Reading Chekhov

The letters Chekhov wrote during the two-and-a-half-month journey are some of the best he has left us. They permit us to see, as if in a movie with a large budget for special effects, the hardships he endured as he made his way across the continent, first by train and riverboat, and then (for the largest part of the trip-nearly three thousand miles) by frail open horse-drawn vehicles on rutted and sometimes washed-out roads. (The Trans-Siberian Railroad did not yet exist.) He traveled, day and night, in frigidly cold weather and endless spells of rain. He suffered from hunger and cold and painful shoes. Before he became accustomed to it, the jogging and lurching of the open carriage made his bones ache. For a consumptive to undertake such a trip would seem like a form of suicide. But, strangely, Chekhov didn't sicken; on the contrary, he thrived. As the journey progressed, he stopped coughing and spitting blood, and started feeling really well (even his hemorrhoids subsided). In The White Plague, the Duboses devote a chapter to some of the odder forms of therapy that were thought up during the premodern period of tuberculosis. One of these was the horseback-riding cure, popular in the eighteenth century. They cite several cases of patients (one of them John Locke's nephew) who recovered from tuberculosis after strenuous daily riding, and note a Dutch physician's recommendation that consumptives "of the lower classes who were confined to sedentary occupations endeavor to find employment as coachmen." They go on to write of a cobbler who did become a coachman. "He was well as long as he remained in the saddle (on the box) but lost his health when he returned to cobbling." Chekhov remained well until he returned to Moscow, in the fall of 1890, when his poor health promptly returned. ("It's a strange business," he wrote to Suvorin on December 24. "While I was traveling to Sakhalin and back I felt perfectly well, but now, at home, the devil knows what is happening to me. My head is continually aching, I have a feeling of languor all over, I am quickly exhausted, apathetic, and worst of all, my heart is not beating regularly.") In his letters during the trip, he exulted over his endurance. On June 5, during a stopover in the Siberian town of Irkutsk, where he slept in a real bed and had a bath ("The soapsuds off my head were not white but of an ashen brown color, as though I were washing a horse"), he wrote to Leikin: From Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk was a desperate struggle through impassable mud. My goodness, it frightens me to think of it! How often I had to mend my chaise, to walk, to swear, to get out of my chaise and get into it again, and so on! It sometimes happened that I was from six to ten hours getting from one station to another, and every time the chaise had to be mended it took from ten to fifteen hours… Add to all that hunger, dust in one's nose, one's eyes glued together with sleep, the continual dread that something would get broken in the chaise… Nevertheless I am well content, and I thank God that He has given me the strength and opportunity to make this journey. I have seen and experienced a great deal, and it has all been very new and interesting to me not as a literary man, ' but as a human being. The Yenissey, the Taiga, the stations, the drivers, the wild scenery, the wild life, the physical agonies caused by the discomforts of the journey, the enjoyment I got from rest-all taken together is so delightful that I can't describe it…

On June 20, Chekhov exulted again to Leikin from a ship on the Amur River: I have driven with horses more than four thousand versts. My journey was entirely successful. I was in good health all the time and lost nothing of my luggage but a penknife. I can wish no one a better journey. The journey is absolutely free from danger, and all the tales of escaped convicts, of night attacks, and so on are nothing but legends, traditions of the remote past. A revolver is an entirely superfluous article. Now I am sitting in a first-class cabin, and feel as though I were in Europe. I feel in the mood one is in after passing an examination.

Chekhov arrived at Sakhalin on July 11, and remained there for three months, traveling all over the island and using the device of a census to gain entrance into prisons and settlers' huts. (Simmons theorizes that the project of a scientific investigation of the colony was itself an after-the-fact rationale to justify his journey to his friends-and to himself.) Chekhov set about his work with characteristic energy and zeal. He managed to interview thousands of people; along with the convicts and settlers, he interviewed the indigenous Gilyaks and Ainus. By October, he was more than ready to leave.