Listen to Rumors
Listen to gossip and check on sources to verify reliability; try to determine why false rumors receive as much credence as accurate reports.
The court councilor aside (who is working as a surveyor on Sakhalin)—why is it that the free settlers and the formerly exiled peasants do not return to the mainland when they have a right to do so? One reason appears to be that their agricultural successes keep them on Sakhalin, but this obviously cannot explain all the instances. After all, only some of the settlers use the communal meadows and plow land. Only eight settlers have meadows and cattle; twelve have plow lands, so, no matter how you look at it, the scale of agriculture here is simply not such as to explain its exceptionally fine economic position. There are absolutely no workers for hire, no craftsmen, and only L, a former officer, keeps a shop. There are no official data that might explain why the residents of Sakhalin are wealthy, and so the only way to understand this situation is by considering the one remaining factor: its bad reputation. In the past Slobodka used to have an extremely widespread black market in alcohol. The import and sale of spirits is now strictly forbidden on Sakhalin, and consequently has given rise to a peculiar kind of traffic in contraband. Alcohol was sometimes smuggled onto the island in tin cans shaped like sugar loaves, in samovars, and even in belts, but usually it was simply shipped in barrels and in the usual bottles since the petty officials were on the take, and the higher-ups looked the other way.
One hears that on Sakhalin the climate itself makes women fertile. Old women give birth, and even women who were barren in Russia and had given up all hope of ever bearing children, get pregnant here. The women are said to be in a rush to populate Sakhalin and often produce twins. In Vladimirovka, a middle-aged woman with a grown-up daughter was certain that she was carrying twins because she'd heard so much talk on the subject; she was most disappointed when she was delivered of only one child. "Look some more," she begged the midwife. In fact, however, twin births occur no oftener here than they do in Russia. In the ten-year period ending January 1, 1890, the colony registered 2,275 births of both sexes, as compared to 26 so-called multiple births.18 All these somewhat hyperbolic rumors about the exceptional fecundity of the women, twins, etc., reveal the degree of interest with which the exiled population regards fertility and its significance for the area.
Study the Graffiti
Ask yourself why people write on benches and walls.
Apparently, there used to be benches on the side of the lighthouse road but they were removed to prevent the convicts and exiles in the area from writing or carving dirty ditties and obscenities on them. To be sure, there are plenty of pornography buffs living in freedom, but when it comes to sheer cynicism, nothing can rival the convicts. Here, not only the messages scrawled on the benches and on backyard fences are vile, but even the love letters are revolting. It strikes me as remarkable that the person who writes obscenities on benches should also at the same time feel lost, rejected, and profoundly unhappy. An old man might say he's sick of life, he might complain that it's time to die, that his rheumatism is killing him and his eyes are failing; but just listen to the gusto with which he lets loose with a string of curses, and hear how he lets fly the choicest obscenities and ornate turns of phrase as he composes intricate incantations against fevers. And if he happens to be literate, he just cannot seem to stifle the urge or resist the temptation to scratch with his fingernails a dirty word into the latrine wall.
Note the Signs of Social Hierarchy
Be attentive to formal and informal forms of address, hat doffing, use of space, sartorial details, and bodily marks.
The guards on duty let the prisoners play cards and themselves take part in the gambling; they drink with the exiles and carry on a trade in liquor. . The exiles have no respect for them and view them with contemptuous indifference. They call them "crackers" to their face and address them with the familiar second-person singular. The administration does not attempt to raise their prestige, probably because it feels this would be useless. The officials address the guards familiarly and speak abusively to them in front of the convicts.. As though ashamed of their duties, the guards from the privileged class look for ways to distinguish themselves from their colleagues: one might wear a slightly wider braid on his shoulders; another might don an officer's cockade; a third, a collegiate registrar,19 might identify himself in official documents not as "guard" but as "director of works and workers."
While I was in Aleksandrovsk, I saw that the officials and their families occupied the front part of the church during services; next came a colorful row of soldiers' and guards' wives and free women with their children; then came the guards and the soldiers; and at the very back, right up against the rear wall, were the settlers in their city clothes, the convict clerks. May a convict with a shaved head, with one or two stripes down his back, shackled, or with a ball and chain attached to his ankles, go to church if he so desires? A priest to whom I posed this question replied, "I don't know."
In Sakhalin, free citizens do not doff their caps when they enter into the barracks. This courtesy is required only of exiles.
Here corporal punishment is administered more often than in the north and sometimes as many as fifty men are beaten at a time. There is one stupid custom in the south that was introduced by some long-forgotten coloneclass="underline" when you, a free citizen, happen to run into a group of prisoners on the street or on the shore, from fifty paces away you will hear the guard shouting, "At-ten-tion! Re-move caps!" The bareheaded, gloomy men file past you, cowering, as though fearing that if they had waited to take off their caps at twenty or thirty, rather than fifty, paces, you would have thrashed them with your cane, just like Mr. Z or Mr. N.
Pay Attention to Place Names
Consider the significance of place or street names.
It is the custom on Sakhalin to name streets after living officials.
Beyond Aleksandrovsk, upstream of the Duyka, is the settlement of Korsakovskoye. It was established in 1881 and named in honor of M. S. Korsakov, the former Governor General of eastern Siberia. It is a curious fact that settlements on Sakhalin are named for Siberian generals, jailers, and even medics, while explorers such as Nevelskoy, the navigator Korsakov, Boshniyak, Polyakov, and many others, who, in my opinion, deserve to be commemorated more than someone like that jailer Derbin who was murdered for his cruelty—are forgotten.20
The colonists themselves call their settlement "Warsaw" because of its many resident Catholics.
Note Traces of the Past