A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire
By Anton Chekhov (translated by Rosamund Bartlett, Anthony Phillips, Luba Terpak and Michael Terpak, 2007)
1. In 1890 Anton Chekhov travelled thousands of miles across Siberia, swooning over “smoky, dreamy mountains” and “lithe” rivers, dreaming of turbot, asparagus and kasha. His goal was the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, in the Sea of Okhotsk north of Japan. Chekhov felt he had “wasted his life on fornication”—who hasn’t?—and wished to write a report on the condition of the prisons and prisoners, hoping that it might do some good. He was 30. He crossed the taiga on the dirt trakt, the sole artery connecting European Russia to its Pacific hinterland. On the whole he loved Siberia, though wind and rain lashed his face to “fish scales” and he had trouble with his hemorrhoids. The landscape comes alive in these pages: broken shafts of springless carriages, smallpox-ravaged Gilyak people living in yurts along the Tym River, a pond of light cast by a tallow candle in a hovel, and the sweet call of a bittern through the darkness on a night ferry.
