Anton Chekhov: Part III

Note: read Part II. Aleksandrovsk had been built nine years earlier as the administrative capital of Sakhalin. Anton would describe it as: “A small, pretty Siberian-type town with 3,000 inhabitants. It does not contain even one stone building. Everything is built of wood, chiefly of larch — the church, the houses and the sidewalks. Here is located the residence of the island’s commandant, the center of Sakhalin civilization. The prison is situated near the main street. Its exterior is quite similar to any army barracks, and as a result Alexandrovsk is completely free of the dismal prison atmosphere which I had expected.” But, still, as one local remarked to Anton, it was a “godforsaken hole.” The prison was everywhere, even when it did not look like a prison. To Anton’s dismay, the convicts and exiles moved through town with freedom. They were in the streets and houses, serving as drivers, watchmen, cooks, and servants. At any time, he wrote, one might pass convicts working with axes, saws, and hammers, or sit in a house while a convict servant stood nearby holding the knife he had just used to peel potatoes. The shock, however, began to wear off. “Soon I became accustomed to this,” Anton wrote. “Everyone becomes accustomed to it, even women and children.” As he settled in, Anton set to work almost immediately. He rose around five each morning and worked until late evening, walking from settlement to settlement with his stack of cards, knocking on doors and asking the same questions again and again from the census card he had created. The goal was to gather data on the population’s makeup. But he also wanted to experience the island as the people did and to understand their lives beyond the basic data points he was collecting. He wanted to know the people more deeply. Yet despite the laborious way of going about the work, he filled out almost all ten thousand census cards in roughly three months — nearly the entire prison population, and more. What he saw, he wrote down in the most straightforward prose he could manage, focusing on journalistic rigor. But the children’s lives troubled him. The convicts and exiles, however cruelly the system treated them, had usually been sent there by sentence or punishment. The children had committed nothing. Many had been born in barracks or raised in rooms where punishment, hunger, drunkenness, and prostitution were part of ordinary life. They watched fathers flogged, and mothers degraded, and learned that this was what life was. About one girl who traveled on the same steamer as Anton to Sakhalin, he later wrote: “There was a convict who had murdered his wife and wore fetters on his legs. His daughter, a little girl of six, was with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the convicts and soldiers all in a heap together.” Some of his most unforgettable pages would be about the children of Sakhalin.