A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire

Anton Chekhov traveled to the desolate island of Sakhalin in 1890. It was a place of exile for dangerous prisoners. The book consists of letters and excerpts from his published report on his journey. At the start the writer faced bad roads, flood, mud, cold winds. In Siberia he saw hundreds of hare and one mouse. He writes that taiga begins at Tomsk. (I had no idea the letters would be so good.) There seems to be no end to the trip across Siberia, a big, cold country. The taiga seems endless. Chekhov claims the best town is Irkutsk. One crosses Lake Baikal by steamer. Traversing Lake Baikal is wonderful. The people in the area call it a sea. From one bank it is impossible to see the opposite bank. In the East there is no culture of denouncing people, (there is no one to arrest you). Chekhov describes the Amur as a fine river. Arriving at Sakhalin he carries out the census. He goes to every settlement and every hut. For three months there is no topic of conversation except hard labor, flogging, and prisoners. Initially it is argued that Chekhov has no right to visit the penal colony to conduct a survey since he isn't a government official. Prisoners and exiles walk about freely. Unlike the general run of Russian villages, in Sakhalin there is great disparity between the rich and the poor. Chekhov feels that at Sakhalin he has seen the extreme limits of human degradation. Walking through the taiga tires Chekhov because he he isn't used to the terrain. The number of Sakhalin Gilyaks, original inhabitants, seems to decrease as Russian settlements grow. Gilyaks have both winter and summer yurts. Russification of the Gilyaks has begun, Chekhov observes. Prisoners act like hungry locusts. Card-playing amounts to an epidemic in the prisons. The travel series by Penguin, Penguin Great Journeys, seems like a ripping idea. Chekhov is both ironic and tragic, depending upon the material presented.

The Penguin version of Anton Chekhov's journey to the tsarist penal colony on Sakhalin Island is very worthwhile and certainly would be recommended by myself. The only issue I have with it is that reading it makes you want to read the actual, full length work by Chekhov, not just these excerpts. You can tell its only the tip of the iceberg. Its a good beginning, but you'll want to read the whole thing.

Anton Chekhov never sat down and wrote a discrete book titled A JOURNEY TO THE FAR END OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, but he did take an eventful journey from Moscow to the island of Sakhalin, the eastern most reach of the empire, in 1890, which he recorded in letters to family and friends and in the report he was commissioned to write regarding the island settlement. Penguin editors have excerpted the letters to describe Chekhov's journey to his destination and draw on the report for what he found at his destination. Together, these parts create a satisfying, often astonishing travelogue and social statement. Chekhov left Moscow in April and the letters begin with his arrival a month later in Tomsk, on the western side of Asiatic (Siberian) Russia. The letters are full of the humor, insights, wonder and conventions that are prized in the genre. Chekhov's narrative voice is addictive. It becomes clear that the route he follows, first by land and then by boat on the Amur, the river that borders China, that late 19th century Asiatic Russia had more than a little in common with the American Wild West of the same period. The Russians pushed eastward usurping land and natural resources from native tribes. Sakhalin, a long desolate island north of Japan, was taken for penal colonies and its coal deposits. In his report, Chekhov ehcoes Dickens and presages Orwell as he considers the condition of the prisoners, those who imprison them and the native Gilyaks. It is an incredible statement about humanity and inhumanity in an inhospitable place far from civilization.