Ask yourself whether the appearance of buildings, house furnishings, and speech patterns might not retain traces of the past, and in what ways they might do so.
The hut consists of one room with a Russian stove. The floor is made of wood. It contains a table, two or three stools, a bench, and a bed frame with bedding, or the bedding is placed directly on the floor. Sometimes there is no furniture at all except for a featherbed in the middle of the floor, obviously just slept on. A mug of leftovers sits on the windowsill. The furnishings would be more in place in a solitary confinement cell than in a hut or a room. Wherever there are women and children, no matter how poor, it feels homey and somehow reminiscent of peasant life, though, to be sure, one senses the absence of something cruciaclass="underline" there's no grandfather, no grandmother, no old icons, no old furniture. The home has no past, no traditions. There is no icon corner, or, if there is one, it is barren and dim, devoid of votive candle and decorations. There are no customs. The furnishings are haphazard and suggest that the family is transient, that it just moved into the lodgings and has not settled in yet. There is no cat. There is no cricket chirping on a cold winter night.. Worst of all, there is no motherland.
When you ask an old settler whether he remembers any good folk having once lived on the island, he'll stop to reflect, as if trying to recollect something that happened a long, long time ago, and finally say, "There were all kinds." Nowhere is the past forgotten as quickly as it is on Sakhalin, and that is because of the exceeding transience of the convict population, which basically turns over every five years, and because of the lack of accurate record keeping in the local offices. Anything that happened twenty or twenty-five years ago is considered ancient history, forgotten and lost to memory. The only things that survive are a handful of buildings, Mikryukov, a couple of dozen stories, and some statistics from the past, which, however, cannot be trusted because none of the departments had even the faintest idea how many prisoners, fugitives, deceased, etc., might have been on the island.
Use Your Nose
Take in smells, identify their source, describe them using plain language, and try to determine their chemical composition.
After spending the day working, usually in foul weather, the convict returns to the prison for the night. His clothing is sodden, his boots filthy; there is nowhere to dry anything; he hangs some of his clothes on the sleeping platform, the rest he uses for bedding. His sheepskin coat reeks of mutton; his footwear smells of leather and tar. His underwear, permeated with bodily fluids, wet and unwashed, is tossed into a heap along with old sacks and mildewed rags. His footcloths have a suffocating reek of sweat. His body, unwashed, lice-ridden, and flatulent, is addicted to cheap tobacco. Bread, meat, dried fish—which usually he himself salted in prison— crumbs, chunks, bones, and leftover shchi21 all go into his mess tin. He squashes bedbugs with his fingers on the sleeping platform. All this makes for fetid, dank, and sour- smelling prison air. It is so saturated with vapor that during severe frosts, the windows freeze over with a thick layer of ice, making the space dark by day. Hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and all sorts of other compounds mix with the air and the water vapor, and the result is something that, in the words of one inspector, "sickens the very soul."
Listen
Listen to noises, sounds, and background voices.
It is always quiet in Duй. The ear soon grows used to the measured clang of chains, the roar of the surf, the hum of telegraph wires, and these sounds serve only to reinforce the impression of a dead stillness. The seal of bleakness lies not only on the striped posts. If someone on the street were suddenly to burst out laughing, it would sound harsh and unnatural. From the very beginning of Duй, life here has taken a course that only the most implacably brutal, desperate sounds can convey, and only the savage, bone-rattling blasts that blow in from the sea through the gap on winter nights can sing what must be sung. That is why it is so strange to hear erupting from this silence the singing of Shkandyba, Duй's eccentric. This convict, an old man now, refused to work from the moment he landed on Sakhalin and every conceivable form of coercion failed in the face of his indomitable, downright brutish obstinacy. He was kept in isolation cells, he was flogged, but he stoically endured every form of punishment and after it was over, invariably announced, "I'm not going to work." They took a lot of trouble trying to break him, but finally had to give it up. Now he strolls from one end of Duй to another, singing.
There is a large square in the center of the settlement and on it stands a wooden church and around it there are no shops, as in our villages, but only prison structures, offices, and official lodgings. As you cross the square, you feel like you might be at a noisy fair humming with the voices of Uskovo gypsies trading horses; stinking of tar, manure, and smoked fish; clamorous with the lowing of cows and the screech of accordions and the singing of drunks. But this idyllic fantasy melts into thin air at the first repellent sound of clanging chains and the muffled shuffle of feet as prisoners and guards cross the square on their way back to prison.
Touch
Use your sense of touch.
In fact, the bread was atrocious. When I broke it open, tiny drops of moisture glistened in the sunlight, and it stuck to my fingers and looked like a filthy lump of slime that was repulsive to touch.
Taste
Use your sense of taste.
Tea came with wheat pancakes and sour cream, egg pie, fritters, and sweet buns. The pancakes were thin and greasy; the buns tasted and looked like those yellow, spongy rolls Ukrainians sell in bazaars in Taganrog and in Rostov-on-the- Don. . If you order something warm for lunch, they will always bring "duck soup." This is an unpalatable, murky slop with chunks of wild duck meat and giblets complete with their original contents. It is not just unappetizing: it is downright nauseating.22
collect facts Consult Written Sources
Study reports and official decrees, lists, regulations, and private letters; deduce customs from prohibitions that ban them.
Rumor has it that the people of Sakhalin do well once they move to the mainland. I was able to read their letters, but did not have the opportunity to see how they actually do in their new locations.
Bishops have made frequent visits to Sakhalin, traveling with the same simplicity and putting up with the same discomforts and privations of the road as ordinary priests. During their tours, they organized churches, consecrated various structures, visited prisons, and offered words of consolation and hope to the exiles.23 The character of their ministry can be appreciated from the following excerpt from a resolution in a letter written by the Most Reverend and preserved in the Korsakov church: "Whereas not all [of the exiles] have faith and repentance, many of them do, as has been ascertained by myself. For nothing save the feeling of repentance and faith had moved them to shed bitter tears when I preached to them in 1887 and 1888. Aside from punishing crime, incarceration has the aim of instilling in prisoners morally sound sentiments, especially to keep them from sinking into despair in their tribulation."
The prisons have many guards, but no order. The guards, as the island commandant has himself recognized, are a constant burden on the administration. Scarcely a day goes by that the daily orders do not levy some penalty or other—a demotion or even discharge: one for unreliability and dereliction of duties; another for immorality, laxness, and stupidity; a third for pilfering government supplies under his care; a fourth for looking the other way; a fifth, not only for failing to maintain order on the barge on which he's been stationed, but even for setting a bad example by stealing walnuts from the same barge; a sixth, for selling government axes and nails; a seventh, for chronic laxness in furnishing feed to government cattle; and eight, for nefarious relations with convicts. From the daily orders, we learn about a senior guard who, while on duty, presumed to break into the women's barracks by climbing in through a window after first having bent back the iron bars, with the intent of pursuing a romantic objective. On another occasion, a guard admitted a colleague, a private in rank, into a cell for the solitary confinement of female prisoners at one o'clock in the morning. The guards do not confine their amorous escapades to the narrow sphere of the women's barracks and individual cells. .