the tarantas together with two travelling companions making the same journey. He missed the jingling of the harness bells, but it was a joy to be able to stretch out his legs fully. Progress was initially slow along the shallow waters of the Shilka River, and at one point came to a complete halt when the boat ran aground, necessitating lengthy repairs to its hull. Chekhov had intended to continue with his travel pieces, but the engine of the Yertnak shuddered so badly that writing was simply out of the question. All he could do was eat, sleep, talk, and gaze through his binoculars at the immense numbers of wild birds and the luxuriant and wild foliage they were passing through. He had fallen totally in love with the Amur. 'It is quite beyond my powers to describe the beauties of the banks of the Amur,' he wrote to Suvorin:
… I can but throw up my hands and confess my inadequacy. Well, how to describe them? Imagine the Suram Pass in the Caucasus moulded into the form of a river bank, and that gives you some idea of the Amur. Crags, cliffs, forests, thousands of ducks, herons and all kinds of fowl with viciously long bills, and wilderness all around. To our left the Russian shore, to our right the Chinese. If I want I can look into Russia, or into China, just as I like. China is as wild and deserted as Russia: you sometimes see villages and sentry huts, but not very often. My brains have addled and turned to powder, and no wonder, Your Excellency! I've sailed more than six hundred miles down the Amur, and before that there was Baikal and Transbaikal … I have truly seen such riches and experienced such rapture that death holds no more terrors for me.22
An Amur River steamer similar to the one Chekhov travelled on
On board the Yermak, Chekhov reported to his family, the talk was all about the gold which had been discovered in the region. Every peasant seemed to be prospecting for gold, he discovered, and nouveau riche Russian gold-dealers were drinking champagne like water, he noticed. The conversation flowed as freely: when in Siberia, with no one to make arrests, and nowhere further to be exiled, people could be as liberal as they liked and say exactly what they thought. So different were the mores out in Asia that Chekhov felt as if he were somewhere
like Texas or Patagonia; everything was utterly foreign. The disregard for conventional European values led to Orthodox priests in the Far East wearing white silk cassocks and openly engaging in gold smuggling (not to mention disregarding the fasts), men handing over women for cash while at the same time treating them with utmost chivalry, and also shooting vagrants without any compunction – all accompanied by a total absence of interest in Russian culture. The writer Chekhov? Who was he? The locals barely knew who Pushkin was.
On 26 June, after a week of swimming in the warm waters of the Amur and dining with gold smugglers (one of whom tried to press an enormous wad of cash on him for treating his pregnant wife), Chekhov reached Blagoveshchensk, the main administrative town in the region. The newfound wealth brought by the discovery of gold nearby had increased the town's population rapidly since its foundation in 1856, and along with the smart new brick buildings traditionally to be found in boomtowns were amenities like brothels. If Blagoveshchensk itself did not make much impression on Chekhov, his experience with a Japanese prostitute certainly did, to judge from the graphic account he gave Suvorin (which prudish Soviet censors swiftly excised from editions of his correspondence). In Blagoveshchensk, Chekhov transferred from the Yermak to the Muravyov-Amursky, a passenger boat named after the charismatic Governor General of Eastern Siberia who had spearheaded Russia's colonialist expansion into China. It was Muravyov whose far-sighted vision had led to the acquisition of the Amur territory in the 1850s, and the consequent annexation of Sakhalin. With his eye on the lucrative tea trade with China, Muravyov knew Russia had to find a waterway to the Pacific or lose out to the British. A major breakthrough was the belated discovery in 1849 that Sakhalin was an island, which meant that Siberia was connected both to the Sea of Japan and the Pacific through the Amur.23
Chekhov had begun to see increasing numbers of Chinese from Irkutsk onwards (they reminded him of the old monks his brother Nikolai used to paint), and on the Muravyov he shared a cabin with an opium-smoking Chinaman who inscribed the margin of one of his letters with some beautiful hieroglyphics which read 'I'm going to Nikolaevsk. Hello.' Chekhov was rewarded for having been bitten continuously by gadflies on the Yermak by now seeing meteors flying round his cabin – fireflies which were just like electric sparks. After
following the path of the Amur south to Khabarovsk, the Muravyov then turned north, arriving in Nikolaevsk on 5 July. It was at this point that his letters home stopped, and his book began.
The Island of Sakhalin has a reputation for being a rather dry and impersonal book, with a style dictated by the need for its central message of human injustice to be delivered with the utmost efficiency. This does not hold true of its opening chapters, however, which describe the final leg of his journey and the history of the discovery of the island in conversational and sometimes intimate tones. Nikolaevsk, which stands where the mouth of the Amur delta meets the narrow Tatar Strait separating Sakhalin from the mainland, was the location for Russia's first fortress in these parts, and was named patriotically after Tsar Nicholas I. It had seen a fair amount of international traffic during the pioneer years earlier in the century, but the little town was not well-equipped to receive visitors now: there was no hotel, and Chekhov felt that the unframed windows of its hundreds of abandoned houses were staring at him like the eye-sockets of a skull. He was forced to spend the next two nights sleeping on the Muravyov, and when it weighed anchor again, he was for a time left completely stranded. Just as the sun was going down, and he was succumbing to a certain amount of panic, a local Gilyak agreed to row him out to the Baikal, the steamer which would carry him on to Alexandrovsk, the main port of Sakhalin. After the rhythmic combination of long and short sentences in Chekhov's short stories, with their clusters of adjectives, and sentences trailing off into dots, the sober clarity and tautness of the prose in The Island of Sakhalin is indeed marked, but occasionally gives way to a lyricism more reminiscent of his fiction:
On the right-hand shore there was a forest burning; the wall of green was throwing up crimson flames; clouds of smoke fused into a long, black, motionless strip which hung over the forest… It was a huge fire, but there was silence and calm all around because it was no one's concern that forests were perishing. Clearly the green riches here belong only to God.24
As the Baikal chugged slowly south, Chekhov began believing he was at the end of the world, and that there was nowhere further to sail to. Into his soul rushed the sensations he felt Odysseus must have
experienced when, dimly expecting to encounter extraordinary creatures, he had sailed into unknown waters – the waters that one day Chekhov would gaze out to when he was growing up. Accompanied by a pair of whales blowing fountains of spray into the air, in warm clear weather, on 11 July the Baikal reached the coast of Sakhalin, whose taiga was also on fire. Whatever poetic frame of mind Chekhov had been in earlier was now replaced by anxiety and foreboding:
Through the smoke and darkness spreading over the sea, I could not see the jetty or any buildings and could only make out the dim lights of the post, two of which were red. The awful picture which was crudely cut out of the darkness, the silhouettes of mountains, the smoke, the flames and the sparks from the fire seemed quite fantastic.25
It seemed to Chekhov that he had already arrived in hell. The next twenty chapters of his book, clearly not written in such leisurely circumstances as the first three, take the reader on a tour of Sakhalin's main settlements, and describe with unflinching detail the lives of the hard-labour convicts, exiles and officials, as well as those of the island's aboriginal peoples. Chekhov's arrival coincided with an official visit by the Governor General of the Amur region, Baron Andrei Korf. Exile was not imposed for life, he assured Chekhov during their meeting, the hard labour assigned to the convicts was not excessively onerous, and there were neither sentries nor chains. Chekhov took pains to assure the reader that the very opposite was the case, and exposed prostitution, starvation and brutal
