How Chekhov was almost eaten by a shark during a trip abroad
Chekhov ended up in Ceylon after hard labor in Sakhalin, but on the way to the tropical paradise the writer almost lost his life twice: in a storm and next to a shark.
Author: Andrey Filimonov
On October 17, 1890, traveler Anton Pavlovich Chekhov appeared at the office of the military governor of Vladivostok to obtain a foreign passport.
The Russian Empire had a permit-based system for traveling abroad, later replicated in the Soviet Union. The state decided for its subjects which of them could leave their homeland and which were better off staying at home. Pushkin was restricted from traveling abroad his entire life. He even signed up as a war correspondent on the Turkish front, hoping to experience the inaccessible foreign lands, even if only in an army convoy.
The authorities did not object to the departure of the writer Chekhov, who had recently arrived in Vladivostok from the penal island of Sakhalin. The writer received passport No. 25, paying 10 rubles for it—the weekly salary of police chief Petrov, who issued Chekhov the receipt.
With a new passport, the traveler boarded the military passenger steamship "Petersburg," which carried both people and "artillery cargo." The Vladivostok-Odessa route usually passed through Japan, and Chekhov was already dreaming of meeting a girl from Nagasaki. However, that year, the Land of the Rising Sun was quarantined due to cholera. So the "Petersburg" immediately set course for Hong Kong.
For the 30-year-old writer, this was his first trip abroad. And it began far more originally than most travelers, who languish in the West, in good old Europe. Anton Pavlovich immediately, literally immersed himself in Eastern exotica—Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon, geishas, sharks, Buddhists.
What brought him to the southern seas was a desire to relax and unwind after three months of intense work on Sakhalin. During this time, Chekhov conducted a census, visiting thousands of homes and camp barracks and filling out forms for approximately 10 island residents. At the same time, Chekhov kept travel notes and collected material for a future book in the unfamiliar genre of documentary prose, "Sakhalin Island." Documentation was important, as few knew about life on the island, inhabited by state prisoners. Chekhov became the first Russian writer to reveal the world of Sakhalin's penal servitude to the reading public.
His brother, Mikhail, recalls in his memoirs that "Brother Anton" was planning to go to Sakhalin because he once skimmed through lecture notes on "prison studies," which Mikhail had been using to prepare for his university exams. "He read them and suddenly began packing... soon, without any recommendations, and with only a correspondent's form in his pocket, he finally set off for the Far East."
In fact, besides his journalistic credentials, Chekhov had something else: all-Russian fame, the glory of a fashionable writer, the “Russian Maupassant,” whose stories are read by all decent people, from the capital to places not so remote.
Even in Siberia, local writers came to pay their respects to Chekhov, reciting their works and then showing the Moscow guest around restaurants and brothels. After visiting a brothel in Tomsk, Chekhov wrote: "The women here are as dull as Siberian nature; they are uncolorful, cold, don't know how to dress, don't sing, don't laugh, aren't pretty, and, as one old-timer put it to me, 'are hard to the touch.'" It sounds a bit cynical. After all, he was a doctor.
The Russian writer liked the women of Ceylon much more. He was completely delighted by them. Perhaps also because, on the way to this garden of earthly joys on the island paradise, he almost lost his life twice.
The Chekhov Museum in Yalta houses a revolver that Anton Pavlovich brought back from his voyage abroad. The captain's mate gave it to him when the Petersburg was caught in a force 10 storm and threatened to sink at any moment. The experienced sailor advised him to shoot himself rather than become shark food alive. The writer sat with the revolver in his hand throughout the stormy night. He was terrified to let go of it because the ship was pitching heavily, sending loose objects flying around the cabin. The only thing missing was a loaded revolver.
The second time, mortal danger awaited the writer was during a calm. The ocean was azure and transparent, like a picture in a travel brochure, and Chekhov had the idea of taking a swim. Naturally, the captain didn't stop the ship to satisfy the writer's whim. So the sailors threw a rope from the stern for Chekhov to grab after jumping into the water from the Petersburg's bow. It's unlikely that the Taganrog native had even the slightest experience with such a dive. So it was a critical moment for Russian literature when Anton Pavlovich jumped overboard. However, he was lucky. He managed to grab the rope with a double knot at the end and joyfully rolled behind the ship, cutting through the waves. But then a shark emerged from the depths of the ocean. Or rather, according to Chekhov's own account, pilot fish appeared on the surface, and it immediately became clear what would happen next. During his voyage on the Petersburg, he heard plenty of terrifying stories in the wardroom, reminiscent of the movie "Jaws," and knew that the "pilots" were looking for prey for their mistress. Fortunately, the sailors were on guard and managed to pull the writer from the shark's jaws.
For his ordeal, Chekhov was rewarded with Ceylon.
His travel itinerary metaphorically echoes the plot of Dante's Divine Comedy. First, the "Inferno": the Aleksandrovsky post on Sakhalin, daily encounters with convicts, and the spy surveillance of police officials, who vigilantly ensure the writer has no contact with the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) and other "politicals." Naturally, the spies missed them, but Chekhov was already sated with the experience.
"For three months now, I haven't seen anyone except convicts or those who only know how to talk about convicts, whips, and convicts. It's a dreary life. I long to get to Japan, and from there to India," he writes to his mother.
Then came "Purgatory": five weeks aboard the Petersburg, seasickness, insomnia, a storm, and his first sea funeral. This ceremony is described in Chekhov's story "Gusev." A soldier who died of consumption is sewn into canvas, and he resembles a carrot or a radish: "wide at the head, narrow at the feet..." The body is placed on a board, which is lowered, and falls into the water, momentarily covered in lace made of sea foam. Then, sewn into a sack, the man disappears forever, plunging into the abyss until he encounters a flock of "pilots" on his final journey:
"...another dark body appears. It's a shark. It swims up beneath him, pompously and reluctantly, as if not noticing Gusev, and he sinks onto its back. Then it turns belly-up, basks in the warm, clear water, and lazily opens its mouth with its two rows of teeth. The pilot is delighted; they stop and watch what happens next. After playing with its body, the shark reluctantly places its mouth under him, carefully touches it with its teeth, and the canvas rips along the entire length of its body, from head to toe..."
The story was "conceived" in Ceylon, as the author informed his publisher, Suvorin. They were friendly, and Chekhov boasted to Suvorin, like a man, about the wonderful time he'd spent between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn: "Here in paradise, I've traveled more than 100 miles by rail and have had my fill of palm forests and bronze women. When I have children, I'll tell them, not without pride: 'You sons of bitches, in my time I had intercourse with a black-eyed Hindu woman... and where? In a coconut forest, on a moonlit night.'" During the Soviet era, this fragment was excised from the collected works.
There, in Ceylon, Chekhov bought two baby mongooses (one of which later turned out to be a palm cat) and brought them back to Russia. The animals were ill-suited to life in the small Moscow apartment on Malaya Dmitrovka. Their habit of defecating in guests' top hats was particularly annoying. Otherwise, they were cute little creatures.
Mikhail Chekhov describes a trip to Tula station, where he went with his mother to meet his traveling brother.
"When we arrived in Tula, the express train Anton was traveling on had already arrived from the south, and my brother was dining at the station with Ensign Glinka, returning from the Far East to St. Petersburg, and a strange-looking foreigner with a flat, broad face and narrow, slanted eyes. This was the chief priest of Sakhalin Island, Hieromonk Irakli, a Buryat who had come to Russia with Chekhov and Glinka and was wearing a civilian suit of the absurd Sakhalin cut. Anton Pavlovich and Glinka had each brought a pet mongoose from India, and while they were dining, the mongooses would stand on their hind legs and peer into their plates. This Sakhalin hieromonk, with his face as flat as a board and without the slightest hair on his face, and these mongooses seemed so outlandish that a whole crowd gathered around the diners and looked at them with their mouths open.
"Is that an Indian?" came the questions. "Are those monkeys?" M. Chekhov, "Around Chekhov"
The "foreign man," Hieromonk Irakli, deserves a separate story. It was the Buryat priest's first visit to central Russia. And he arrived triumphantly, in the company of Chekhov and mongooses.
Prior to this, Father Irakli served for five years on Sakhalin as the rector of the Tymovsky District prison church. For his impeccable service, the church authorities awarded him a gold pectoral cross. Irakli's flock was a special one: murderers, robbers, and rapists, all of whom had a lot to tell in confession.
The hieromonk himself converted to Christianity as an adult. Daniil Kharms's father, Ivan Yuvachev, a Narodnaya Volya member who served a hard labor sentence on Sakhalin, recorded Irakli's story in his memoirs:
"During a severe flood that inundated all the Buryat villages, the young, newly married Irakli vowed to accept Christian baptism if he survived. The entire population perished. Only Irakli remained, and he quickly entered a monastery." I. P. Yuvachev (Mirolyubov), "Eight Years on Sakhalin"
At Anton Pavlovich's invitation, Hieromonk Irakli settled on Malaya Dmitrovka. An exotic Buryat in a Sakhalin-style suit and a mongoose with a palm cat entertaining guests earned the Chekhovs a reputation as progressive and freethinking individuals.
The journey was over, but work on the book about Sakhalin was just beginning.
"I brought with me about 10 statistical cards and a lot of paperwork. I'd like to be married now to some smart girl so she can help me sort through this junk; it's embarrassing to dump this work on my sister.", Chekhov wrote to Suvorin in December 1890.
In addition to working materials, he brought something that he did not even tell Suvorin about: letters from exiles.
Sakhalin authorities received strict orders from St. Petersburg not to allow Chekhov access to the "politicals." There were about forty of them on the island: Russian members of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) and Poles from the Great Proletariat party. Both recognized economic and political terror as the "highest form of struggle against autocracy." Chekhov managed to communicate with them only briefly, and only in the presence of vigilant officials. But even during these brief encounters, they managed to agree on the transfer of correspondence. The ordinary correspondence of convicts was carefully screened, and whether a letter would reach his relatives on the mainland depended on the censor's mood. Chekhov's arrival was a chance to share his uncensored thoughts with his loved ones (and comrades in the struggle).
Anton Pavlovich proved to be a skilled courier. He delivered the revolutionaries' letters to Odessa and distributed them to their addresses as if they were regular mail.
In early December, the Petersburg docked at the Odessa port, where another group of convicts was already waiting their turn to board. They would travel on the same ship, but without Chekhov's comforts.
Returning from his paradise, Chekhov sat down to write a book about hell. The work dragged on for nearly five years. There were several reasons for this. First, the author wanted to avoid the genre of superficial travelogues. He wanted to create a book that would distill facts and documents into a compelling literary form. And second, there was censorship…
While Galkin-Vraska sits on the prison throne, — Chekhov wrote in August 1892, “I really don’t want to publish a book.”
Before leaving, he was given a condition: submit the manuscript to the Main Prison Administration for preliminary proofreading. Any journalist knows how "pleasant" it is to get approval for an article from officials. This is despite the fact that Mikhail Nikolaevich Galkin-Vraskoy was, in fact, a progressive and enlightened official.
He believed in the educational impact of labor on prisoners and headed a model prison in St. Petersburg, where carpentry and metalworking workshops were established for the first time in Russia, and a vegetable garden was established to supply the prison with vegetables. Galkin-Vraska also lobbied to have his exile to Siberia lifted. But Chekhov's book still outraged him. He complained to the Main Press Directorate and delayed its publication as best he could.
Nevertheless, in 1895, "Sakhalin Island" was published as a separate edition, after which auditors were sent to the island, who confirmed almost everything written by the author.
A reviewer for the Tomsk newspaper "Sibirskaya Zhizn" (Siberian Life), after reading Chekhov's new book, wrote that "his style, compressed and cold, seems to emanate the melancholy of a despondent tourist..."
Still, in Tomsk they were never able to forgive Anton Pavlovich for his caustic remarks about the city and its people.
