been filled out. He had clearly had some assistance with the task in one settlement; 584 of the 1,368 cards show the handwriting of someone else – a person who filled out 222 cards on his own. This person was a Buryat priest who Chekhov became friendly with on Sakhalin, and who not only accompanied him on some of his travels round the island, but travelled back to Russia with him on the Petersburg and lived for a while with his family in
Moscow. As native Siberians, Buryats were traditionally Shamanists, but Father Irakly had converted to Christianity after being the sole person in his village to survive a flood. He had then become a missionary, after taking holy orders in a monastery in the Transbaikal region where he came from. Almost the only Orthodox monk without a beard and moustache, he had served as a priest for eight years when Chekhov arrived on Sakhalin, and it was he who helped him make contact with some of the political prisoners there. Chekhov had been expressly forbidden from talking to this section of the island's populace, and Father Irakly's assistance came at a considerable risk to himself.31
It was with a huge sense of relief that Chekhov was finally able to leave Sakhalin. Empty of its convict cargo, the Petersburg started rolling heavily after they left Hong Kong, but there were compensations. The hell of Sakhalin was mirrored by the paradise of Ceylon, where Chekhov had the opportunity to spend some blissful moonlit hours in the company of a bronze-skinned woman in a coconut plantation, and to acquire what he thought were two mongooses (one later proved to be a vicious palm civet).
A year later, back home in Russia, he worked through the trunkful of notes he had brought back with him from Siberia and finished the first eight chapters of his book. He went on to complete it over the following two years. By this time he had patched up his differences with the editors of the journal who had slandered him as 'unprincipled' on the eve of his departure, and The Island of Sakhalin initially appeared in serial form in Russian Thought. He had saved the most harrowing chapters until last, and his account of a flogging was, not surprisingly, initially forbidden by the censor. The Island of Sakhalin was first published as a book in 1895, and was soon creating waves in official circles and inspiring several other people to write books about the Siberian exile system. One idealistic young lady from St Petersburg was so deeply affected by Chekhov's book that she even moved to Sakhalin so that she could dedicate herself to alleviating the lot of its benighted population.32 At one point in his book, Chekhov describes a modest white house on the shoreline which turned into a lighthouse at night, its lamp shining brightly as if the red eye of hard labour was itself looking out at the world. His book also acted like a lighthouse, drawing attention to one of the worst aspects of the Tsarist regime. In the seventh of the travel pieces he published while travelling out to
Sakhalin, he exhorted his readers to take a look at the literature on prisons and exile: 'Two or three little articles, two or three authors, and goodness me, it's as if prisons, exile did not exist in Russia! Our thinking intelligentsia has been saying for 20-30 years now that criminals are a product of society, but how indifferent it is to that product!'33
Chekhov returned home in 1890 with his faith in Russia badly dented. In the first letter he wrote after returning home (addressed, of course, to Suvorin), he lamented how little justice and humility there was in Russia, and how poorly patriotism was understood. Having caught a glimpse of some of the British Empire's colonies, and heard Russian complaints about exploitation of the natives, Chekhov concluded that at least the British brought transport, sanitation, museums and Christianity with them, whereas the Russians indulged purely in exploitation:
A drunken, debauched wreck of a man may love his wife and children, but what good is his love? The newspapers all tell us how much we love our great Motherland, but what is our way of expressing this love? In place of knowledge there is limitless impudence and arrogance, in place of work there is idleness and bestiality; there is no justice and the idea of honour goes no further than 'pride in one's uniform' – a uniform which is most usually to be found decorating the docks in our courts. What we must do is work, and let everything else go to the devil. Above all we must be just, and everything else will follow.34
In 1904, the truth of Chekhov's words was demonstrated when the steamroller of Russian imperialism was finally brought to an abrupt and humiliating halt by the Russo-Japanese War. Hostilities broke out a few months before his death. Establishing a naval base on the Pacific and occupying Manchuria in 1900 had been an encouraging prelude to Russia's ambition to conquer Asia: such was the empire's false sense of superiority when it acquired a twenty-five-year lease from China to expand into its north-eastern provinces, that the foreign minister declared that one flag and one sentry was all that was required to secure Port Arthur: Russian prestige would do the rest.35 But Japan was no longer prepared to tolerate Russia's expansionist aims. Having enjoyed spending time with the Japanese Consul to Sakhalin back in 1890,
Chekhov was one of the few people in Russia who did not still see Japan through a 'yellow fog of ignorance' – as a quaint place where people whiled away their time with geishas, elaborate tea ceremonies and flower arranging.36 He read news of the war's progress avidly, and with great concern. The way in which the Orient had taken hold of his imagination can be seen from the fact that he expressed a serious intention to travel to the front and work as a doctor that summer, even though by that time he barely had the strength to go for a walk, let alone carry out medical duties. The alarming news about the war's progress troubled him greatly during his last days, and no doubt partly lay behind his delirious mutterings about a sailor just before he died.37
Sakhalin was the only Russian territory that Japan invaded during the war, and it temporarily acquired the southern half of the island under the terms of the peace treaty drawn up in September 1905. In the chaos before the penal colony was finally shut down the following year, over 30,000 Russian inhabitants managed to escape.38
Chekhov attempted very little creative work in the year that he travelled to Sakhalin, but his story 'Gusev', which was begun just before the last leg of his fifty-two-day sea journey back to Odessa, and finished in Colombo, bore the stamp of his recent experiences, and stands out as one of his most unusual and artistically ambitious pieces of fiction. The story is set in the sick-bay of a ship similar to the Petersburg, and at the beginning of a similar voyage: through the Sea of Japan to Hong Kong and on to Singapore. The patients in the sickbay – a sailor, three privates and an impoverished clergyman – have all served in the Far East and are now returning to Russia. The anger the cleric Pavel Ivanych expresses towards the Russian authorities, who have washed their hands of consumptive peasant soldiers by loading them on to ships of the Voluntary Fleet, undoubtedly echoed Chekhov's own feelings. Over 400 discharged Russian servicemen had come on board the Petersburg at Vladivostok, and two had died and been thrown overboard by the time the ship reached Singapore. Partly acting on Chekhov's advice, five sick bulls were slaughtered and thrown overboard as well.39 Three out of the five patients in the sickbay die during the course of 'Gusev', which has more sentences trailing off into rows of impressionistic dots than any other story he wrote, echoing the delirious state of its central character. The peasant soldier Gusev is, in fact, so delirious when Pavel Ivanych dies that he does not
even notice his body being removed from the sick-bay. Within a matter of days he too is dead, and his body is being sewn up in sailcloth to be thrown into the deep to be eaten by a shark. Chekhov finished this story in Colombo, and its fantastic ending seems inspired by that exotic locale:
Then another dark body appears. It is a shark. It glides underneath Gusev grandly and nonchalantly, as if not noticing him, and Gusev lands on its back; then it turns belly up, basks in the warm, clear water and lazily opens its jaws, showing two rows of teeth. The pilot fish are thrilled; they stop and look to see what is going to happen next. The shark teases the body a little, then nonchalantly places its mouth underneath it, carefully grazes it with its teeth and the sailcloth is ripped along the whole length of the body from head to toe; one of the weights falls out and frightens the pilots by striking the shark on its side before descending quickly to the seabed.
