His account of his land and river journey is told in vivid letters to his sister and his mother.
The rain poured down during the river trip to the ravines of Kineshma. After leaving the steamer he took to the road, jolted in an open public coach from one posting house to the next, though he hired private carriages when he could, and sat there freezing “like a goldfinch in a cage.”
He writes to his sister:
I have my fur coat on. My body is all right, but my feet are freezing. I wrap them in the leather overcoat, but it is no use. I have two pairs of breeches on…. Telegraph poles, pools, birch copses flash by. Here we overtake some emigrants…. We meet tramps with pots on their back; these gentry promenade all over … Siberia without hindrance. One time they will murder some poor old woman to take her petticoat for their leg-wrappers; at another they will strip from the verst post the metal plate with the number on it—it might be useful; at another will smash the head of some beggar or knock out the eyes of some brother exile; but they never touch travellers….
He is by now well past the Urals. If the small towns are gray and miserable, the country people are “good and kindly,” and
have excellent traditions. Their rooms are simply furnished but clean, with claims to luxury; the beds are soft, all feather mattresses and big pillows. The floors are painted or covered with homemade linen rugs.
No bugs, no “Russian smell.” The explanation: these people have forty-eight acres of black earth, which they farm themselves.
But it cannot all be put down to prosperity…. One must give some of the credit to their manner of life…. they don’t search in each other’s heads in your presence…. There is a cleanliness of which our Little Russians can only dream, yet the Little Russians are far and away cleaner than the Great Russians.
Food! Pies and pancakes are good, but all the rest is not for what Chekhov calls his “European” stomach. Duck broth is disgusting and muddy; there is the terrible “brick tea” tasting like a “decoction of sage and beetles.”
The last of the bad Moscow air was out of his lungs and he had stopped coughing. But in Siberia there were freezing gales, food was scarce; the bad roads, the floods and the days and nights of jolting along brought on his cough again and he spat blood. He had bought a cart of his own by now because it was cheaper, but he was continually repairing it. His cheap boots cramped his feet and for the rest of the journey he suffered agonies from piles. His whole body was aching.
He changes to a public coach. It is like traveling on roads flooded to the size of lakes and he has to be rowed across them. As for fellow passengers—they seem chiefly to have been drunkards and boasters. There was a police officer who had written a play and insisted on reading it. He also exhibited a nugget of gold. There was constant talk about gold in Siberia.
Tomsk turns out to be a dull and drunken town— “a pig in a skullcap” and the acme of “mauvais ton.” It is regarded as a distinction that all its governors die in it.
After the freezing gales the heat of summer comes suddenly. He had his first bath at Irkutsk, “a very European town,” and threw away his filthy clothes and bought new ones. Then on by river steamer to the famous Lake Baikal, a little sea in itself, and at last he reached a paradise on the Amur River. On the left, the Russian shore; on the right, wild and deserted China. What a region for a summer villa, among duck, grebes, herons and all sorts of creatures with long beaks, young girls smoking cigarettes, old ladies smoking pipes. Marvelous crags and forests, everyone talking about gold, gold, gold.
And what liberalism! Oh what liberalism…. People are not afraid to talk aloud here. There’s no one to arrest them and nowhere to exile them to, so you can be as liberal as you like. The people for the most part are independent, self-reliant and logical. If there is any misunderstanding at Ustkara, where the convicts work (among them many politicals who don’t work), all the Amur region is in revolt. … An escaped convict can travel freely on the steamer to the ocean, without any fear of the captain’s giving him up. This is partly due to the absolute indifference to everything that is done in Russia.
At last, after two and a half months, on July 5, 1890, he is at Nikolayevsk, a town of respectable smugglers on the Tatar Strait and the port of embarkation for the island of Sakhalin on the other side of the strait. On the crossing he found himself with three hundred soldiers and several prisoners, one he notices “accompanied by his five-year-old daughter, who clung to his shackles as he came up the gangway.”
The first sight of the town itself alarmed him. Smoke was drifting across the strait from huge fires. He eventually wrote in The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin:
The horrifying scene, compounded of darkness, the silhouettes of mountains, smoke, flames and fiery sparks, was fantastic. On my left monstrous fires were burning, above them the mountains, and beyond the mountains a red glow rose to the sky from remote conflagrations. It seemed that all of Sakhalin was on fire.
Chekhov had had no difficulty in getting permission to talk to the convicts or the settlers, but his official permit forbade him to talk with political prisoners. He had given practical forethought to his inquiry and he had shrewdly decided to begin by making his personal census of the population. He devised a card of twelve questons, which requested simple particulars of each settler’s status, age, religion, education and year of arrival, and included the very cogent question: Married in Russia or in Sakhalin? He claimed to have filled out ten thousand of those cards. There was no Impressionist in Chekhov, the doctor. Most of the settlers were of peasant origin and illiterate. Some didn’t know where they came from. There were twice as many men as women in the penal colony, and in addition there were the “bachelor soldiers,” who were as dangerous, he noted, as “roughnecks building a railroad” near a Russian village.
If he is writing a flat documentary prose and rather overloads his book with the statistics, he has the storyteller’s eye for the grim and the bizarre. When word of a new delivery of woman convicts gets around, we shall see, the road is crowded with men going south to the port of arrival. These are known to everyone, not without irony, as the “suitors,” or prospective bridegrooms.
They actually look like bridegrooms. One has donned a red bunting shirt, another wears a curious planter’s hat, a third sports shining new high-heeled boots, though nobody knows where he bought them or under what circumstances. When they arrive at the post they are permitted to enter the women’s barracks and they are left there with the women. The suitors wander around the plank beds, silendy and seriously eyeing the women; the latter sit with downcast eyes. Each man makes his choice. Without any grimaces, without any sneers, very seriously, they act with humanity toward the ugly, the old and those with criminal features…. If some younger or older woman “reveals herself” to a man, he sits down beside her and begins a sincere conversation. She asks if he owns a samovar and whether his hut is covered with planks or straw…. Only after the housekeeping examination has been completed, when both feel that a deal has been made, does she venture to say: “You won’t hurt me in any way, will you?”
The conversation is over. The civil marriage is completed and he takes his “cohabitant” home.
With the exception of women from the privileged classes or those who arrived with their husbands, all female convicts became “cohabitants.” Most of the women convicts were neurotics who had been “sentenced for crimes of passion or crimes connected with their families.” They say, “I came because of my husband,” or “I came because of my mother-in-law.”
Most are murderers, the victims of love and family despotism. Even those who are sent out here for arson and for counterfeiting are being punished for their love affairs, since they were enticed into crime by their lovers.