'At a Low Moment in Our Lives'

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).]