Reading Chekhov

Back in Moscow in December (he made the return journey by ship from Vladivostok-through Hong Kong, Ceylon, India, Egypt, and Turkey-to Odessa) he wrote to Suvorin, "I know a great deal now, but I have brought away a horrid feeling. While I was staying in Sakhalin, I had only a bitter feeling in my inside as though from rancid butter; and now, as I remember it, Sakhalin seems to me a perfect hell. For two months I worked intensely, putting my back into it; in the third month, I began to feel ill from the bitterness I have spoken of, from boredom, and the thought that the cholera would come from Vladivostok to Sakhalin, and that I was in danger of having to winter in the convict settlement." But a week later he wrote to Suvorin, "How wrong you were when you advised me not to go to Sakhalin… what a sour creature I would be now if I had sat at home. Before my journey The Kreutzer Sonata seemed to me to be an event, but now it seems to me absurd and ridiculous. Either I've grown up because of my journey or I have gone crazy-the devil knows which."

On the eve of Chekhov's heroic journey a complication had arisen that almost ruined it. An artist named N-, "a nice but tedious man," wanted to travel with him. Chekhov enlisted Suvorin's aid, writing, "To refuse him my company I haven't the courage, but to travel with him would be simple misery." Chekhov went on, "Be my benefactor, tell N- that I am a drunkard, a swindler, a nihilist, a rowdy character, and that it is out of the question to travel with me, and that a journey in my company will do nothing but upset him." "When one is traveling one must be absolutely alone," Chekhov wrote to his sister on June 13, concluding his complaints about a trio of traveling companions-an army doctor and two lieutenants-he had picked up somewhere along the way and now wished to shed. He had begun to complain about the trio in a previous letter to Masha (June 7): "I like silence better than anything on the journey, and my companions talk and sing without stopping, and they talk of nothing but women." Chekhov finally shed the officers by traveling first-class on the Amur River steamer, where they had booked second-class.

That he had picked them up in the first place is consistent with his lifelong inconsistency in regard to solitude. (On the boat, he actually sought out the officers and had tea with them.) He liked silence, but he also didn't like it. He complained about trying to write in a room where someone was banging on the piano, a baby was crying, and someone else was asking his advice about a medical matter; but when the house was silent he would ask his brother to play the piano. 1 le complained about the number of guests at Melikhovo, but also said he couldn't live without guests. ("When I'm alone, for some reason I become terrified, just as though I were alone in a frail little boat on a great ocean," he wrote to Suvorin in June 1889.) At the end of his life, when he felt stuck in Yalta, as he had felt stuck with the dying Nikolai, he complained about the crowd of visitors he had-and about his feeling of isolation. He was a restless man-perhaps because he understood too well what rest represented. "Life is only given us once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full consciousness and beauty," the consumptive narrator of "An Anonymous Story" (1893) says. Chekhov lived only forty-four years, and during the last third of his life he was surely conscious of the likelihood of a premature death. Those of us who do not live under such a distinctly stated sentence of death cannot know what it is like. Chekhov's masterpieces are always obliquely telling us. Nine

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hekhov's decision to write a book of nonfiction about his journey to Sakhalin, instead of allowing the trip to develop into fiction in his interior darkroom, may have been influenced by the fact that he had already written a masterpiece of fiction about a journey. This was the long story "The Steppe" (1888), the first Chekhov story to appear in a literary journal (as opposed to a newspaper) and the work that catapulted him into the ranks of major Russian writers. The story chronicles a summer journey across the steppe of a øïå-year-old boy named Yegorushka, accompanying his merchant uncle, Ivan Ivanitch Kuzmitchov, and an old priest, Father Christopher Sireysky, who are taking a convoy of wagons filled with wool to a distant town, where the wool will be sold and the boy put in school. Along the way, they search for a mysterious, powerful entrepreneur of the Ittppe named Varlamov, on whom the sale of the wool obscurely depends. "I describe the plain, its lilac vistas, the sheep breeders, the Jews, the priests, the nocturnal storms, the inns, the wagon trains, the steppe birds and so on," Chekhov wrote to Grigorovich on January 12, 1888, while composing the story. But he was nervous about it: