Now they were “settled.” Twenty years before Chekhov’s time such women were sent to brothels.
Chekhov made a study of the grim mining settlements all over the island. Due was a place of violent brawls and robberies. On another journey there is a place called Upper Armudan, famous for its cardplayers. They gambled here with their rations and clothing. Once he was obliged to stay in a garret in the jail because the only other room was fully occupied by bugs and cockroaches. The jailer said these creatures “win all the time.”
It seemed as though the walls and ceiling were covered with black crepe, which stirred as if blown by a wind. From the rapid and disorderly movements of portions of the crepe you could guess the composition of this boiling, seething mass.
During his journeys Chekhov came across dozens of criminal life stories. He got used to the apathy of the women, but the lot of the children born there horrified him.
What is terrifying in the cities and villages of Russia is commonplace here…. When children see chained convicts dragging a wheelbarrow full of sand, they hang onto the back of the barrow and laugh uproariously.
They played Soldiers-and-Convicts and Vagrants among themselves and knew the exact meaning of “executioner,” “prisoners in chains,” and “cohabitant.” He records a talk with a boy of ten.
“What is your father’s name?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he answered….
“You are living with your father and don’t know his name? That is disgraceful.”
“He’s not my real father.”
“What do you mean, he’s not your real father?”
“He’s my mother’s cohabitant.”
“Is your mother married or a widow?”
“A widow. She came because of her husband.”
“What do you mean, she came because of her husband?”
“She killed him.”
In spite of this Chekhov was convinced that the children were “the most useful, the most necessary and the most pleasant” creatures on the island and that the convicts themselves felt this too. The children loved their “impure mothers and criminal fathers more than anything else in the world. … often children are the only tie that binds men and women to life, saving them from despair and a final disintegration.” Yet the parents seemed indifferent to child prostitution.
The most horrifying pages of the book are those describing a flogging. Chekhov steeled himself to watch it and to record almost every stroke and all the screams of the criminal and the cold professional attitude of the flogger, counting out the strokes. Chekhov was impelled to identify himself with all the pain on the island. The one relief from the sight of human degradation came to him from the sights of nature: the crops, the forests, the animals, birds and shoals of fish. He studied the agriculture of the island very seriously. Writing the book when he was back home was a trying labor for one who was not by nature a documentary journalist. He added very enlightening footnotes. The book did not appear until 1895.
By October he was glad to leave Sakhalin, glad to stop being a doctor, examining human degradation, and to be a free globe-trotter. He left on a steamer by way of Hong Kong and Singapore. He reveled above all in Ceylon, where, he claimed in a letter to Alexander, he had made love to a dark girl under the palm trees; he also acquired three mongooses, and then went on to Odessa. At Tula his mother and sister met him, and then home to Moscow. He had been away eight months. He was thirty. He told his friends and family:
I can say I have lived! I’ve had everything I want. I have been in Hell which is Sakhalin and in Paradise which is Ceylon.
He was restless. This labor of writing a “book of statistics” hung over him like a punishment for a long time, for once more he was frantic about money. He had spent more than he could afford. His mind was full of stories begging to be written.
The man so conscientious in his duties inevitably craved once more for escape and evasion. The “cure” was more travel and, although protesting, he jumped recklessly at the chance of a trip to Europe with Suvorin. The distraction was indeed a cure. On Sakhalin he had simply worked too hard; now with Suvorin and Suvorin’s son he moved from barbarism to civilization. Vienna amazed him. He had never seen anything like this in his life.
I have for the first time realized…. that architecture is an art. And here the art is not seen in little bits, as with us, but stretches over several miles. And then on every side street there is sure to be a bookshop. … It is strange that here one is free to read anything and to say what one likes.
They went on to Venice: “For us poor and oppressed Russians it is easy to go out of our minds here in a world of beauty, wealth, and freedom,” he writes. And in another letter: “And the house where Desdemona lived is to let!”
On they went to Bologna and Florence. What works of art! What singing! What neckties in the shops! In Naples he was enchanted by the famous aquarium and studied the grace and viciousness of the exotic fish. He climbed Vesuvius and looked down on the crater and heard “Satan snoring under cover of the smoke.” In Monte Carlo he could not resist a gamble and lost more than he could afford. “If I had money to spare I would spend the whole year gambling”—and, in one sense, his own life had become a gamble. In Nice he thought the luxury of the resort vulgarized the scenery. In Paris there were riots, but he thought the French “magnificent.” He was impressed at the Chamber of Deputies, where he heard a free and stormy debate on the behavior of the police in the riots. Imagine the freedom to criticize the police! For once in his life he was staying in luxury hotels. He loved the Moulin Rouge but he eventually tired of “men who tie boa constrictors round their bodies, ladies who kick up to the ceiling, flying people, lions, cafés chant ants, dinners and lunches.” He wanted to get back to work. His depression had gone.
On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I write my Sakhalin book, on the other days, except Sunday, my novel, and on Sundays, short stories.
He had paid his debt to medicine.
Chapter Nine
The immediate reward of Chekhov’s Sakhalin adventure was an extraordinary leap of his imagination. It was prompted by an incident he had witnessed on the sea voyage home. He had seen two men buried at sea. In Gusev he turns from his prison documents to a fable that grows out of this incident and, one must suppose, from his preoccupation with his own illness. Gusev is traveling by sea with other soldiers sent home on sick leave. They are on edge and their talk is querulous and wanders between their real life of the moment and delirium. At sea one simply exists, outside society. Three soldiers are playing cards, and one of them drops his cards in the middle of the game and lies down on the floor. Dryly and offhand the others realize he has died. We listen to Pavel, a townsman, who is angered by his fears: his pain has made him sadistic. He is a class-conscious political, a real recalcitrant, who hates the officer class: he is contemptuous and patronizing of the naive Gusev, who is a peasant. Pavel jeers at Gusev, telling him that he won’t last the voyage; he is an ignorant peasant anyway. For example, Gusev believes what some soldier had told him: that in the night a big fish had collided with the ship and made a hole in it. When the wind howls Gusev believes that “the wind has broken loose from its chain.” Pavel mocks him. To Gusev’s peasant imagination images are facts. He says:
“Suppose the fish were as big as a mountain and its back were as hard as a sturgeon and, in the same way, supposing that away yonder at the end of the world there stood great stone walls and the fierce winds were chained up to the walls.”