Friend Chekhov

by KORNEI CHUKOYSKI

(Translated by Pauline Rose)

1

HOSPITAUTY was a veritable passion with Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. No sooner had he settled down in a village than lie began inviting throngs of guests to visit him. He filled his house to overflowing with guests whom he dined and wined and doctored.

He once rented a summer house in an out-ofthe-way Ukrainian provincial hole, and before he even saw it, he invited all sorts of guests from Moscow, from St. Petersburg, from Nizhni-Novgorod. And when he made his home outside Moscow, his residence resembled a hotel. “They slept on the divans, several people in each room,” his brother Mikhail recalls. “They even spent the night in the hallway. Writers, young women, local land department officials, local doctors, distant relatives” would crowd his home for weeks at a time.

But even this was not enough for Chekhov. “We’re expecting Ivanenko. Svobodin is coming. I’m going to invite Barantsevich. Of course Suvorin will be here” is what he wrote to Nata Lintvareva from Melikhovo in 1892. And in the same breath he invited her as well. His home provided constant shelter for friends of the family, “permanent guests,” and swarms of incidental, nameless folk.

Chekhov’s invitations were extended gayly, spiritedly, playfully. “Well, sir,” he wrote the editor of the weekly Sever (North), “as you’ve published my portrait and thereby helped me to acquire glory, I want to present you with five bunches of radishes from my very own garden. But you’ve got to come down here [from St. Petersburg — four hundred miles away!] to eat those radishes.”

When inviting his friends and acquaintances to visit him, he described the pleasures that awaited them, as though he were writing advertisements for health resorts: “It is a wholesome place, with lots of gayety, plenty of food, and people galore.” “A hundred times warmer and more beautiful than the Crimea.” “A comfortable carriage, very tolerable horses, a marvelous road, and people who are fine in all respects.” “Wonderful bathing.”

He was very insistent when extending an invitation. “I’ll get you down here if I have to lasso you,” he wrote to the writer Shcheglov. That is what most of his invitations really were — lassoings.

During his first years in Moscow, Chekhov came to know every stratum of Moscow society. At the same time he studied Moscow’s suburbs — Babkino and Chikino, and Voskresensk and Zvenigorod, ravenously gulping down all the impressions of the life about him.

And that is why, in the letters of his earlier years, we constantly read: “I’ve just been at the horse races.” “Slept and ate and drank with the officers.” “I often drop in on the monks.” “I’m going to visit a glass factory.” “Am going to take a trip through the Ukraine for the whole summer and will visit the fairs a la Nozdrev.” “I drank and sang with two opera bassos.” “I often call at the court of justice.” “Was in àa stinking pub, where I saw two rogues playing billiards in a billiard room that was packed full.” “I acted as best man for a certain doctor.” “Nelly has arrived and is going hungry.” “The baroness has given birth.” And so on.

Chekhov liked working with people and roaming about with them, and best of all he enjoyed practical jokes, masquerading, and buffoonery. He would shove a heavy round watermelon wrapped up in thick paper into the hands of a Moscow policeman and confide to him in a worried manner: “Bomb! Take into the police station — be careful!” Or dress up his brother’s wife like a hooligan and provide her with a medical certificate which stated that she was “suffering from ventriloquism.”

Without this phenomenal sociability of his; without his constant readiness to hobnob with anyone at all, to sing with singers and to get drunk with drunkards; without that burning interest in the lives, habits, conversations, and occupations of hundreds and thousands of people, he would certainly never have been able to create that colossal, encyclopedically detailed Russian world of the 1880’s and 1890’s which goes by the name of Chekhov’s Short Stories.

If all the people portrayed in the many-volumed collection of Chekhov’s Short Stories — all his policemen, midwives, actors, tailors, prisoners, cooks, religious devotees, teachers, prostitutes, landowners, bishops, circus performers, functionaries of all ranks and departments, peasants from northern and from southern regions, generals, bathhouse attendants, engineers, horse thieves, monastery novices, merchants, singers, soldiers, matchmakers, piano tuners, firemen, examining judges, deacons, professors, shepherds, lawyers—it all these could, in some miraculous way, come streaming forth from his books out into a Moscow street, what a mob they would make!

2

VAUDEVILLE ideas come gushing out of me like oil from the bowels of Baku,” Chekhov said of himself at the end of the eighties.

“Do you know how I write my short stories?" he said to Korolenko, the radical journalist and short-story writer, when the latter had just made his acquaintance. “Here’s how!”

“He glanced at his table,” Korolenko tells us, “took up the first object that met his eye, — it happened to be an ash tray, — placed it before me, and said: ‘If you want it, you’ll have a story tomorrow. It will be called “The Ash Tray.’””

And it seemed to Korolenko right then and there that a magical transformation of that ash tray was taking place: “Certain indefinite situations, adventures which had not yet found concrete form, were already beginning to crystallize about the ash tray.”

Everyone marveled at the mastery and ease with which his powerful fund of creative energy found living form in his host of diverse tales. From his early youth, for a period of ten to twelve years without interruption, Chekhov worked like a dynamo, tossing off reams of stuff, and although, in the beginning, there was no small quantity of spoilage, soon Chekhov began turning out dozens of chefsd’oeuvre one right after another.

“I read two of Chekhov’s books, and laughed like the devil,” a peasant, once wrote Maxim Gorky. “I read them to my mother and wife, and they did the same — they just rolled with laughter. Now here we’ve got something that’s both funny and nice.”

That was a good many years ago. But just recently, here in Moscow, some first-year medical students who had to go on duty for the night borrowed a volume of Chekhov’s stories from me. They read and laughed the whole night through until they got the hiccoughs. “Our watch was over and it was time to go, but we still sat there reading and laughing like silly old fools!”

This humor of Chekhov’s has lived through so many world-shaking events — through three wars and three revolutions. How many kingdoms have crumbled, how many famous names have passed into oblivion after having made the world ring with their fame, how many illustrious books have been forgotten, how many changes have taken place in literary trends and styles; yet Chekhov’s “ephemera” live on in all their freshness, and our grandchildren will laugh over them just as heartily as did their fathers and grandfathers.

And then this happiest of talents, this gayest of great Russian writers, a man who infected not only his contemporaries with his immortal mirth but millions of people then unborn, suddenly burst forth with an agony of grief beyond his endurance.

Even young Maxim Gorky, who in those years was by no means inclined to tears — even ho gave way before that tempest. Soon after Chekhov’s story “In the Ravine” appeared in the press, Gorky, who was in the Poltava region, wrote Chekhov: “I read ‘In the Ravine’ to some muzhiks. If you had only seen the effect it had. Those Khokhols wept, and I wept with them.”

And several years later, he wrote: “I saw Uncle Vanya a few days ago, saw it and broke down like an old woman.”

Uncle Vanya was a favorite play of Gorky s and he saw it a number of times. After its thirtyninth performance he wrote Chekhov from Moscow, “The audience wept, as did the actors.”

Such was the depth of Chekhov’s emotion that even professional actors who had rehearsed the play half a hundred times, who had performed it thirty-nine times, and for whom it had become part of their daily routine — even they broke down together with their audience, unable to restrain their tears. There is no other writer who, without piling up horrors, with the help merely of quiet, subdued lyricism, could wrest so many tears from his audiences.

3

CHEKHOV’S letters deal much more with nature than, for instance, do the letters of such generally recognized masters of nature as Tyutchev, Maikov, Turgenev, Pisemsky, and Fet. For Chekhov, nature was always an event, and when he spoke of her, he, who had such a rich command of words, more often than not found but one epithet: wonderful.

“During the day the snow comes softly falling down, while at night the moon, a luxuriant, wonderful moon, lights up all Johnny Street. It is magnificent! ”

“The weather here is wonderful, astonishing. It is so charming that I am at a loss for words.”

He saw in nature what a lover finds in his beloved — something new and wonderful every minute of the time, and all his letters which speak of nature are essentially love letters.

“The weather is marvelous. Everything is in blossom, is alive with song, and sparkles with beauty. The garden is quite green already, and even the oaks are astir with life. Billions of creatures are being born every day.”

And how tempestuously indignant he could be with nature when she proved less wonderful than he wanted her to be: —

“Villainous weather.” “The road is as dull as can be, enough to make one kick the bucket.” “The sky is as stupid as a cork.”

In fact, he was so intimate, so close to nature that in his letters he either raged at her or was delighted with her to the point of rapture—but he could never feel indifferent towards her.

But his attitude toward nature was not confined to a passive contemplation of her “riches” and “splendors.” It was not enough for him to appreciate a landscape esthetically: he forced nature to his own unbending will, which sought to create and transform life. He could never permit the soil around him to remain barren, and he labored so ardently to make tlie land green that when you looked at him it was impossible not to recall those ardent foresters and gardeners whom he described in his writings. In painting the portrait of the fanatic tree planter, Astrov, in Uncle Vanya, Chekhov drew what was essentially a portrait of himself.

lie was indcfatigably active in rendering the soil fruitful. When still a pupil at the Gymnasium he planted a small vineyard at his home in Taganrog, and in its shade he loved to rest. When he settled down in desolate and barren Melikhovo, he planted about a thousand cherry trees there and filled the bare forest areas with firs, pines, maples, elms, oaks, and other leafy trees — and all Melikhovo grew green.

Needless to say, Chekhov shared his happiness with others on more than one occasion: he sent his relatives in Taganrog seed so that they might grow at least a garden of sorts about their own home. And he presented trees to his neighbor so that he also might have a garden.

In “The Duel,” when Chekhov wanted to prove that Layevsky’s parasitic existence was worthless, the first accusation that he leveled at him was that he “had not planted a single tree and had not grown a single blade of grass” in his own garden.

When he conceived the portrait of a humanitarian who preached the wise gospel that boundless love brings happiness, he put the words into the mouth of a horticulturist who had spent his whole life among flowers, for it seemed to Chekhov that a horticulturist was the man most worthy of propagating such a lofty idea (“The Tale of the Head Gardener”). Time and again he asserted in his lett ers that horticulture was his favorite occupation. “It seems to me,” he wrote Menshikov in 1900, “that if it were not for literature, I might become a gardener.”

A year later he wrote his wife: “Darling, if I were to give up writing and become a gardener now, it would be a very good thing, for it. would give me ten more years of life.” And as though keeping them posted about important events, Chekhov would tell his friends and relatives: —

“My hyacinths and tulips are coming up.”

“The hemp, castor-oil plant, and sunflower already have raised their heads above the ground.”

“My roses are blooming marvelously.”

And when his camellia blossomed in Yalta, he hastened to telegraph his wife about it. In each flower, as in every animal, he saw a personality, a character, individual qualities. This is also evident from the fact that certain kinds of flowers were especially dear to him, while he felt hostile to others.

“You have six hundred dahlia plants,” he wrote to Leikin. “Why do you want that cold, uninspiring flower? It has an aristocratic, baronial exterior, but nothing whatever behind it. I feel like knocking its haughty, dull little head off with a cane.”

Dearest to his heart was the cherry tree in blossom. It is no wonder that the main role of the poetic drama he wrote just before his death was played by a cherry orchard — “all white,” “young,” and “full of happiness.”

When he informed the co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislavsky, that he was going to call his play The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov was overcome by sheer joyous laughter, to Stanislavsky s astonishment, and it struck the latter then that Chekhov was “talking of something wonderful, something he loved tenderly.”

Even more wonderful and more beloved is the garden depicted by Chekhov in The Black Friat,”which embodies all the happiness of the great horticulturist Pesotsky.

And in both his play and his tale, when Chekhov desired to depict a catastrophe in the life of people, he presented it in the terms of the desolation of their beloved garden. For Pesotsky, the desolation of his garden and death were one and the same thing.

4

NOT only was Chekhov eager to turn everything green, to make the soil fruitful; he was also always eager to create something new in life. With all his life-confirming dynamic, inexhaustibly active nature he gave himself up not merely to describing life but to transforming it, to building it up.

Now he would bustle about the building of Moscow’s first People’s Home, with a library, reading room, auditorium, and theater. Now he would see about getting Moscow a clinic for skin diseases. Now with the help of the painter Ilya Repin he would organize a Museum of Painting and Fine Arts in Taganrog. Now he would initiate the building of Crimea’s first biological station. Now he would collect books lor the schools on the Pacific island of Sakhalin and ship them there in large consignments.

Now he would build three schools for peasant children, not far from Moscow, one after the other, and at the same time, a belfry and a fire department for the peasants. Later, when he moved to the Crimea, he built a fourth school there. And generally, any construction work fascinated him, for in his opinion such activity always increased the sum total of man’s happiness. He wrote to Gorky: If every man did what he could on his little bit of soil, how marvelous our world would be!”

In his notebook he made this entry: The Mussulman digs a well tor the salvation of his soul. It would be good if each of us left after him a school, a well, or something ot the kind so that our life would not pass into eternity without leaving any trace behind.”

This activity of Chekhov’s often demanded much hard labor of him. When, for instance, he was building the schools, he himself had all the fuss and bother of dealing with the laborers, bricklayers, stove-installers, and carpenters; he bought all the building material himself, down to the tiles and doors for the Dutch ovens, and personally supervised construction work.

A perusal of any of his letters written during that period would give the impression that they had been written by a professional construction engineer, so much was Chekhov taken up with beams and pilasters, cement and lime and foundations.

And when he conceived of building a public library in his native Taganrog, on such a large scale as provincial towns never even dreamed of having in those days, he not only gave up more than two thousand of his own books — that is, his entire personal library, which contained many rare autographed editions of considerable value; he not only set up a picture gallery for the library, with portraits of outstanding scientists and artists; but for the next fourteen years he kept sending it bundles and cases of books which he purchased.

In 1889, planning to purchase, on credit, a “mangy little homestead” on the Khorol River, he wrote to the radical poet Pleshcheyev, who was in St. Petersburg; “If I do succeed in buying something, I’ll add a few wings and lay the foundation for a literary colony on the banks of the Khorol.

He did not found this colony, any more than he erected the lodging house which he had long dreamed of building, or a sanatorium for ailing teachers, with a fruit orchard, kitchen garden, and apiary attached, which Gorky mentions in his reminiscences. But what he did do was more than enough. When he died he left behind not only twenty volumes of universally famous prose, but also four village schools, a highway to Lopasnya, a library for an entire city, a monument in Taganrog to Peter I, a belfry, a forest which he had planted on waste land, and two marvelous gardens and letters from hundreds of grateful people.

Over seven thousand letters addressed to Chekhov have been preserved. The Socio-Economic Publishing House has published excerpts from this mountain of mail and everywhere we meet that rarest of words: gratitude.

“I am grateful for the money received.”

“I am grateful for helping me find work.”

“I am grateful for bothering about the passport.”

Nor could it have been otherwise. All Chekhov’s relations with people were like that: he took very little from them, usually nothing at all, but gave unstintingly and kept no record.

Take his work as a doctor. During a cholera epidemic he worked all alone as a district doctor. Without any assistants he took care ol twenty-five villages. And the help he gave to the starving during the years when the harvest failed. And his work during the All-Russian census. And his many years of medical practice as a doctor, chiefly among the peasants of Moscow’s suburbs.

According to his sister, Maria Pavlovna, who helped him as a trained nurse, he “treated more than a thousand sick peasants a year at his home, gratis, and he supplied them all with medicines,”

A whole book could be written about his work in Yalta as a member of the Board of Guardians for the Visiting Sick. He burdened himself to such an extent that he was practically the entire institution in himself. Many tubercular people came to Yalta at that time, without a copper in their pockets, and they came all the way from Odessa, Kishinev, and Kharkov just because they had heard that Chekhov was living in Yalta. “Chekhov will fix us up. Chekhov will arrange lodging for us and a dining room and treatment.”

And they besieged him the whole livelong day. He himself was wasting away with the disease — yet every day he went about “fixing them up,” and if they were Jews he secured for them the right to live in Yalta.

5

CHEKHOV was such a gregarious creature that he even dreamed of writing in collaboration with others, and he was ready to invite the most unsuitable people as his co-authors.

“Look here, Korolenko. Let’s work together. We’ll write a drama. Four acts. In two weeks.”

This, although Korolenko had never written any dramas and had absolutely nothing to do with the theater.

And to the vaudeville writer Bilibin: “Let’s write a vaudeville sketch in two acts. You make up the first act and I’ll do the second. We’ll divvy up the royalties.”

And to Suvorin, the editor, publisher, and author: “Let’s write a tragedy — Holofernes — based on the opera Judith. We’ll make Judith fall in love with Holofernes. . . . There are lots of subjects. We can write a Solomon, or one about Napoleon III and Eugenie, or Napoleon I at Elba.”

He was even ready to write a play with Goltsev, a professor of law and a man seemingly quite unfit for writing fiction. “I bet you we could do it if you only wanted to. I do. Think it over.”

There was a severe and captious critic in Russia who was stubbornly inimical to Chekhov’s brilliant work and who, over a long period, heaped scorn on his head as a poor scribbler. Even today, after a lapse of half a century, it hurts to read his malicious, insolent comments on the works of the great writer. “Junk,” “rubbish,” “trash,” “a chewed rag,” “colophony and vinegar,” “weighty twaddle,” “not art but muck” — such were the usual epithets which this critic applied to almost every new production of Chekhov’s.

Chekhov’s play Ivanov had not as yet appeared in print when this critic called it “bolvanov” (chucklehead), “miscarriage,” “nasty little skit.” Even “J he Steppe,” which is the only lyrical hymn to the limitless expanses of Russia to be found anywhere in world literature, was, in this critic’s opinion, “bagatelle,” while Chekhov’s principal earlier works, as “The Malefactor,” “The Eve of the Trial, “ First Aid,” “A Work of Art,” masterpieces which have now become an inherent part of world literature, were declared, in the same contemptuous tone, to be “bad and banal.” A Tragedian in Spite of Himself was considered a “mangy play,” an “old stale joke,” and The Proposal a “notoriously stupid play.”

What is most remarkable is the fact that this heartless and caviling critic who so angrily condemned almost every work of Chekhov’s was — Chekhov himself. It was he who called his plays “trifling skits,” and his tales “rubbish and junk.”

About two thousand letters of his written to his relatives, friends, and acquaintances have come down to us, and it is characteristic of him that in not a single one of them does he refer to his creative art as such. He seems to have fought shy of applying such a high-sounding, lofty term to his own literary work. When a certain authoress called him a proud master, he hurriedly and jestingly disclaimed all right to that imposing title.

“ Why call me a proud master? Only turkeys are proud.”

Or again: “I’ve just finished a play, which I’m calling The Seagull. Nothing especially good. I’m no great shakes as a playwright.”

The question naturally arises: Why was it that to the end of his days no one realized Chekhov’s true giant stature? Even those who loved him, constantly referred to him as “dear Chekhov,” “lovable Chekhov,” “exquisite Chekhov,” “refined Chekhov,” “pathetic Chekhov,” “charming Chekhov,” as though they were referring not to a man of immense proportions but to a figurine.

Not only during his lifetime but also later, up to the very present, even those who loved him seemed to think that the words “enormous,” and “mighty” are quite incongruous when applied to him. But the question is: Why rlid he himself, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, stubbornly reject these appellations?

6

USUALLY authors who write about Chekhov repeat that they are quite unable to understand what induced him, in 1890, to undertake a dangerous and fatiguing trip to Sakhalin Island to study the life of those sentenced to terms of penal servitude there.

“I still don’t understand Chekhov’s journey to Sakhalin,” Nikolai Yezhov declares. “Why did he go there? Perhaps to find plots. I don’t know.

“The reasons prompting Chekhov to make that exceptionally difficult journey have to this day remained inadequately explained,” Sergei Balukhaty writes.

Yet all one has to do is to recall his deep dissatisfaction with himself, which especially obsessed him at that time, a dissatisfaction with his own art and achievements, for his act to become fully comprehensible. Exactly because the whole business was so difficult, tiring, and dangerous, exactly because it took him away from the happy career of a successful, fashionable author, did he burden himself with this undertaking.

As his sister Maria Pavlovna later said, “At that time there were rumors of the difficult conditions of exiles condemned to penal servitude on Sakhalin Island. People were indignant, they grumbled about it, but that was all, no one took any measures.

... Anton Pavlovich, however, could not remain calm when he knew that people were suffering in exile. He decided to go out there.”

He could have rested on the shore of the Mediterranean, but he forced himself, a sick man, to set off for the most pernicious spot in all Russia. And in doing so, he explained laconically, “I must be my own animal trainer!”

“The journey means a good six months of uninterrupted physical and mental labor,” he said in one of his letters, “but I must do it, for I’m a Khokol and have begun to feel lazy. I must discipline myself.”

He spent a long time preparing for his Sakhalin trip, and studied a whole library of scientific volumes as well as all manner of newspapers and magazines which had even the remotest connection with the devil’s isle he was getting ready to visit. He wished to challenge the Russian system of penal servitude not in the capacity of a lightweight pamphleteer, but as an earnest, well-equipped scientist. And as a scientist he set off for the place to which people were usually driven by force — across the whole of Siberia, thousands and thousands of miles, traveling where no railway ran, by horse, in a sort of gig, during the bad season when roads were full of bumps, ruts, and holes which repeatedly broke the wheels and axles of his cart.

Chekhov was so cruelly shaken up by the journey, especially beyond Tomsk, that he ached all over. His valises would go flying out of the gig into the ruts. His hands and feet were numb with cold, and he had almost nothing to eat, for in his inexperience he had neglected to take along the necessary food supplies. Several times he escaped death only by a miracle. One night he was thrown out of his carriage, and two other carts, each hauled by a team of three horses, went dashing right into him. On another occasion — this time while sailing on one of the Siberian rivers — his steamer struck some submerged rocks and came close to sinking.

There had been Russian writers before him who had made a study of convict life, but in almost every case it had been against their free will: Dostoyevsky, Korolenko, and Melshin have left us remarkable books on life in penal servitude — they had all served terms of exile. But for a young fiction writer, in the heyday of his fame, to set off voluntarily over a murderous route of eleven thousand kilometers where there were no roads fit for travel, for the single purpose of alleviating the conditions of people who were outlawed by society — for the single purpose of defending them against the arbitrariness of the pitiless police system — this was heroism the like of which is rarely to be found.

Chekhov set off for Sakhalin not as the empowered representative of some organization, not on a special assignment of some influential, rich newspaper, but as an ordinary mortal without any privileges.

When, drenched to the skin, and after having walked several kilometers over a vile road, up to his knees in water, he reached a small house together with some general, the general changed into dry clothing and was given a bed, but Chekhov had to lie down on the bare floor in his soaked clothing.

And on Sakhalin Island he undertook so much work that, of all the people there, including those serving sentences, he was the hardest-worked person for the several months he spent at the place.

In collecting material for his future book he tackled a monstrously difficult job: the taking of the census of the entire population inhabiting that island, which is twice the size of Greece. It was an undertaking worthy of a whole staff of workers. He did it all by himself, without any assistance, going from house to house, from one prison cell to another.

Is it any wonder that his journey to that convict isle finally undermined his health, which had been none too robust before? On the way back he caught cold and began to cough more violently than ever.

His premature death can undoubtedly be explained by the fact that during this period, when he could still have cured his tuberculosis, he spent several months under such insufferably difficult conditions as would have put a healthy person on his back. Furthermore, the trip ruined him financially, for lie spent all his own money on it. Ilis drivers alone he paid double and triple what he should have paid, and incidental traveling companions robbed him right and left. After this journey he found himself in need again, and even four years later he wrote: “I spent more time and money on that trip and that work than I’ll be able to make up in a decade.”

But even when he returned from Sakhalin, coughing, with heart trouble, he never once struck the pose of a hero. In fact, he spoke of the journey in his usual ironical tone.

“Yes, Sashechka,” he wrote his older brother, “I’ve traveled all round the world, and if you want to know what I saw, read Krylov’s fable ‘The Curious.’ What insects, flies, and roaches!”

Not one of countless friends and acquaintances, literally not. one of them, had the remotest conception of the aim he had pursued in making his journey to that penal island. Even the publisher Suvorin, who at that time was one of the people closest to him, even he, in friendly banter, sent him a telegram at Irkutsk: “Don’t brag. Stanley’s a long way ahead of you yet.”

It must be said to the shame of the society of those days that Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island, which was published several years after his return and which had entailed such sacrifices on his parf, remained almost unnoticed. Only the periodical, Books of the Week, acidly mumbled that it was absolutely futile for Chekhov to spend his energy on works which an ordinary newspaperman could write.

Not until Chekhov was dead did a famous scientist, Professor Mikhail Chlenov, declare in the Moscow University newspaper that, in the future, Sakhalin Island “will serve as a model for works of this nature, when a department of ethnographic medicine, which we need so much, is opened up.”

During Chekhov’s lifetime, however, university medical men merely shrugged their shoulders when it was mentioned that the author merited a scientific degree for this “exemplary book.” “Who? Yesterday’s Antosha Chekhonte? Impossible!”

While the book was conceived with the noblest of aims, it must be frankly admitted that it is immeasurably weaker than any other Chekhov book, for it lacks the most important thing — Chekhov himself. Throughout the book he never lets himself go as an artist, but pitilessly suppresses his gift of description. One would never guess that it was written by a master who, at that very time, was capable of moving his readers to tears. We look forward to every new page, hoping that Chekhov will drop the cloak of the scientist and will at last begin to speak in his magic language—the language of full-blooded, significant images — and that we shall then not only understand, but also feel until it hurts, all the penetrating horrors of the daily, seemingly orderly life on Sakhalin Island. But there is never an intfiliation of this. He was at the zenith of his powers then, and there is no doubt whatever that he could have created a work of overwhelming force, but, as has happened more than once in Russian literature, lie “stepped upon the throat of his own song” and strangled it.

As we have seen, not long before this he was very dissatisfied with himself and his “futile” fiction, and sought to get as far away as possible from that “trash,” in order to “engage in painstaking, serious labor.” Well, he betook himself, first to the Siberian backwoods and a convict island, and then to a journalistic-scientific book which called for more than a year of zealous effort, and which, in the end, remained unnoticed.

Yet here, too, Chekhov’s main theme is to be found — the crying senselessness and fruitlessness of the sufferings to which one group of people, for some reason or other, subjects others. With irrefutable clarity, with figures and facts, he slowly, methodically, earnestly, thoroughly reveals the stupidity of tsarist penal servitude, of the brutish mockery of the propertied and the well-fed over the social outcasts. And what is characteristic of the writers and critics of t hose days is that they not only showed no inclination to support his theme, if only within the limits permitted by the censors, but, on the contrary, continued to declare Chekhov an unprincipled writer without ideas and indifferent to the interests and needs of Russian society.

When the book was finally written, Chekhov dropped all reference to his Sakhalin journey, whether in conversation or in his letters. In all the three volumes of his correspondence with his wife, Sakhalin Island is mentioned only once, and then only in passing, merely as the title of a book.

“There is nothing to indicate that he liked to recall that trip,” the novelist Potapenko says.

Even on those rare occasions when he was forced to relate his autobiography for the press, he ascribed very little significance to his journey to Sakhalin, and there was hardly a word to suggest the difficulties of the undertaking.