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Chekhov as Ethnographer: Epistemological Crisis on Sakhalin Island

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Cathy Popkin
Cathy Popkin*
Affiliation:
The Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University
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Extract

In 1890, Anton Chekhov traveled all the way across Siberia, spending five months in transit and three more in residence, to visit the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. The trip was enormously eccentric—it was dangerous, arduous, ill-advised for someone of Chekhov's delicate constitution and uncharacteristically adventuresome for someone so sedentary. Its eccentricity is heightened by the battery of cavalier explanations advanced by the writer, who justified his trip first as an attempt to erase a portion of his life, then as an effort to produce the only halfyear worth remembering, now as a mere change of pace, then as a pressing need to flee a romantic entanglement, at times as a scientific enterprise, at other times as a symptom of "Sakhalin mania."

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 36 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

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References

I am grateful for the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.

1. Chekhov, A. P., Ostrov Sakhalin: (Iz putevykh zapisok), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, Sochineniia, vols. 14-15 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Nauka,” 1978), 45 Google Scholar. AH subsequent references to this edition will be included parenthetically in the text. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

2. Letter to A. S. Suvorin, 11 September 1890 (Pis'ma 4: 134). The sentiments expressed in Chekhov's letters parallel fairly closely those in his book. They initially reflect his confidence in his research designs and later his increasing discomfiture.

3. See Chekhov's “Uchitel’ slovesnosti” (The Teacher of Literature), 8: 310-32.

4. Eliot, George, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 106.Google Scholar

5. See, for instance, Chekhov's often-cited letter to Suvorin, which was written during his preparations for the trip: he outlines his intentions to write a documentary piece on Sakhalin “in order to begin to pay off my debt to medicine, to which, as you know, I have behaved like a pig.” 9 March 1890 (Pis'ma 4: 31). Prior to the work's publication, Chekhov repeats this consideration and now expresses satisfaction that, becauseSakhalin Island is “an academic work,” at least “medicine can no longer reproach me for having betrayed her.” To Suvorin, 2 January 1894 (Pis'ma 5: 258).

6. Chekhov's census cards included a thirteenth line— “What illnesses do you suffer from? “—that he never mentions in his text. Whether he reconsidered his questions and chose to eliminate that one, or the responses to it were even less reliable for tabulation than the rest of his tenuous results, remains an object of speculation. One of Chekhov's questionnaires is reproduced in Pis'ma 4: 135.

7. Letter to Suvorin, 11 September 1890 (Pis'ma 4: 133-34).

8. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 28 Google Scholar. Further references are incorporated parenthetically in the text.

9. Kennan, George, Siberia and the Exile System, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 78.Google Scholar

10. Exiles to Siberia carry sentences that fall'into four general categories: 1) hard labor and deprivation of civil rights, 2) compulsory colonization and full or partial deprivation of civil rights, 3) compulsory colonization without deprivation of civil rights and 4) banishment to Siberia by administrative process. See Kropotkin, Peter, In Russian and French Prisons (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 62–64.Google Scholar

11. Kennan, vol. 2, 261.

12. Chekhov joked to Suvorin that he would marry any “girl” who could figure out how to organize all the statistical “junk” he had accumulated on his research trip.17 December 1890 (Pis'ma 4: 146). Chekhov remained a bachelor, however, throughout his work on Sakhalin Island.

13. 18 May 1891 (Pis'ma 4: 232).

14. Chekhov himself acknowledges to Suvorin that the book turned out to be a “massive” compendium of “figures” and “footnotes.” 16 March 1895 (Pis'ma 6: 37). V. M. Doroshevich claims in his memoirs that Chekhov attributes his overuse of figures to the exigencies of credibility: “ ‘If I had written “Sakhalin” in literary form, without figures, they'd say “He's telling us fairy tales.” But numbers, statistics—they inspire respect. Any fool respects figures.'” Rus. SL, no. 183 (1904), as cited by A. Izmailov, Chekhov 1860-1904: Biograficheskii nabrosok (Moscow: Tipografiia T-va. I. D. Sytina, 1916), 339.

15. To Suvorin, 9 December 1890 (Pis'ma 4: 139).

16. To N. A. Leikin, 10 December 1890 (Pis'ma 4: 141).

17. To A. F. Koni, 26 January 1891 (Pis'ma 4: 167).

18. To Suvorin, 27 May 1891 (Pis'ma 4: 235).

19. To E. la. Chekhova, 6 October 1890 (Pis'ma 4: 137).

20. Seamus Heaney, “Chekhov on Sakhalin,” Station Island (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 18-19.

21. Ernest J. Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography (Boston: Litde, Brown and Company, 1962), 229. Simmons is one of many critics and biographers who have expressed this view.

22. To the extent that any “strangeness” has been addressed by the extant literature onSakhalin Island, it has confined itself principally to the oddity of the trip and the generic ambiguities of the work. Most treatments of Chekhov's book debate its problematic genre. Some emphasize its scientific, documentary character ( Polotskaia, E. A., “Posle Sakhalina,” in Opul'skaia, L. D., et al., eds., Chekhov i ego uremia [Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Nauka,” 1977], 131–36Google Scholar). Others underscore instead the work's literary aspects (Joseph Conrad, “Chekhov as Social Observer: The Island of Sakhalin,” in Clyman, Toby W., ed., A Chekhov Companion [Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1985], 275–84Google Scholar; and Atchity, Kenneth John, “Chekhov's Infernal Island,” Research Studies 36 [December 1968]: 335–40)Google Scholar. Mark Teplinskii hails Chekhov's distinctive fusion of two genres—the medical dissertation and the artistic sketch (A. P. Chekhov na Sakhaline [Iuzhno-Sakhalinsk: Dal'nevostochnoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1990], 115-22), and I. N. Sukhikh congratulates Chekhov on the creation of a new genre, what Lidiia Ginzburg has termed “documentary prose” (Problemy poetiki A. P. Chekhova [Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1987], 94-97). A number of critics acknowledge a certain dryness in the surfeit of statistics, but most defend the excessive data as the source of the work's tremendous impact ( Laffitte, Sophie, Chekhov: 1860-1904, trans. Budberg, Moura and Latta, Gordon [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973], 134 Google Scholar); as essential to Chekhov's naturalism ( Kuleshov, V. I., “Realizm A. P. Chekhova i naturalizm i simvolizm v russkoi literature ego vremeni,” in his Etiudy o russkikh pisateliakh (Issledovaniia i kharakteristiki) [Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1982], 251–52Google Scholar); or as a refusal to contaminate documentary with artistry (I. G. Erenburg, “Sakhalinskaia stranitsa,” in Kniazeva, K. I., et al., eds., Anton Pavlovich Chekhov: Sbornik statei [Iuzhno-Sakhalinsk: Sakhalinskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1959], 167, 169 Google Scholar). Irina Ratushinskaia maintains that the avalanche of detail only seems sterile to the “superficial reader” ( “Introduction: The Gift of Kindness,” in Chekhov, Anton, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, trans. Luba, and Terpak, Michael [London: Century, 1987], xi Google Scholar). Conrad argues that the tiresome data are only a ploy to initiate more substantive discussion ( “Chekhov as Social Observer,” 284), and Sukhikh sees the tedium itself as an artfully constructed commentary on the grim realities of Sakhalin and contends that every single detail is compositionally essential (92, 94). None of these scholars question Chekhov's control of his material, least of all John Tulloch, whose very agenda it is to demonstrate the professionalism of Chekhov's scientific methods, the strength of his commitment to statistics and the scope of his confident (and competent) positivism (Chekhov: A Structuralist Study [New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980]). Donald Rayfield, too, citing Chekhov's reverence for the explorer Przheval'skii, presents a Chekhov with a well-founded faith in the attainment and communication of knowledge (Chekhov: The Evolution of his Art [New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975], 92-93, 113). Even V. B. Kataev, who identifies the “gnoseological problem” as the central issue in Chekhov's fiction, stops short of any skepticism about Chekhov's own epistemological bearings in his documentary projects. He argues that Chekhov's intention at every step is to unmask the lies in what others have claimed to know about Sakhalin (Proza Chekhova: problemy interpretatsii [Moscow: Izdatel'stvoMoskovskogo universiteta, 1979], 87, 119-21). M. L. Semanova explains many of theapparent contradictions in Chekhov's book as his strategy for exposing these lies byletting them stand, unglossed, right alongside the truth ( “Rabota nad ocherkovoi knigoi, “in L. D. Opul'skaia, et al., eds., V tvorcheskoi laboratorii Chekhova [Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Nauka,” 1974], 133-34). Conrad allows for an unconscious revulsion to Ainuand Giliak hygiene that results in Chekhov's contradictory portrayals ( “Anton Chekhov'sViews of the Ainu and Giljak Minorities on Sakhalin Island,” in Kluge, Rolf-Dieter, ed., Anton P. Cechov: Werk und Wirkung [Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990], vol. 1, 434, 438-39, 442 Google Scholar). Joanne Trautmann, perhaps, goes farthest when she suggests that the strangeness of the account stems from Chekhov's horror, which he simply handles badly ( “Doctor Chekhov's Prison,” in Trautmann, ed., Healing Arts in Dialogue: Medicine and Literature [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981], 129). Only a very few critics have addressed the oddity of the work without attempting to justify it. Izmailov regrets that Chekhov “suffocates” his readers with so much extraneous data (337); Kornei Chukovsky calls Sakhalin Island the weakest thing Chekhov ever wrote (Chekhov the Man, trans. Pauline Rose [New York: Hutchinson 8c Co., Ltd., n.d.], 43); and Stanley Edgar Hyman shares my own quizzical reaction to Chekhov's “odd ambivalence” and outright contradictions in this “very mixed production” ( “Counting the Cats” in Phoebe Pettingell, ed., The Critic's Credentials: Essays and Reviews by Stanley Edgar Hyman [New York: Atheneum, 1978], 235-40). For the most detailed treatment of Chekhov's book and the critical responses to it, see M. L. Semanova's exhaustive commentary to the academy edition (Sochineniia 14-15: 742-61, 773-886).

23. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 25. Contemporary anthropological thought has drawn attention to the fact that, as Clifford puts it, “ethnography is, from beginning to end, enmeshed in writing” (25), not only because the target culture itself can be seen as an assemblage of texts to interpret rather than a set of facts to command, but because any description of that culture is an inescapably rhetorical enterprise. Moreover, argues Bernard McGrane, the composition of an ethnographic account is essentially a literary affair. Because the object of ethnographic attention, the exotic “other,” is first and foremost a projection of the self anxious to delimit its own identity, the “other” is less a matter for discovery and description than the product of invention and construction. Anthropological discourse can accordingly ; be seen as a kind of “terrestrial science fiction,” a discursive practice that no more ; documents actual others than its literary analogue, but rather “conceives of” them. Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 2-4. But even the most fanciful account must persuade, contends Clifford Geertz. An ethnographer's capacity to convince readers that he or she has “been there” relies on his or her “being there” on the page. Anthropological authority, in other words, is jj inexorably tied to an act of explicit authorship; the authority to “describe” the other 1 comes from the ability to “inscribe” the self in the text. Works and Lives: The Anthrom pologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 6, 9, 17, 23. In each of 1 these views, die legitimacy of ethnographic discourse rests on a creative gesture. I

24. Doroshevich, V. M., Sakhalin (Katorga), 2vols. (Moscow: Tipografiia Tovarishchestva I. D. Sytina, 1903).Google Scholar