'With Rapture or Bitterness'

Among the minor motives for the continued care and feeding of Anecdotal Evidence is the pleasure of lobbying for books not sufficiently well-known and appreciated. Chekhov’s short stories don’t need anyone’s help but few have read Sakhalin Island (1891-93), a nonfiction chronicle of the Russian penal colony in Siberia, based on Chekhov’s visit in 1890. Readers familiar only with his fiction are likely to be surprised by its occasional case-study dryness. But should that surprise us? Chekhov was for most of his life a practicing physician in a country with wretchedly poor public health and primitive health care. He trusted what today we would call “data” but never to the degree that he underestimates the experience of individual human beings. Chekhov's sensibility mingles compassionate understanding and a certain clinical distance, even coolness, in fiction and nonfiction.

In a March 9, 1890 letter to his editor at the newspaper New Times, Alexi Suvorin, written not long before the start of his eleven-week journey to Sakhalin (by train, horse-drawn carriage and river steamer), Chekhov says:

 

“I am going there absolutely secure in the thought that my journey will not make any valuable contributions to literature or science: I have neither the knowledge, time, nor pretensions for that. . . . I want to write at least one or two hundred pages to pay off some of my debt to medicine, toward which, as you know, I’ve behaved like a pig.”

 

In other words, Chekhov is no social justice warrior and is temperamentally unsuited to leading a crusade – rare qualities among writers in his Russia and our world. “Granted, I may get nothing out of it," he writes, "but there are sure to be two or three days out of the whole trip that I’ll remember all my life with rapture or bitterness.”

 

Even when engaged in medical inspections in the penal colony, gathering data for his reports, or enduring the tedium of travel, Chekhov never stops telling stories. On a steamer during his journey from Moscow, Chekhov goes below deck and meets his fellow passengers:

 

“Our lady travelling companion, the wife of a naval officer, had fled Vladivostok, having taken fright at the cholera there, and now, somewhat reassured, was returning. She had an enviable disposition. The very slightest reason was enough for her to go off in fits of the most unaffected, bubbling and joyous laughter, till her side ached, till she was in tears; she would begin to tell you something in her regional burring accent, and suddenly the laughter and gaiety would come gushing up like a fountain, and, looking at the lady, I would begin to laugh as well . . .”

 

And this analysis of prisoner psychology: “Nowhere is the past so swiftly forgotten as on Sakhalin, precisely because of the extraordinarily high mobility of the exile population, which changes radically every five years here. . . . What happened twenty to twenty-five years ago is regarded as being profound antiquity, already forgotten and lost to history.”

 

Randall Jarrell might have had Chekhov, one of his favorite writers, in mind when he wrote: “Man is the animal that likes narration.”

 

Looking at Sakhalin Island again, I’m struck by the deftness and economy of Chekhov’s prose, which permits him to remain straight-faced while quietly satirical, as he often is in his stories. These qualities are evident even through the scrim of translation (by Brian Reeve, in the edition I’m reading). Take this:

 

“On pulling into the bank, the first thing the oarsmen do is set to abusing each other. They swear with malevolence, for no reason at all, and obviously in a half-asleep state. Listening to their choice vituperation, you might think that not only my driver, the horses and they themselves, but even the water, the ferry and the oars, have mothers.”

 

That might have come from one of his stories. In his note to the passage Reeve tells us:

 

“Most Russian terms of abuse either relate to parts of one’s mother’s anatomy, or else take the form of injunctions to depart and perform intimate acts with one’s mother or the mother of the Devil.”

 

[I’m using Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973), translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, and Reeve’s translation of Sakhalin Island published in an excellent Oneworld Classics edition. It comes with notes, biography and bibliography of Chekhov, photographs, a selection of pertinent letters and the text of the first chapter in Russian.]