To date, the two individuals who have done the most for the establishment and responsible management of the penal colony are M. S. Mitsul and M. N. Galkin-Vraskoy. A tiny, impoverished, temporary settlement of ten households is named in honor of the former, while a settlement with the long-established local name Silyantsy was named for the latter, though it is known as Galinko-Vraskoye only on some maps. Incidentally, the name of M. S. Korsakov was given to a settlement and a large post not because of any of his particular merits or sacrifices, but simply because he had once served as Governor General and had made himself feared. [A.C.]
Cabbage soup. [L.L.]
Anton Chekhov, "Iz Sibiri," II (May 9, 1890), Polnoe so- branie sochinenii i pisem v tridcati tomakh: Sochinenia v vosemnad- cati tomakh: Toma chetyrnadcatyj—pyatnadcatyj: Iz Sibiri: Ostrov Sakhalin. (1890—1995) (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), available at: http://az.lib.ru/c7chehow_a_p/text_0200.shtml.
On the consecration of the Krilon lighthouse by Bishop Martimian, see Vladivostok, 1883, no. 28. [A.C.]
Chekhov is giving the temperature in Rйamur units, which were standard in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The equivalent temperature in Fahrenheit is 32 degrees. [L.L.]
Personal proper names, in Russia, reflect the patriarchal structure of the society. Every individual is known by his or her given name (corresponding to our first name), followed by the patronymic—the given name of the father to which the suffix "-ovich" (masculine) or "-ovna" (feminine) is added—and finally, the surname (family name). Personal address is extremely complex in Russia. Subtle nuances of status, degree of intimacy, and esteem can be communicated, depending on which part or parts of the triadic name are used, and in what combination; whether or not diminutive forms of any parts of these names are used; and finally, if a diminutive is used, which of nearly a dozen variants of diminutives the speaker chooses to use. [L.L.]
The Old Believers, or "Raskol'niki," were a conservative Russian Orthodox sect formed in the midseventeenth century in opposition to reforms in church ritual and books introduced and enforced by Patriarch Nikon on the contemporary Greek Orthodox model. Subject to excommunication and persecution, the Old Believers retreated to the easternmost territories of the Russian Empire and, after the Revolution of 1917, found their way to refuges in China, Argentina, Canada, and the United States, where they have remained to this day. [L.L.]
Potemkin was already a rich man when he arrived on Sakhalin. Dr. Avgustinovich, who saw him three years after his arrival on Sakhalin, wrote, "The home of the exile Potemkin is the best." If in only three years Potemkin, as a convict, was able to build himself a good house, keep horses, and marry his daughter off to a Sakhalin official, then, I think, agriculture had nothing to do with his success. [A.C.]
The melodrama Trente ans, ou La vie d'un jouer (1827) was written by French novelist and playwright Victor Henri-Joseph Brahain du Cange (or Ducange) (1783-1833). [L.L.]
Situated some 1,800 miles east of Tomsk, in the Siberian Transbaikal, were the mines of Kara, where the czarist regime banished the most dangerous criminals and the most troublesome political offenders. [L.L.]
Chekhov's footnote bearing on this settler's verbal virtuosity is cited earlier in the Notebook section. [L.L.]
Chapter Five
Sintsovsky, "Hygienic Conditions of Convicts, Correspondence (from Western Siberia) from the Island of Sakhalin," Zdorov'e, no. 16 (1875). [A.C.]
For more detail, see A. M. Nikol'sky, Sakhalin Island and Its Vertebrate Fauna (Ostrov Sakhalin I ego faumapozvonochnykh zhiv- otnykh), supp. to vol. 9, Zapiski im. Akademii Nauk (St. Petersburg, 1889). [A.C.]
The agronomist Mikhail Semyonovich Mitsul'—a man of rare moral strength, an indefatigable worker, optimist, and idealist, endowed with enthusiasm and the capacity of communicating it to others—also took part in the expedition under the command of Vlasov that was dispatched from St. Petersburg in 1870. At that time Mitsul' was in his midthirties. He was exceptionally conscientious in discharging the duties with which he had been entrusted. In studying the soil, flora, and fauna of Sakhalin, he covered on foot the entire area encompassed by the present Alek- sandrovsk and Tymovsk regions, the western coast, and the entire southern part of the island. At that time, there were no roads on the island; the miserable paths that did exist here and there disappeared in the taiga and in the swamps, and any form of transportation, by horse or on foot, was a veritable martyrdom. The idea of a convict agricultural colony both astonished and fascinated Mitsul'. He embraced it with his entire soul and came to love Sakhalin. Like a mother, for whom her beloved child can do no wrong, Mitsul' paid no attention to the frozen earth and the fogs of the island that had become his second motherland. Instead, he saw it as a flourishing garden, and from this opinion he could be moved neither by the meteorological record, which, in all fairness, was nearly nonexistent at the time, nor by the bitter experiences of earlier visitors, of whose value he was profoundly skeptical. Here, after all, could be found wild grapes, bamboo, gigantic
grasses The subsequent history of the island finds him in the
role of Actual State Councilor, as enthusiastic and indefatigable as ever. He died on Sakhalin of an acute nervous ailment at the age of forty-one. I saw his grave. He left behind a book, An Agricultural Study of Sakhalin (1873). It is an extensive paean to the fertility of Sakhalin. [A.C.]
In the interest of fairness, I should note that Mayor Sh. showed perfect respect for my literary profession and that for the duration of my stay in Korsakov, he made every effort to rescue me from boredom. Several weeks before my arrival in the south, he had made the same exertions on behalf of the Englishman Howard, an adventurer and a man of letters, who had survived shipwreck on a Japanese [sic] junk on the Aniva and subsequently wrote some rubbish about the Ainus in his book The Life with Trans-Siberian Savages. [A.C.]
Volunteer. [L.L.]
According to the "Regulations on Exiles," authorities are not bound by the procedural directives stipulated in the "Laws of Legal Procedures" when arresting a deported convict. The latter can be arrested at any time under the mere suspicion of having committed a crime. [A.C.]
Chekhov is referring to the character of Margarete/Gretchen, the lovely innocent who was seduced and abandoned in Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's Faust (1806-32). [L.L.]
The wheelbarrow shackle was a particularly severe form of punishment in which the prisoner was chained to a wooden wheelbarrow weighing as much as 175 pounds. Nothing was transported in the wheelbarrow, and the convict thus secured did not engage in any labor. This form of punishment was reserved for escapees, recidivists, and those sentenced to death penalty but pardoned. [L.L.]
[Tolstykh] was sentenced to penal servitude for beheading his wife. [A.C.]
The Russian peasant hut featured a large, high, usually tiled stove, the top of which was used as a sleeping platform. [L.L.]
In other words, he occupied the highest rank in the lowest of the fourteen grades in the "Table of Ranks." See ch. 4, n. 19. [L.L.]
Named for Metropolitan Macarius (Mikhail Petrovich Bulgakov, 1816-82), Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna and member of many learned societies, including the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Metropolitan Macarius Award was given for exceptional contributions to science. [L.L.]