'What Is Needed Is Work'

Chekhov has just returned from his journey by train, horse-drawn carriage, river steamer and ocean-going freighter from the katorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, 4,000 miles east of Moscow. He writes to his editor Alexi Suvorin on this date, Dec. 9, in 1890:

“Here is a brief report, I spent three months plus two days on Sakhalin, not two months as was reported in your paper. My work was strenuous; I took a complete and detailed census of the entire Sakhalin population and saw everything except an execution.”

  

Chekhov already suffered from the tuberculosis that would kill him fourteen years later. He had also entered his mature phase as a writer and would soon be producing his finest stories. Over the next three years he would begin publishing his Sakhalin findings in journals. Sakhalin Island was published as a book in 1895 and remains largely unrecognized as a masterpiece of nonfictional literature, at least among Anglophone readers and critics. Chekhov writes to Suvorin:

“While I was living on Sakhalin, I felt nothing more than a certain bitterness in my innards, the sort that comes from rancid butter, but now, when I think back on it, Sakhalin seems to me like hell itself. For two months I worked strenuously, giving myself no rest, and during the third the bitterness I’ve just spoken of became more than I could stand, the bitterness and boredom and the thought that cholera was on its way to Sakhalin from Vladivostok and that I might therefore risk spending the winter quarantined in the penal colony.”

On the return journey he visited Hong Kong, Singapore and Ceylon. Chekhov seems to be venting the months of outrage and frustration he accumulated on Sakhalin:

“God’s world is good. Only one thing in it is bad: we ourselves. How little justice and humility there is in us, and how poorly we understand patriotism! A drunken, frazzled, dissolute husband may love his wife and children, but what good is his love? The newspapers tell us we love our great homeland, but how do we express our love? Instead of knowledge we have insolence and arrogance beyond measure, instead of work – indolence and swinishness; we have no sense of justice, our conception of honor goes no farther than honor for one’s uniform, a uniform that usually adorns the prisoner’s dock in court. What is needed is work, and the hell with everything else. We must above all be just, and all the rest will be added unto us.”

Find the 2007 Oneworld Classics edition of Sakhalin Island, translated by Brian Reeve, which includes excellent notes, photographs and the book’s first chapter printed in the original Russian. The passages from Chekhov’s letter quoted above are from Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, 1973).