Reading Chekhov

The Island of Sakhalin isn't an artistic failure, since Chekhov had no artistic ambitions for it. He saw it as a work of social and natural science, and he even considered submitting it to the University of Moscow medical school as a dissertation attesting to his qualifications to teach there. (The idea was broached to the dean of the medical faculty by Grigory Rossolimo, and scornfully turned down.) It ran serially in the journal Russian Thought in 1893, and was published as a book in 1895. There are occasional Chekhov-ian passages, but not many; it is a book largely of information. In 1897, when he was in Nice for his health, Chekhov was asked by an editor to write a story "on a subject taken from life abroad"; he declined, explaining, "I am able to write only from memory, I never write directly from observed life. I must let the subject filter through my memory, until only what is important and typical in it remains in the filter." In the book on Sakhalin, Chekhov wrote from file cards and scholarly books and reports. His customary artist's fearlessness gave way to a kind of humility, almost a servility, before the ideal of objectivity and the protocols of scientific methodology. Like a convict chained to a wheelbarrow (one of the punishments at Sakhalin), he drags along the burden of his demographic, geographic, agricultural, ethnographic, zoological, and botanical facts. He cannot omit anything; his narrative line is constantly being derailed by his data. In his autobiography for Rossolimo, Chekhov registered his awareness that "the principles of creative art do not always admit of full accord with scientific data; death by poison cannot be represented on stage as it actually happens." In the Sakhalin book, the conflict between science and art is almost always resolved in science's favor. Chekhov tells it like it is, and allows his narrative to go where his mountain of information pushes it, which is all over the place, and ultimately nowhere. Chekhov's horror at the harshness and squalor of life in the colony, his contempt l'4 «lit- stupidity and callousness of the administration, and his pity for the convicts and settlers sometimes does break through the posture of scientific detachment. But in rendering the sufferings on this island of the damned, Chekhov could not achieve in three hundred pages what he achieved in a four-page passage at the end of his story "The Murder" (1895) about Sakhalin convicts in fetters loading coal onto a steamer on a stormy night.