If those critics whose authority you cite know something that you and I do not, then, tell me, why haven't they spoken up all this time and revealed their truths and immutable laws to us? Believe me, if they had actually known something along this line, they would most certainly have pointed us in the right direction long ago, and you and I would have known what to do.. You and I would not have been as bored as we are now, and you wouldn't have been
drawn to the theater nor I to Sakhalin But the critics
maintain a dignified silence or carry on with their idle blather. If you find them influential, that is only because they are stupid, pretentious, aggressive, and strident: empty barrels rattling in your ears.
To hell with all that. Let us move on to another subject. Please do not expect anything artistic to come out of my Sakhalin journey. I am not going for observations or impressions, but only to spend six months living in a way I have not lived yet up to now. Do not place any great hopes in me, my friend. If I do manage to accomplish something, praise the Lord; if not, do not blame me. I will be leaving the week after Easter.
Talk Things Over with Friends
Clarify the areas and scope of your research in discussions with friends.
Letter to Alexei Suvorin, March 9, 1890 We are both wrong about Sakhalin, but probably you more so than I. I am going there certain that my trip will contribute nothing of value either to art or to science. I lack the knowledge, time, and ambition for that. I have no plans on the scale of Humboldt's or Kennan's.1 I intend to write between 100 and 200 pages so I can pay off some of my debt to medicine, in regard to which I have been a perfect swine
Sakhalin is a place of such unbearable suffering as only man, free or captive, is capable of inflicting. Those working on and around it have been trying to find solutions to horrendous, weighty problems. I regret I am not sentimental or I would say that we should be bound to make pilgrimages to places such as Sakhalin the way Turks go to Mecca, and that sailors and experts on penal servitude should regard Sakhalin in the same way the military regards Sebastopol.2 The books I have read and am currently reading make it clear that we have condemned millions of human beings to rot in prisons; we have condemned them barbarically, for no purpose at all, without thinking; we have herded human beings tens of thousands of miles across the cold, in chains; we have infected them with syphilis, debauched them, multiplied the number of criminals, and we have put all the blame for this on the red-nosed prison wardens. Nowadays all educated Europeans know that prison wardens are not to blame, but we go on insisting that this is none of our business and cannot interest us. The vaunted sixties3 did absolutely nothing for the sick and the imprisoned and thereby violated the central commandment of Christian civilization. Our age is doing something for the sick, but nothing for the imprisoned; our legal experts have absolutely no interest in penology. No, I assure you, Sakhalin is necessary and interesting; the only regrettable thing is that I am going there—rather than someone with more expertise and more ability to arouse public opinion. After all, I am traveling there on a trivial pretext.
Challenge Indifference
Study those areas that no one else studies; go in person to see the injustices that no one else sees; value firsthand experience and hands-on knowledge.
Anton Chekhov, "From Siberia," The Island of Sakhalin
(travel notes), May 18, 1890
I am deeply convinced that in fifty or a hundred years' time people will look upon our sentences of life imprisonment with the same dismay and distress with which we now view the slitting of nostrils and the amputation of fingers from the left hand. I am equally convinced that though we may sincerely and clearly acknowledge that such archaic phenomena as life imprisonment are obsolete and pernicious, we are utterly impotent to stop them. At present, we lack the knowledge, experience, and, perhaps, courage to replace the life sentence with something more rational and just. All our attempts to do so are indecisive and tentative and consequently can produce only grave errors and extremes: this is the fate of all undertakings not grounded in knowledge and experience..
For the past twenty or thirty years our thinking intellectuals have been repeating the phrase that criminals are produced by society, and yet how indifferent they are to this product! The cause for this indifference—quite incomprehensible in a Christian state and a Christian literature—to prisoners and exiles lies in the abysmally shallow education of our Russian lawyer. He knows little. He is encumbered with professional biases He takes his university examinations so he can learn how to go about judging and sentencing others to jail or to exile. However, he himself has no idea what happens to the criminal after trial, and why, and what prison and Siberia might be like, and all this is beyond his sphere of interests or his area of expertise. All this is a matter for the convoys and the prison wardens with their red noses!
Read and Summarize
Do research and take notes; ask for help and borrow books; read everything except what fails to give facts.
Letter to AleXei Pleshcheyev, February 15, 1890 I have been sitting here all day long, reading, and taking notes. There is nothing in my head or on paper except Sakhalin. Mental derangement. Mania Sakhalinosa.4
Letter to AleXei Suvorin, February 23, 1890 If you happen to come across Tsebrikova's article, do not bother sending it to me.5 Articles like hers do not give any real information and are a waste of time. I need facts. In general, there is a dreadful dearth of facts and a dreadful wealth of speculation in our Rus,6 as I am coming to realize through my zealous study of literature on Sakhalin.
Letter to Modest Tchaikovsky, March 16, 1890 I am shut up at home, sitting and reading about the price of a ton of coal on Sakhalin and in Shanghai in 1883. I am reading about the force of winds from the northeast, northwest, southeast, and other directions that will be blowing on me as
I will be observing the symptoms of my own seasickness on the shores of Sakhalin. I am reading about the soil, the subsoil, the sandy loam, and the loamy sand.
Letter to Alexei Suvorin, March 22, 1890 Do you happen to have in your library Voyeykov's Climates of Various Lands?7 It is an excellent work. If you do have it, please send it; if not, do not bother because it costs five rubles, which is a lot of money for me. Send me Maksimov's Siberia and Penal Servitude.8