt like fish scales. It was not until he reached the mighty Yenisei River that he began to feel truly inspired by the landscape. If the Volga was a self-effacing beauty, whose sadness would turn all your hopes into Russian pessimism, he wrote in the ninth and last of his travelogues, the fast, strong currents of the Yenisey had quite the opposite effect. The mountains on its far bank, moreover, reminded him of the smoky, dreamy peaks of the Caucasus, and he mentally cursed Levitan for not having accompanied him. Chekhov was intoxicated by his first Siberian spring as he travelled through a forest of firs, pines, larches and birches that seemed to have no end: here was the magnificent taiga, which he had heard so much about. Birch trees had darker leaves in Siberia, he noticed, and were not as 'sentimental' as in Russia. Spring had indeed arrived, and for the first time Chekhov's spirits began to soar as his body began to warm up in the sunshine. It was not true that the taiga was silent and had no smell, he discovered: the air was thick with the scent of sun-drenched pine resin; he was surrounded by birdsong and the incessant buzzing of insects. And the sides of the road he travelled were covered with pink, yellow and pale-blue flowers that were a feast for the eye.17
As well as his travel pieces, Chekhov wrote some exuberant and
very lengthy letters back home to his family and friends. Signing himself Homo Sachaliensis, he sent one letter to his family from Krasnoyarsk in May 1890, in which he happened to mention that Yukhantsev and Rykov were resident there.18 Both men had been convicted of bribery and embezzlement in high profile cases in the late 1870s and early 1880s (in Yukhantsev's case to the tune of two million roubles) and had been the butt of incessant jokes in the comic journals to which Chekhov contributed. In mentioning their names, he would have certainly been thinking about the court reportage he filed from Moscow to The Petersburg Newspaper about the Rykov case in 1884, and perhaps also, with a wry smile, he was remembering some of the spoof items in an irreverent 'Bibliography' he had published back in January 1883:
The following new books have been published and are on sale:
On the abolition of tax payable on bamboo sticks imported from
China. Brochure. Price 40 kopecks.
Guidebook to Siberia and its surrounding areas. With a map and a
portrait of Mr Yukhantsev. Part 1: The best restaurants. Part 2: Tailors,
coach-builders, salons de coiffure. Part 3: Addresses of 'those ladies'. Part
4: Index of rich young spinsters. Part 5: Excerpts from Yukhantsev's
notebook (anecdotes, vignettes, dedications).
Is there any money in Russia and where is it? By Rykov. Price 1
rouble.19
As they read his letter from Krasnoyarsk, Chekhov's family may well have pondered the extraordinary changes that had taken place in their lives since they had burst out laughing when this piece appeared seven years earlier.
On 5 June, Chekhov wrote to Nikolai Leikin from Irkutsk that coping with freezing weather, biting winds, interminable waits for ferries across flooded rivers, impassable mud and day-long delays while his tarantas was mended, had been awful. He had suffered from sleeplessness, hunger and fear (there had been one frightening collision with five mail carriages coming the other way at great speed one night) and he had dust permanently in his nose, but he regretted nothing:
Krasnoyarsk and the Yenisey River
The city of Irkutsk
All the same I am happy and I thank God for giving me the opportunity and the strength to embark on this journey. I have seen and experienced a lot, and everything is exceptionally interesting and new for me, not as a writer, but simply as a human being. The Yenisey, the taiga, the stations, the drivers, the landscape, the wildfowl, the physical torments caused by discomforts on the road, the enjoyment from getting some rest – all this together is so good I don't have the words to describe it. Just being day and night in the fresh air for over a month is interesting and healthy; for a whole month I have seen the sun rise and go down every day.20
By the time Chekhov reached Irkutsk, he was so filthy that the brown suds which poured off him when he went to the bathhouse made him feel as if he was a horse. Irkutsk was the best town he had yet seen in Siberia, and he spent a week recuperating there, and enjoying its amenities, which included a theatre, a museum, good hotels, wooden pavements and municipal gardens.
After Irkutsk, where he sold his tarantas, came a short journey along the Angara River to the steep, tree- covered shoreline of Lake Baikal,
which the locals referred to as a sea. Chekhov had heard that you could see almost as far as a mile down in some of the lake's deepest places, and he told his family that he had seen rocks and mountains drowning in its delicate turquoise waters that had made his skin come out in goosebumps. The picturesque scenery and its warm and gentle colours again made Chekhov long for Levitan to be there enjoying it with him. Siberian poetry began with the mirror-smooth waters of Lake Baikal, he wrote to a friend; it was just prose up until then. Seeing bears, sables and wild goats was also pretty thrilling. After the trip across Baikal, which he described as wondrous and utterly unforgettable, came the last leg of the journey by horse-drawn transport. The drivers were now Buryat rather than Russian, and their horses very wild. The weather was by this time very warm, and Chekhov felt he was in paradise; the scenery of the Transbaikal seemed to contain all his favourite landscapes:
I found in one place everything I have ever dreamed of: the Caucasus, the Psyol valley, the area round Zvenigorod, the Don. In the afternoon you can be rolling along in the Caucasus, by nightfall you are in the Don steppe, next morning you wake from a doze and find yourself in Poltava – and all within six hundred and sixty miles.21
At Sretensk, Chekhov boarded the steamer Yertnak (named after the Cossack who had begun Russia's conquest of Sibera in the late sixteenth century), and travelled further east along the Shilka and Amur rivers. The first-class cabin felt luxurious and rather strange after all that time travelling by road, spending cramped nights in
