Chekhov’s Beautiful Nonfiction

Anton Chekhov’s “Sakhalin Island,” his long investigation of prison conditions in Siberia, is the best work of journalism written in the nineteenth century. The fact that so few people know of the book, and that among Western critics (not necessarily Russian ones) it is considered a minor masterpiece instead of a major one—inferior to Alexander Herzen’s journals, for example—has something to do with how journalism is rarely considered literature. But it has even more to do with the lies that Chekhov told to get access to the prison colony.

Chekhov began preparing to go to Siberia in 1889. This was soon after his brother’s death from tuberculosis and not so long after learning that he, too, had the disease, and was likely to die. Getting permission to make the three-month journey to visit the prison colony required Chekhov to tell many different lies to many different people. He told some that he was doing an academic thesis to complete medical-degree requirements. To others, he said that he was taking a simple survey of the size of household groups. This second lie, combined with the first, is why “Sakhalin Island” is often mistakenly seen as medical anthropology instead of what it always was: investigative journalism. As Chekhov explains of the island:

In order as far as possible to visit all the inhabited spots, and to become somewhat closer acquainted with the life of the majority of the exiles, I resorted to a device which, in my position, seemed the only way. I carried out a census. In the settlements that I visited I went round all the cabins and noted down the heads of the households, members of their families, tenants and workmen. To make my work easier, and to cut down on time, I was very obligingly offered assistants, but as my main aim in conducting the census was not its results but the impressions received during the making of it, I used somebody else’s help only on rare occasions.

“Sakhalin Island” was published as a series of nine articles in the journal New Times. In its own time, it was seen as investigative journalism. Now—owing to the way certain things get misremembered, as well as to the fact that there is nothing else like “Sakhalin Island” in Chekhov’s bibliography—critics don’t know how to handle the work, and the book is often viewed through the lies that Chekhov told.

The reason “Sakhalin Island” is the greatest work of journalism from the nineteenth century is that, unlike other major journalistic works from that period (for example, journalism from the Crimean War), the book has not aged. There are two causes for this. One is technical, and the other is a matter of sensibility.

The nine articles that became “Sakhalin Island” are each so long that they give Chekhov the space to build up characters and narrative arcs. Second, Chekhov’s articles are mostly about closely observed humanity. His sentences deliver news, but they are primarily concerned with how human beings live their lives. In Chekhov’s case, unlike that of his contemporaries, this observation of human behavior is lacking in self-censorship. He is willing to write about anything, and he is willing to see everything with compassion. Here is a typical detail that Chekhov developed, and the stance that he took towards it:

I was told that at one time there had been benches standing on the path to the lighthouse, but they had been forced to take them away because, while out strolling, the convicts and settled exiles had written on them and had carved with their knives filthy lampoons and all sorts of obscenities. There are a lot of free lovers of this so-called “wall literature” too, but, in penal servitude, the cynicism surpasses all limits and absolutely no comparison may be made with it. Here, not only benches and the walls of backyards, but even the love letters, are revolting. It is remarkable that a man will write and carve various abominations on a bench while at the same time he is feeling lost, abandoned and profoundly unhappy.

When I read something like this, I swoon. Because human beings are the same and have always been the same and will always be the same, it is possible to read “Sakhalin Island” and feel like you are reading something that is occurring right now. Every time I read the book, I am captivated by moments such as this:

Then follows Vtoraya Pad (Second Chasm), in which there are six farm holdings. Here the old woman called Miss Ulyana cohabits with a prosperous old peasant in exile. Once, a very long time ago, she had killed her baby and buried it in the ground; at the trial, she said that she had not killed the child but buried it alive—she thought that she would stand a better chance of being acquitted that way. The court sentenced her to twenty years. Telling me about this, Ulyana wept bitterly, but then she wiped her eyes and asked, “Fancy buyin a nice little bit o’ pickled cabbage?”

Reading this, I feel that Miss Ulyana is still alive—that Chekhov is still in her hut, bent over and listening to her. There is the sensation that great literature generates, of bearing witness.

Mostly, when critics read “Sakhalin Island,” they read it as a source text for later works by Chekhov, in particular the stories dealing with prison and exile. This obscures the fact that the book is a unique work in its own right. When I read it, what I am most amazed by is how different in style Chekhov the fiction writer is from Chekhov the nonfiction one. We all know that his fiction is described as “impressionistic.” What this means, exactly, is often left undeveloped. Here is his impressionistic technique from the opening of “A Medical Case”:

A professor received a telegram from the Lialikovs’ factory asking him to come quickly. The daughter of a certain Mrs. Lialikov, apparently the owner of the factory, was sick—nothing more could be understood from the long, witlessly composed telegram. The professor did not go himself, but sent his intern Korolev in his place.

He had to go two stations away from Moscow and then some three miles by carriage. A troika was sent to the station to pick Korolev up; the driver wore a hat with a peacock feather, and to all the questions responded with a loud military “No, sir!” or “Yes, sir!”

The “he” at the start of the second paragraph is confusing. Who is “he” referring to? Is “he” the professor who received the telegram? This is one of the grammatical ways that Chekhov pushes the reader onto the surface of the story, and so the story remains mysterious, only periodically flashing into clarity.

Here’s another example of a similar grammatical confusion. This is from “Gusev,” a story about an ill sailor and one of the first post-Siberia stories:

He sleeps for two days, and on the third day two sailors come from topside and carry him out of the sick bay.
He is sewn up in canvas and, to weigh him down, two iron bars are put in with him. Sewn up in canvas, he comes to resemble a carrot or a black radish, wide at the head, narrow towards the foot…. Before sunset he is taken out on deck and laid on a plank; one end of the plank rests on the rail, the other on a box placed on a stool. Discharged soldiers and the ship’s crew stand around him with their hats off.

It is near the end of the second paragraph that we begin to realize that the “he” that sleeps is dead.

There is none of this grammatical mysteriousness in “Sakhalin Island.” The work always remains lucid. To see how much more legible it is than Chekhov’s fiction, compare their respective descriptions of the yards of buildings.

From “Sakhalin Island”:

I visited the Alexandrovsk Hard-Labour Prison soon after my arrival. It consists of a large four-cornered yard, enclosed by six wooden barrack-type huts separated by a fence. The gates are always open and a sentry walks around nearby. The yard is swept clean: no stones, rubbish, refuse of puddles of slops can be seen anywhere. This exemplary neatness creates a good impression.

From the opening of the story “Ward No. 6”:

In the hospital yard stands a small annex surrounded by a whole forest of burdock, nettles, and wild hemp. The roof is rusty, the chimney is half fallen down, the porch steps are rotten and overgrown with grass, and only a few traces of stucco remain. The front façade faces the hospital, the back looks onto a field, from which it is separated by the gray hospital fence topped with nails. These nails, turned point up, and the fence, and the annex itself have that special despondent and accursed look that only our hospitals and prisons have.

While the paragraph from “Sakhalin Island” establishes the yard clearly by size and shape and then describes how it is populated, the passage from “Ward No. 6” doesn’t tell us what a hospital yard looks like, or what “small” means, or what an annex looks like, or how we should interpret “whole forest,” and we must do the work of processing the names of plants into visually distinctive objects. The next set of images—the rusty roof, the half fallen chimney, the porch steps that are rotten and overgrown with grass—raise more questions than they answer. For example, is the roof flat or sloped? What does a half collapsed chimney look like? Is the grass growing on the wooden steps or around and over it?

These stylistic differences between Chekhov’s fiction and nonfiction make me appreciate what an achievement the style of the fiction actually is. This does not mean that the nonfiction is lesser, or that it is a source text. Even when one image is taken directly from the nonfiction into the fiction, the meaning of it is fundamentally changed. “Sakhalin Island” is full of images of nature and eternity. These images uniformly mark the leeching away of hope:

I set out for the Arkay for the first time at 8 a.m. on 31^st July. The tide had begun to go out. It was squalling with rain. The overcast sky, the sea, on which could be seen not a single sail, and the steep clay shoreline had a forbidding air; the waves pounded dull and melancholy Stunted, sickly trees looked down from high up on the banks; here, out in the open, each of them fights in isolation a cruel battle with the frosts and cold winds, and during the autumn and winter, through long, dreadful nights, each of them sways restlessly from side to side, bends to the ground and creaks in lamentation, and this lamentation is heard by nobody.

And:

The wide, broad sea down below, sparkling in the sunlight, makes a hollow roaring sounds, the distant coast beckons temptingly, and everything grows sad and dull, as if you will never get off this Sakhalin again. A glance at the coast on the other side and it seems that, if I were a convict, I would try to escape from here no matter what.

In the fiction, the stories already contain strains of nihilism, so nature and eternity are often used to prop open the door of hope. In “The Lady with the Little Dog,” we have waves described this way:

In Oreanda they sat on a bench not far from the church, looked down on the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist, white clouds stood motionless on the mountaintops. The leaves of the trees did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous dull noise of the sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. So it had sounded below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda were there, so it sounded now and would go on sounding with the same dull indifference when we are no longer there. And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection.

Like most people, I fell in love with Chekhov’s fiction before I read the nonfiction. It is still the thing that I love the most about him. I wonder, though, what would have happened if the reverse had occurred. “Sakhalin Island” can be so different from the fiction: it has the pleasure of moving through a physical, distinct world and the keenness of documentary analysis. (At one point, Chekhov begins parsing mining contracts to show how money is being stolen.) Yet it retains the gorgeous prose and the deep compassion of the fiction. Had I encountered “Sakhalin Island” first, I wonder if I would have thought that Chekhov should have written more journalism.