Chekhov left Moscow on April 21, 1890, on his way to the kartorga, or penal colony, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, 4,000 miles east of Moscow. He would travel by train, horse-drawn carriage, river steamer, occasionally on foot and, on his return, by ocean-going freighter. Along the way he experiences spring floods, a carriage collision and shipwreck – a mostly landlocked adventure worthy of Robert Louis Stevenson. Like Stevenson, the thirty-year-old physician was already sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him in 1904. By June 27, he had reached Blagoveshchensk in Eastern Siberia. To his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin he writes a sort of high-spirited travelogue:
“I’ve sailed
more than six hundred miles down the Amur [River, forming the Russo-Chinese
border], and before that there was Lake Baikal and Trans-Baikal . . . I have
truly seen such riches and experienced such rapture that death holds no more
terrors for me.”
Three paragraphs
later comes a passage first deleted by Chekhov’s sister who edited his letters
after his death, and later by the Soviet censors. Chekhov describes meeting
Japanese women, “diminutive brunettes with big, weird hair-dos. They have
beautiful figures and are, as I saw for myself, rather short in the haunch.
They dress beautifully. . . . When, to satisfy your curiosity, you have
intercourse with a Japanese woman, you begin to understand Shalkovsky
[1843-1905, mining engineer and minor writer], who is said to have had his
photograph taken with a Japanese whore.” A lengthy and fairly discrete account
of Russo-Japanese relations follows. It’s reassuring to know Chekhov,
at least on occasion, was merely human. He goes on to describe impromptu opportunities
to practice medicine along the way. “Bathing in the Amur” he writes, “talking
and dining with gold smugglers—is that not an interesting life?”
On July 11,
after travelling for eighty-one days, Chekhov reaches Aleksandrovsk, in the
Arctic tundra, on Sakhalin Island. For two months he collects data from some
10,000 prisoners and their families in the penal colony. “Chekhov’s
indignation,” Donald Rayfield reports in his 1997 biography of the writer, “focused
not on the plight of the prisoners or guards, but of the children.”
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. It wasn't translated into English until
1967. I didn’t read it until 2008 when I found the annotated edition translated
by Brian Reeve and published in 2007 by Oneworld Classics. It includes
photographs, a biography of Chekhov, a bibliography, a selection of his letters
pertaining to Sakhalin and the book’s first chapter printed in Russian. It’s
one of my most prized books. The great Irish essayist Hubert Butler writes in
“Materialism Without Marx: A Study of Chekhov,” published in 1948 and collected
in Independent Spirit (1996):
“His book Sakhalin Island, the result of this
journey, has only recently been translated, because it is in conflict with the
accepted Chekhov legend. It is not wistful, resigned and full of subdued
melancholy. It is blazing with certainty and indignation, and because of that,
in spite of its tragic contents it is perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic
of all his writings. He believed that it was worthwhile to be passionately
indignant about remediable injustice and that to remedy injustice was not the
task of the statistician, the trained welfare officer, the experienced
committeeman, it was the task of every man of sensibility and integrity.”
I think of Howard
Moss’ “Chekhov” (Buried City: Poems, 1975),
which alludes to the Russian’s final play, The
Cherry Orchard. The poem concludes:
“We could be
Racing the
wolves at thirty below
In a ravine
whiplashed by snow, or slowly
Succumbing
to boredom in a seaside town,
Waiting for
a future that will never be,
The heat
getting worse, far off the waves
Pounding
faintly late in the moonlight,
At a low
moment in our lives.”
After
Proust and perhaps Henry James, Chekhov was the prose writer Moss most admired. In “Notes on Fiction” (Minor Monuments,1986) he identifies a rarely
recognized relation between writers and serious readers. Across a lifetime of books,
a handful of writers become trusted companions whose company we depend on. We
even confide in them. Moss continues:
“Bookish
affections of this kind are deceptive and irrelevant, yet they truly exist. For
me, Colette, Keats, and Chekhov inspire affection. Faulkner, Shelley, and Ibsen
do not.” Right on all counts.
[The
passages from Chekhov’s letter quoted above are from A Life in Letters (trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips,
2004).]
2 comments:
Was just yesterday reading final chapters of Rayfield's biography of Chekhov. Very touching, the part about the contrast between those who knew the dying writer and those locals who were unfeeling but curious about celebrity.
I've just finished reading that edition of Chekhov's letters recently. Feel even closer to him now.
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