Following Chekhov to ‘Hell’

Travel Stories: On Sakhalin Island, Robert Reid communes with the world's first "Gulag tourist"

11.04.09 | 10:41 AM ET

Chekhov statuePhoto of Chekhov statue by Robert Reid

In 1890, 30-year-old Anton Chekhov was already a Pushkin Prize winner with hit plays swooning Moscow’s elite when he pulled a Dave Chappelle. He turned his back on fame and packed for a penal colony north of Japan on Sakhalin Island, a place he’d later call “hell.” Unlike so many other Russian writers, he wasn’t going in chains, but as a tourist.

Traveling the same year Joseph Conrad’s heart darkened on the Congo (and a year before the Trans-Siberian Railway construction began), Chekhov went the hard way—overland, across 6,000 miles of muddy roads and rivers, an epic three months one way. While living on the island, he woke to the clanking sounds of prisoners in chains, witnessed bare-backed lashings, and noted how wives and daughters lived off prostitution. During a visit to Dooay Prison, he became the world’s first “Gulag tourist,” staying in a house where “millions and millions of insects” coated the walls and ceilings, “moving as if in wind.” Most prisoners’ quarters were worse. The island’s effect was “nihilistic in the fullest sense of the word,” he wrote in his only non-fiction work, the sobering Sakhalin Island. He had hoped it might lead to prison reforms. It did not.

While traveling in the Russian Far East last summer, I decided to feed the inner Russian lit freak rooted in my fidgety college years by visiting a few spots along this “Chekhov trail” to see how the locals remembered the legendary drop-by. Or if one could find a little cheer in a place so linked with terror. Because much of his route was way off today’s Trans-Siberian, and frequently dreary, I began where the lonely playwright had been happiest, Blagoveshchensk (roughly “good news”) on the Chinese border, six time zones east of Moscow.

Today the city of over 200,000 is surprisingly lively, with a mix of Tsar-era mansions, Soviet housing and glitzy casinos. After dumping my bags off at a renovated communist-era hotel with a giant rat mural in the lobby, I walked along the Amur River promenade passing beer-sipping Russian men in muscle shirts and looking over to Heihe, the booming Chinese border town where children could be seen splashing in water. Nearby I found the gorgeous 19th-century red-and-white river port (now a geological institute). A lady in a wide navy blue dress quickly waddled out from her administratsi desk to bar my entrance. I asked about the day when Chekhov came through the building. “I know nothing of it,” she snapped. “We study rocks, not writers.”

My visit happened to be timed with the suspension, after 48 consecutive years, of the ferry to Khabarovsk, so, alas, I could only follow the next leg of the century-old trip, loosely, by train. Chekhov had professed his “love” for the scenery here (and a Japanese geisha he met). My train to Komsomolsk (nearly 40 hours, with a change in Khabarovsk) clanked past wide fields and scattered taiga forest. I didn’t feel any particular attraction. Nor did I when a chubby bleach-blonde Russian hooker working the carriage dropped by. My meaty cabin mate disappeared with her and I tried to sleep.

At the mouth of the north-flowing Amur, remote Nikolaevsk was already past its prime in 1890, when Chekhov imagined it as a Texas or Patagonia. Time hasn’t helped much. No roads or rails yet reach it. I arrived by hydrofoil (a pleasant 12-hour trip from Komsomolsk) and rolled my suitcase along cracked sidewalks past belching smokestacks to the city’s lone hotel, whose staff insisted a scrawny 20-year-old attendant named Sergei follow me everywhere. “For safety,” he sighed. I wasn’t sure if I could refuse, so together we searched out a tiny museum, where we found no mention of Chekhov’s restless night here. But Sergei helpfully pointed to a dismantled bust in the corner. “This is Stalin. Do you know him?”

Chekhov spent most of his time on Sakhalin Island at Aleksandrovsk—or the “Paris of the Sakhalin” per one naïve local official. Chekhov’s first impression of it, arriving by boat, was a “fearful picture, crudely cut out of darkness, silhouettes of mountains, smoke, flames and sparks from the fires.” Soon he’d vow never to return.

No ferry goes there anymore, so I flew into Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, a busy oil town in the south of the island, and took an overnight train midway up the island to Tymovskoe, where a couple daily buses reach Aleksandrovsk. Waiting at a nearby bus stop, I found myself facing a half-circle of hungover, fierce-looking young men in tracksuits. I might have run, but they were in tears. One with upturned nostrils and a puss-filled eye was leaving the rest.

The bus bounced past dust-caked brush and trees for an hour and finally reached Aleksandrovsk’s sprawl of Soviet-era housing surrounded by shoulder-high weeds in a mountain-backed valley leading in wide, descending steps to the Tatar Strait coast. A sense of depression outweighed the natural beauty. Staring out my bus window, I spied a brick warehouse with freshly painted lettering (“USSR 1939”), and five scary guys (four shirtless) drinking beer by a Lenin statue, at the spot the jail had stood until 1904. When the bus parked, I realized I was the last on. The driver, seeing my reluctance to exit, guessed “American?” and offered to take me to the hotel—back by the topless drinkers. Inside a plain official building, I found a woman watching an action film on TV who checked me into a simple room with box springs for a mattress. Leaving me, she dryly announced, “Our town has no restaurants or bars.” Maybe this is hell.

Siberia and the Russian Far East are filled with dying towns like these—so-called “lost cities” as Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy call them in their damning book, “The Siberian Curse.” During Soviet times, the forcibly growing populace out here (spurred on by patriotic initiatives, and Gulags) required heavy subsidization to survive, and once Moscow’s funding stopped after the USSR’s fall, a rushed exodus and slow decay began. Visiting a place like this almost feels like time travel to the Brezhnev era. Just that the party’s clearly over.

After a short nap I looked out my room window and saw that a crew of grandmothers selling cucumbers and flowers had taken the sidewalks from the drunks, so I ventured out. A few peeling billboards stood nearby; the smallest told of Chekhov’s visit, others celebrated World War II. The central theater had a disco night scheduled, but no showings of “The Seagull.” I crossed a narrow plank bridge over giant water pipes and took steep steps down toward “Chekhov St,” a tree-lined road with a replica of the wood cottage where the writer stayed, now a museum.

The lone employee, Raisa, led me on a brisk tour of the just-mopped four rooms, pointing out a few photos of prisoners shackled to wheelbarrows and Chekhov’s desk. I asked what Raisa’s favorite Chekhov story was. “Oh, I’ve never read him.”

I had time to burn till the next night’s train, so I wandered about the town of 16,000. Across from the museum stood a sad Chekhov statue surrounded by cigarette butts. I wandered up a nearby bluff for a view of a mile of coastline littered with gutted warehouses and collapsing piers, then ventured back through town, over a Soviet pedestrian bridge on the Duyka River (where Chekhov met a 71-year-old hunchback ferryman called “Good-looking Can’t-remember-my-relations”) and peeked at plastic sandals and toilet parts at a dead-quiet Chinese market. Occasionally a Lada kicked up dust on the streets. Most passersby ignored the unusual presence of a foreigner. One gray-haired woman stopped to chat a bit, asking “Aren’t there more Russians than Americans in New York City?”

The next morning I met Anatoli, a plump 40-something native overseeing a flooring project in my hotel building. He couldn’t imagine why I had come. “It used to be so clean here! All the factories were working, then perestroika”—he spit it out like a bad word—“now, nothing.” I asked about Chekhov. “I don’t like him. He wrote about vulgar things, like prostitution. He didn’t think about the revolution.”

Still, I asked about seeing a lighthouse mentioned in “Sakhalin Island,” a popular retreat to break from the island’s unbearable ennui, and he offered to show me how to get there. We hopped into his Landcruiser and took a dirt road a mile to a gross coal-loading dock on a long stone beach backed by cliffs. He pointed toward a tunnel another mile away, then drove off. I was alone, but for a couple boys swimming offshore. I started walking, a bit uncertainly, down the coast till I reached a dead end: Waves slammed into a rocky outcrop blocking further passage, about 500 feet short of the tunnel.

I stuck a stick in the rocks at the shoreline to gauge if the tide was receding. After an hour, nothing had changed. A mom and her young son came, shook their heads at me, and walked back. It looked bleak, but I had to try. Aleksandrovsk had gotten under my skin a bit, and I hoped the lighthouse views might revive me. I kicked off my shoes and eased into the numbing temperatures, moving over jagged sea-floor stones towards the tunnel to the unseen paradise. But after a few painful steps, a couple brain-sized boulders tumbled off the cliffs and splashed next to me. I returned to my shoes.

But maybe it was appropriate. To fail here. Chekhov’s wide-eyed characters always ramble on about things they’ll never do. And if Chekhov had found peace at the lighthouse in 1890, it wasn’t everlasting. Sitting on the lighthouse bench, he had concluded, “If I were a convict, I would try to escape ... no matter what.”

Back at the hotel, Anatoli rocked unapologetically with laughter over my tidal misadventure and offered a seat to talk about European soccer, oil and family life. Anything but Chekhov. I guess just because a town has a hard time looking far ahead doesn’t mean it has to look back.