The first “Chekhov’s Footprints” post from home, Durham. It must mean something, some turning point or possibly even an appreciation of stasis.

Not too long ago a friend told me about someone who applied for a job that would be perfect for him, and he for it, but he was rejected because he had been treated for depression during COVID. My feeling was that I would not hire anyone who was NOT depressed during COVID. That would not be a normal person. Add to this the horrors of the past year-and-a-half and I think it’s understandable that normal people would be hiding, along with me, in a dark place under the rocks.

This connects with my long silence, which who needs to explain? But some things happened this week. Deborah Martinsen’s birthday was June 14, marking 18 months now without her. And her near and dear people commemorated this with an exchange of thoughts and photos. Just a few hours after I sent in my bit (yesterday), I received an email from the editor of Deborah’s Dostoevsky: A Very Short Introduction, which I am helping leap through its last few hoops to publication with Oxford. I’d submitted a bunch of images and “boxes” for the book and now we are haggling over them.

The most important of these images is a map of Dostoevsky’s trip to Siberian prison and exile between 1850 and 1859. I had found a nice map of this journey in 2019 at the Dostoevsky Museum in Omsk, which I photographed from its place on the wall and threw into my post from Omsk:

https://sites.duke.edu/chekhovsfootprints/2019/09/22/omsk/. Since I had not seen any maps of Dostoevsky’s Siberian journey in publications (in the West at least) before this, and since my whole life’s enterprise is mappy, I wanted to get it into the VSI. For the Oxford editor, I supplemented this rough and blurry image with several copies of close-up google maps showing the trip, along with some handwritten commentary. Many of my pictures and boxes for the VSI went into the trash, but miraculously the editor kept my clumsy drafts and sent them to a cartographer! (Mike) Somehow Mike managed to decipher all the sloppy inputs, and produced a beautiful professional map, which he sent with some queries (I probably can’t post his map here but it will be in the book).

Today it is pouring rain in Durham. I cannot park in my usual spot on West campus, because my Buddy (the scooter) was stolen last week and though with the help of sharp-eyed neighbors we managed to recover it from plain view at the side of Washington Street, it sustained damage and is currently in the shop being quibbled over by mechanics and the insurance company. And also because of the rain.

I would like to note, here, that after the police came and fingerprinted my Buddy (with the teenagers who hotwired it undoubtedly watching and snickering from somewhere just down Green St.), a man stopped by and to my question as to who would just leave a stolen scooter on a major street where everyone could see it (including my neighbor Suzanne who texted me about it, precipitating its recovery), he answered, “I guess they was done with it.”

If you can’t connect this story with Duke Parking, this means you are ignorant of what it costs to park an actual automobile on West. Anyway, so I just crawled back under my dark rock to wait for (a) the rain to stop; and (b) my scooter to be fixed, and (c) for peace and love to reign all over the world.

Something about the message from the editor, though, along with the thought of Deborah, dragged me out from under the rock into the office today.

Mike’s queries turned out to be lethal:

The original fuzzy map between Perm and Tobolsk did not match any documented river or road route from 1850 Russia. After much floundering about, I came across this amazing article by Boris Tikhomirov from September 2022: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/peterburg-tobolsk-omsk-semipalatinsk-o-puti-dostoevskogo-na-katorgu-i-v-ssylku

In his inimitable manner, our colleague from the St. Petersburg Dostoevsky Museum offers a detailed itinerary, refuting the route proposed by other scholars (including the book where my map, I mean the Omsk wall photo, came from). One of the Petrashevsky convicts accompanying Dostoevsky in January 1850 (I. L. Iastrzhembskii) records in his memoirs that when they arrived in Tobolsk, the Tobolsk transit prison inspector I. G. Korepanov confiscated a “nearly full bottle of good rum” that he had bought in Kazan (p. 15 of Tikhomirov’s article). I’m feeling very sad for Iastrzhembskii, who’d brought the rum all that way through ice and snow (in shackles no less) and wish he’d had a way just to chug it right then and there and hand over the empty bottle. And I’m also thinking of the bottle of cognac that Dr. Kuvshinnikov gave Chekhov before his trip to Sakhalin 40 years later, which Chekhov vowed to drink only upon reaching the Pacific, an episode that sparks a poem by Seamas Heaney, which, since the poet is so famous, I link here, despite the profoundly annoying details—a @#$% troika, the insane geography, a place called “Tiumin,” Siberia being “to the south,” and, is it Lake Baikal or the Pacific?, a cantor by the ikonostasis, a woman with “cleavage” in 19th century Russia, the midnight sun, and basically nearly every other detail):

https://lyrics.lol/artist/21375-seamus-heaney/lyrics/6520834-chekhov-on-sakhalin.

But the real point, given our need to get that map into the VSI Dostoevsky, is that this detail, that Iastrzhembskii obtained the rum in KAZAN, must have meant, says Tikhomirov, that the prisoners must have gone through that city (not to mention Nizhnii Novgorod), NOT, as some scholars (and my fuzzy map from Omsk) claim, through Vytka.

In short, I wrung out my wet things and spent the afternoon tracking down the elusive facts of Dostoevsky’s travels in January 1850. I mean, I spent the afternoon appreciating Tikhomirov’s meticulous scholarly work, figuring out how to draw a red line in a pdf, and fixing my map. Some details remain up for grabs (did he go through Vyatka anyway? Did Iastrzhembskii remember wrong?) but I’ll go for Tikhomirov’s version.

Now how did Dostoevsky get from the transit prison in Tobolsk to Omsk? The standard route would be back through Tiumen (which BTW is the hair-raising route driver Andrei took me in 2019 (https://sites.duke.edu/chekhovsfootprints/2019/09/20/the-road-in-between/). But Dostoevsky (along with his guards and companion convict Durov) went by a local road. It took them three days.

I am doubtful about the stops in Golyshmanovo and Ishim, but Google maps (being from the 21st century and enamored of highways) refuses to go directly from Tobolsk to the first little unlabelled gray town icon (Abatskoe).

Of the towns that Tikhomirov mentions, my radar picked up Tiukalinsk (the second unlabelled little town icon on the map), and at this moment all the journeys (Dostoevsky’s, Chekhov’s, and mine) suddenly converged, and everything made sense. This is after all, where Sergei of Omsk took me as part of his lifelong quest to visit all the places Chekhov visited on his journey to Sakhalin Island.

https://sites.duke.edu/chekhovsfootprints/2019/09/24/on-and-off-the-map/.

It’s hard to explain, but thank you, Deborah.