The Pritchett Century (80 page)
Read The Pritchett Century Online
Authors: V.S. Pritchett
He is by now well past the Urals. If the small towns are gray and miserable, the country people are “good and kindly,” and
have excellent traditions. Their rooms are simply furnished but clean, with claims to luxury; the beds are soft, all feather mattresses and big pillows. The floors are painted or covered with homemade linen rugs.
No bugs, no “Russian smell.” The explanation: these people have forty-eight acres of black earth, which they farm themselves.
But it cannot all be put down to prosperity.… One must give some of the credit to their manner of life.… they don’t search in each other’s heads in
your presence.… There is a cleanliness of which our Little Russians can only dream, yet the Little Russians are far and away cleaner than the Great Russians.
Food! Pies and pancakes are good, but all the rest is not for what Chekhov calls his “European” stomach. Duck broth is disgusting and muddy; there is the terrible “brick tea” tasting like a “decoction of sage and beetles.”
The last of the bad Moscow air was out of his lungs and he had stopped coughing. But in Siberia there were freezing gales, food was scarce; the bad roads, the floods and the days and nights of jolting along brought on his cough again and he spat blood. He had bought a cart of his own by now because it was cheaper, but he was continually repairing it. His cheap boots cramped his feet and for the rest of the journey he suffered agonies from piles. His whole body was aching.
He changes to a public coach. It is like traveling on roads flooded to the size of lakes and he has to be rowed across them. As for fellow passengers—they seem chiefly to have been drunkards and boasters. There was a police officer who had written a play and insisted on reading it. He also exhibited a nugget of gold. There was constant talk about gold in Siberia.
Tomsk turns out to be a dull and drunken town—“a pig in a skullcap” and the acme of “mauvais ton.” It is regarded as a distinction that all its governors die in it.
After the freezing gales the heat of summer comes suddenly. He had his first bath at Irkutsk, “a very European town,” and threw away his filthy clothes and bought new ones. Then on by river steamer to the famous Lake Baikal, a little sea in itself, and at last he reached a paradise on the Amur River. On the left, the Russian shore; on the right, wild and deserted China. What a region for a summer villa, among duck, grebes, herons and all sorts of creatures with long beaks, young girls smoking cigarettes, old ladies smoking pipes. Marvelous crags and forests, everyone talking about gold, gold, gold.
And what liberalism! Oh what liberalism.… People are not afraid to talk aloud here. There’s no one to arrest them and nowhere to exile them to, so
you can be as liberal as you like. The people for the most part are independent, self-reliant and logical. If there is any misunderstanding at Ustkara, where the convicts work (among them many politicals who don’t work), all the Amur region is in revolt.… An escaped convict can travel freely on the steamer to the ocean, without any fear of the captain’s giving him up. This is partly due to the absolute indifference to everything that is done in Russia.
At last, after two and a half months, on July 5, 1890, he is at Nikolayevsk, a town of respectable smugglers on the Tatar Strait and the port of embarkation for the island of Sakhalin on the other side of the strait. On the crossing he found himself with three hundred soldiers and several prisoners, one he notices “accompanied by his five-year-old daughter, who clung to his shackles as he came up the gangway.”
The first sight of the town itself alarmed him. Smoke was drifting across the strait from huge fires. He eventually wrote in
The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin:
The horrifying scene, compounded of darkness, the silhouettes of mountains, smoke, flames and fiery sparks, was fantastic. On my left monstrous fires were burning, above them the mountains, and beyond the mountains a red glow rose to the sky from remote conflagrations. It seemed that all of Sakhalin was on fire.
Chekhov had had no difficulty in getting permission to talk to the convicts or the settlers, but his official permit forbade him to talk with political prisoners. He had given practical forethought to his inquiry and he had shrewdly decided to begin by making his personal census of the population. He devised a card of twelve questions, which requested simple particulars of each settler’s status, age, religion, education and year of arrival, and included the very cogent question: Married in Russia or in Sakhalin? He claimed to have filled out ten thousand of those cards. There was no Impressionist in Chekhov, the doctor. Most of the settlers were of peasant origin and illiterate. Some didn’t know where they came from. There were twice as many men as
women in the penal colony, and in addition there were the “bachelor soldiers,” who were as dangerous, he noted, as “roughnecks building a railroad” near a Russian village.
If he is writing a flat documentary prose and rather overloads his book with the statistics, he has the storyteller’s eye for the grim and the bizarre. When word of a new delivery of woman convicts gets around, we shall see, the road is crowded with men going south to the port of arrival. These are known to everyone, not without irony, as the “suitors,” or prospective bridegrooms.
They actually look like bridegrooms. One has donned a red bunting shirt, another wears a curious planter’s hat, a third sports shining new high-heeled boots, though nobody knows where he bought them or under what circumstances. When they arrive at the post they are permitted to enter the women’s barracks and they are left there with the women. The suitors wander around the plank beds, silently and seriously eyeing the women; the latter sit with downcast eyes. Each man makes his choice. Without any grimaces, without any sneers, very seriously, they act with humanity toward the ugly, the old and those with criminal features.… If some younger or older woman “reveals herself” to a man, he sits down beside her and begins a sincere conversation. She asks if he owns a samovar and whether his hut is covered with planks or straw.… Only after the housekeeping examination has been completed, when both feel that a deal has been made, does she venture to say: “You won’t hurt me in any way, will you?”
The conversation is over. The civil marriage is completed and he takes his “cohabitant” home.
With the exception of women from the privileged classes or those who arrived with their husbands, all female convicts became “cohabitants.” Most of the women convicts were neurotics who had been “sentenced for crimes of passion or crimes connected with their families.” They say, “I came because of my husband,” or “I came because of my mother-in-law.”
Most are murderers, the victims of love and family despotism. Even those who are sent out here for arson and for counterfeiting are being punished
for their love affairs, since they were enticed into crime by their lovers.
Now they were “settled.” Twenty years before Chekhov’s time such women were sent to brothels.
Chekhov made a study of the grim mining settlements all over the island. Due was a place of violent brawls and robberies. On another journey there is a place called Upper Armudan, famous for its card-players. They gambled here with their rations and clothing. Once he was obliged to stay in a garret in the jail because the only other room was fully occupied by bugs and cockroaches. The jailer said these creatures “win all the time.”
It seemed as though the walls and ceiling were covered with black crepe, which stirred as if blown by a wind. From the rapid and disorderly movements of portions of the crepe you could guess the composition of this boiling, seething mass.
During his journeys Chekhov came across dozens of criminal life stories. He got used to the apathy of the women, but the lot of the children born there horrified him.
What is terrifying in the cities and villages of Russia is commonplace here.… When children see chained convicts dragging a wheelbarrow full of sand, they hang onto the back of the barrow and laugh uproariously.
They played Soldiers-and-Convicts and Vagrants among themselves and knew the exact meaning of “executioner,” “prisoners in chains,” and “cohabitant.” He records a talk with a boy of ten.
“What is your father’s name?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he answered.…
“You are living with your father and don’t know his name? That is disgraceful.”
“He’s not my real father.”
“What do you mean, he’s not your real father?”
“He’s my mother’s cohabitant.”
“Is your mother married or a widow?”
“A widow. She came because of her husband.”
“What do you mean, she came because of her husband?”
“She killed him.”
In spite of this Chekhov was convinced that the children were “the most useful, the most necessary and the most pleasant” creatures on the island and that the convicts themselves felt this too. The children loved their “impure mothers and criminal fathers more than anything else in the world.… often children are the only tie that binds men and women to life, saving them from despair and a final disintegration.” Yet the parents seemed indifferent to child prostitution.
The most horrifying pages of the book are those describing a flogging. Chekhov steeled himself to watch it and to record almost every stroke and all the screams of the criminal and the cold professional attitude of the flogger, counting out the strokes. Chekhov was impelled to identify himself with all the pain on the island. The one relief from the sight of human degradation came to him from the sights of nature: the crops, the forests, the animals, birds and shoals of fish. He studied the agriculture of the island very seriously. Writing the book when he was back home was a trying labor for one who was not by nature a documentary journalist. He added very enlightening footnotes. The book did not appear until 1895.
By October he was glad to leave Sakhalin, glad to stop being a doctor, examining human degradation, and to be a free globe-trotter. He left on a steamer by way of Hong Kong and Singapore. He reveled above all in Ceylon, where, he claimed in a letter to Alexander, he had made love to a dark girl under the palm trees; he also acquired three mongooses, and then went on to Odessa. At Tula his mother and sister met him, and then home to Moscow. He had been away eight months. He was thirty. He told his friends and family:
I can say I have lived! I’ve had everything I want. I have been in Hell which is Sakhalin and in Paradise which is Ceylon.
He was restless. This labor of writing a “book of statistics” hung over him like a punishment for a long time, for once more he was frantic about money. He had spent more than he could afford. His mind was full of stories begging to be written.
The man so conscientious in his duties inevitably craved once more for escape and evasion. The “cure” was more travel and, although protesting, he jumped recklessly at the chance of a trip to Europe with Suvorin. The distraction was indeed a cure. On Sakhalin he had simply worked too hard; now with Suvorin and Suvorin’s son he moved from barbarism to civilization. Vienna amazed him. He had never seen anything like this in his life.
I have for the first time realized.… that architecture is an art. And here the art is not seen in little bits, as with us, but stretches over several miles. And then on every side street there is sure to be a bookshop.… It is strange that here one is free to read anything and to say what one likes.
They went on to Venice: “For us poor and oppressed Russians it is easy to go out of our minds here in a world of beauty, wealth, and freedom,” he writes. And in another letter: “And the house where Desdemona lived is to let!”
On they went to Bologna and Florence. What works of art! What singing! What neckties in the shops! In Naples he was enchanted by the famous aquarium and studied the grace and viciousness of the exotic fish. He climbed Vesuvius and looked down on the crater and heard “Satan snoring under cover of the smoke.” In Monte Carlo he could not resist a gamble and lost more than he could afford. “If I had money to spare I would spend the whole year gambling”—and, in one sense, his own life had become a gamble. In Nice he thought the luxury of the resort vulgarized the scenery. In Paris there were riots, but he thought the French “magnificent.” He was impressed at the Chamber of Deputies, where he heard a free and stormy debate on the behavior of the police in the riots. Imagine the freedom to criticize the police! For once in his life he was staying in luxury hotels. He loved the Moulin Rouge but he eventually tired of “men who tie boa constrictors round their bodies, ladies who kick up to the ceiling, flying people,
lions,
cafés chantants
, dinners and lunches.” He wanted to get back to work. His depression had gone.
On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I write my Sakhalin book, on the other days, except Sunday, my novel, and on Sundays, short stories.
He had paid his debt to medicine.
(1988)
ITERARY
C
RITICISM
ARK
T
WAIN
THE AMERICAN PURITAN
After reading Hemingway and Faulkner and speculating upon the breach of the American novel with its English tradition, we go back to the two decisive, indigenous Americans who opened the new vein—Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. Everything really American, really non-English comes out of that pair of spiritual derelicts, those two scarecrow figures with their half-lynched minds. Both of them, but particularly Twain, represent the obverse side of Puritanism. We have never had this obverse in England, for the political power of Puritanism lasted for only a generation and has since always bowed if it has not succumbed to civilised orthodoxy. If an Englishman hated Puritanism, there was the rest of the elaborate English tradition to support him; but American Puritanism was totalitarian and if an American opposed it, he found himself alone in a wilderness with nothing but bottomless cynicism and humorous bitterness for his consolation. There has never been in English literature a cynicism to compare with the American; at any rate we have never had that, in some ways vital, but always sardonic or wretched, cynicism with its broken chopper edge and its ugly wound. We have also never had its by-product: the humorous
philosophers; Franklin’s Poor Richard, the Josh Billingses, the Artemus Wards, the Pudd’nhead Wilsons and Will Rogerses with their close-fisted proverbs:
