corporal punishment in flat contradiction of the baron's Panglossian optimism. The Governor General's visit was accompanied by speeches, dinners, music and fireworks, but Chekhov found it all depressing. No amount of Bengal flares could turn the river in Alexandrovsk from a cook's daughter into a society lady, as he put it, and the cannon which blew up when it was fired seemed somehow symbolic. There might have been a party atmosphere at the Governor's residence, but elsewhere the mood was sombre:
Nevertheless, it was miserable on the streets, despite such merrymaking. There were no songs or accordions or a single person getting drunk; people were wandering about like shadows, and were
as silent as shadows. Hard labour is still hard labour even when it is illuminated by Bengal flares, and music only inspires a deathly longing when it is heard from afar by a person who will never return to his homeland.26
By the time Chekhov made his historic visit, Sakhalin was the largest and most notorious penal settlement in Siberia, but it had not always been a penal colony, and it had not always been Russian. The sterlet-shaped island, twice the size of Greece, had first been explored by the Japanese, who found it was already inhabited by aboriginal peoples, principally Gilyaks and Ainu. Russians had started pushing eastwards into Asia from the sixteenth century onwards, lured both by the riches to be obtained in the fur trade and the possibility of escaping bondage to Ivan the Terrible. When the government began seriously expanding its eastern frontiers in the nineteenth century, Sakhalin naturally loomed into view due to its strategic importance in relation to Japan and China. In May 1805, the naval officer who captained the first Russian circumnavigation of the world suggested that it be taken for the empire, and confidently asserted that two cutters with sixteen guns and sixty men would be sufficient to sink the entire Japanese fleet.27 It was not until the late 1840s, however, that the first Russian flag was raised on Sakhalin, with the first settlements following in 1853. After a flurry of diplomatic visits, Japanese resistance to the notion that Sakhalin belonged to Russia was finally overcome. In 1875 Japan agreed to exchange Sakhalin for the Kurile Islands. Six years later Russia founded a penal colony on the island, intending to use convict labour to excavate its rich coal deposits. Its population was then just a couple of thousand. By 1904, the population of Sakhalin had swelled to over 40,000. About a quarter of this figure were convicts serving terms of hard labour in the island's six prisons, with about a thousand exiles arriving each year on vessels of the Volunteer Fleet. The latter had been founded by voluntary public subscription in 1878 as a buttress against the Turkish navy and to protect Russia's Asian coastlines, but was largely subsidized by the government. The original three steamers which participated in the Russo-Turkish War had been joined by eleven other ships, some of which were converted so that they could be used to transport convicts to Sakhalin and other penal institutions, as well as freight to Vladivostok.
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The famous Sakhalin convict Sofya Blyuvshtein
It took Chekhov a while to accustom his ear to waking to the sounds of clanking chains as convicts marched past his lodgings each morning. When he asked why even cockerels wore shackles, he received the reply that everything was chained up on Sakhalin. The work that he carried out on the island was in its own way a kind of hard labour. In order to get to speak to the inhabitants, he hit upon the rase of conducting a census. His aim was to interview every single member of the island's population, filling in a questionnaire for each of them which he could later use as material for his book. He was clearly rather taken with this kind of statistical calibration, and he would later assist in the national census that was conducted in 1897, but his interest can be dated much earlier. One wonders whether, as he trudged round Sakhalin's settlements, he ever recalled the irreverent 'Supplementary Questions for the Personal Details Form of the Statistical Census suggested by Antosha Chekhonte' that he had published right at the beginning of his writing career in 1881:
Are you a clever or a stupid person?
Are you an honest person? A swindler} A robber} A rogue} A lawyer}
Which columnist is most to your liking? Suvorin? 'Letter'? 'Amicus'? Lukin? or Yuly Shreyer?
Are you a Joseph or a Caligula} A Susannah or a Nana?
Is your wife blonde} brunette} black-haired} or a redhead}
Does your wife beat you or not} Do you beat her or not}
What did you weigh when you were ten years old?
Do you consume hot beverages? Yes or no}
What did you think about on the night of the census?
Have you seen Sarah Bernhardt? or not}2*
Chekhov worked flat out for the ninety-five days he spent on Sakhalin, rising at 5 a.m. every morning and walking, mostly alone, from hut to hut where he listened to heart-rending stories of human misery from people who had nothing to live for:
It was a quiet, starry night. A night watchman was tapping, and a stream was gurgling nearby. I spent a long time standing there, staring at the sky and at the huts, and it seemed a miracle to me that I was six and a half thousand miles from home, in some place called Palevo, at the end of the world, where they did not even remember the days of the week, nor had any need to, since it was absolutely the same whether it was Wednesday or Thursday.29
With corruption rife among the guards and officials, what possible hope was there for redemption? Because of the climate and because peasants could never return to Russia at the end of their sentences, Sakhalin had no chance of ever becoming a vibrant colony like Australia. The aboriginal population had shrunk drastically since the Russian occupation. It was no wonder that so many Sakhalin exiles, driven by an overwhelming longing for freedom, attempted to escape, even though they knew the chances of success were slim. The vitality of a colony, Chekhov pointedly remarked, did not depend on prohibitions and orders, but on conditions guaranteeing a life that was peaceful and well-provided for. There was nothing remotely resembling any kind of civilized society when he visited Sakhalin in 1890, as far as he could see. And how could there be when sentries were even posted to stand guard outside churches while convicts prayed, and when the government's idea of Russifying the natives was
Gilyak storehouses for dried fish, Sakhalin
to hand out guns and badges? Sakhalin's inhospitable climate rendered most of it unfit for cultivation: its east coast was frozen for half the year, and much of its territory was impassable. Ships only called between June and October, and sometimes even the telegraph cable was cut off during the winter months. Chekhov was hard-pressed to find beauty on Sakhalin, but was clearly thinking of Levitan when suggesting that landscape artists might find inspiration in the yellow sunflowers, green rye and pink, red and crimson poppies of the Arkov valley.30
By the time Chekhov had finished his work on Sakhalin, 8,719 of the cards he had printed on the island had
