Chekhov drew up a research program. He began with travelogues, one of his favorite genres. He loved reading about Charles Darwin's global expedition. Since childhood, he had been entranced by Ivan Goncharov's The Frigate Pallada (1858), an account of the author's journey from St. Petersburg by way of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to Ceylon, Japan, and the eastern coast of Russia, and thence, overland, across Siberia. Chekhov drew up a bibliography of everything he could find on the subject of Sakhalin: the journals of explorers, geographical tracts, and investigations into the zoology, botany, ethnography, mineralogy, geology, and meteorology of the island. He collected books, articles, and statistics on the Russian penal system. From Alexei Suvorin he obtained maps, atlases, and publications that were beyond his reach or means. He prevailed on his sister Masha and a young woman friend to make copies of journals in the Moscow library, and he persuaded his brother Alexander to do the same in St. Petersburg. From an actress named Kleopatra Karatygina, who had spent many years in Siberia, he obtained a list of contacts and practical advice, including the suggestion that he never ask anyone the reason why they had been brought to Siberia. His letters spoke of nothing but Sakhalin, and all his time went into research. In jest, he diagnosed himself as afflicted with Mania Sakhalinosa.13
Friends advised him to secure official letters of introduction to the Sakhalin administrators. Chekhov refused: he saw no point in applying to authorities who had a vested interest in maintaining public indifference to the plight of prisoners and exiles. In January 1890, however, he did obtain authorization to conduct literary and scientific research on the island from Mikhail N. Galkin-Vraskoy, the head of the national prison administration.14 Fearful of what Chekhov might uncover, Galkin-Vraskoy secretly directed island authorities to bar the writer from contact with political prisoners and stipulated that any findings be submitted for approval before publication in Suvorin's paper.15
It took Chekhov ten weeks to cover the roughly 7,500 miles by land across Siberia. He traveled by train, steamer, and tarantass ("a sort of wicker basket") drawn by two horses, with a change of private drivers at each village station. Bumping across the steppe and slogging through mud, Chekhov felt as if his stomach were coming out of his mouth: he was exhausted in every part of his body, and his feet seemed to be turning to ice. Nevertheless, he scrupulously scribbled his impressions in pencil and sent them to his editor and his family. His letters from the road are filled with detailed descriptions of the landscape, the people, the discomforts of the road, and humorous insights. Finally, on July 5, 1890, Chekhov arrived in Nikolayevsk.16
On the island itself, he traveled by train, cart, carriage, and steamboat. The fieldwork was exhausting. "I've gone around to each of the settlements," he wrote, "stopped at each hut, and talked with each person. For purposes of the census, I made use of a file card system and have already compiled records of around ten thousand convicts and settlers. In other words, there is not a single convict or settler left on Sakhalin who has not talked with me." He "visited all the celebrities" of the island.17 He turned down offers of assistance, preferring to conduct his census alone. He was not interested in the numerical part of the census, but in meetings with people and what he saw and experienced within himself in the course of his research.
Chekhov visited homes, kitchens, prisons, workshops, latrines, clinics, hospitals, villages, barracks, churches, farms, cemeteries, schools, and mines. He made inquiries about the status of agriculture and fishing and studied the climate, soil, water, and condition of the forests. He examined police registries and reports and interviewed inmates, soldiers, officials, administrators, guards, exiles, and priests. He made ethnographic observations on the Ghiliaks and the Ainu and concluded that "Russification" attempts had had a negative impact on their lives and morale. He looked into the medical condition of children, discovered that women were treated no better than animals, and learned that young girls were forced into prostitution. He railed against the particular medical condition afflicting the islanders, which he called "febris sakhaliniensis"; he attributed it to the brutal labor regi- men, the harsh climate, the appalling rations, the stress, and the physical and psychological abuse.
By the time he was ready to leave, Chekhov had collected 7,500 index cards, an assortment of souvenirs given to him by convicts, a notebook, the island commandant's orders of the day, a sheaf of petitions, and personal letters. An outbreak of cholera forced him to return by way of the Sea of Japan, the Indian Ocean, Ceylon, and the Suez Canal. Once home, he felt like a trunk stuffed full of documents and proceeded to draft his report. The writing, however, was difficult and proceeded by fits and starts. One problem was the necessity of getting the work past the censor; another was securing the approval of Mikhail Galkin-Vraskoy, the chief administrator of all the prisons and penal institutions of the Russian Empire.
Chekhov dashed off a sketch on escapes from Sakhalin, which would become one of the final chapters, and published it in December i89i in a publication to benefit famine victims. Then the writing faltered. In the summer of i892, Chekhov wrote to Suvorin that he could not write as long as "a Galkin-Vraskoy rules the prisons."18 In fact, however, he could not quite find the right tone: to his ear, everything he wrote had a false ring. Eventually, he figured out the problem. "The insincere quality," he wrote to Suvorin, "stemmed from the sense that I was trying to make Sakhalin instructive even as I was concealing something and holding myself back. But as soon as I realized how much I had felt myself to be an eccentric on Sakhalin and what swine there were on that island, I felt relieved and my writing took off, though it turned out a touch humorous."19
The final version of the text, which appeared three years after the journey to Sakhalin, betrays Chekhov's fear of the censor. There is nothing even remotely tendentious or anything that might suggest he is passing judgment. Chekhov scrupulously confines himself to facts. Wherever possible, he replaces the first-person pronoun with impersonal expressions: "I think" becomes "one might say." Chekhov's name never appears in the text. Nor does he refer to himself as a physician except in the last chapter, in which he describes a surgical procedure that he performed. Instead, the impersonal narrator stands for Chekhov the traveler, whose persona gives the impression of someone who is ready to believe everything he hears, goes on picnics, and fights boredom with fishing. The author's personality vanishes. He emerges here in the guise of an everyman who observes honestly and without prejudice and tells what he sees. He is neither an omniscient guide nor a curious tourist, nor—least of all—a prophet.20
The Lessons of Sakhalin
The Sakhalin project helped Chekhov understand why he wrote and prompted him to reflect on the goals of his writing. He learned that "life is a march to prison. Literature should genuinely teach either how one can escape or it should promise freedom."21 He also gained insights into the particular quality of life in his native land. "Life in Russia crushes the Russian until there's nothing left, not even a wet spot; it crushes like a twenty-ton rock."22 He admitted now that he felt out of place in his own land and understood that writing represented an act of freedom in a country "where there was no freedom of press or freedom of conscience ... where life was so narrow and foul and there was so little hope for better times."23 Nevertheless, he did not want to preach; rather, he wanted to be "a mere chronicler... [of] the unconditional and honest truth."24