We’ve had our fun with the drunken peasant and grumpy Chekhov, and we’ve spent some time living the life of the mind. But as always, there are other stories to tell.

Do a random sample among my people (in the US), asking about their perceptions of Siberia, and my hunch is that the Gulag will be right up there with snow, vodka, and bears.

Every university (and basically, every institution and individual) in the Soviet Union was touched by the Great Terror of the 1930s (and the other years of terror). Everywhere, behind the scenes of normality lurk the spirits of imprisoned, executed, marginalized, “repressed” (as the polite term would have it) victims. Having begun my study of Russian and Russia during darkest zastoi (“back in the USSR”),  I’ve taken a wild ride through history, as one country disappeared and another took its place, and as people began to recapture their history and to grapple with the extraordinary upheavals of the post-Soviet period.

There’s no end to the marathon I’m on.

As I’ve traveled from city to city this fall, meeting people and getting a sense for everyday life in Siberia in 2019, I’ve also been able to visit sites touched by the country’s darker history. Regions, squares, and streets still bear the names of the perpetrators (Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Lenin), even as museums, statues, and memorials to the victims rise up and find their place.

Tomsk is no exception. Like Tobolsk, the town served as a Gulag transit center; some prisoners passed through on their way to more distant places, others were settled in “facilities” in and around town. I found the Tomsk NKVD Memorial Museum particularly moving. The museum is unique in that it is set in the actual building where prisoners were held and interrogations took place.

To get to the museum  exhibits you descend a long dark stairway and alight in a basement corridor lined with small chambers. These were  were either cells or interrogation rooms. What I found extraordinary in the museum was the abundance of individual stories that it manages to tell, even as it presents the Gulag’s physical geography, its facts, dates, and statistics. Behind each fact and number lies a human tragedy, families torn apart, individuals tortured and murdered, children orphaned. One scary exhibit is a document (one of many) listing quotas of arrests that were assigned to each region. We know this; people were arrested not necessarily for any particular crime, but to meet NKVD quotas. During the height of the Terror, those administrators whose job it was to arrest, interrogate, and sentence people feared for their own lives. In one document a local official writes to Stalin asking for his quota to be raised by a few hundred or thousand–I don’t remember–in the hopes that his zeal in rooting out enemies will spare him from being arrested and shot himself.  In Stalin’s handwriting, the official’s request is “approved.” And as a result, several hundred more people were arrested and executed–and probably, in due time, the desperate man who wrote this particular appeal.

Looking at the various displays with these numbers rattling around in your brain, you learn individuals’ stories. The scariest part is recognizing in these stories the all-too human failings that led people to denounce their neighbors and co-workers. The deadly sins were at work: envy, greed, wrath, and the others, too. If your neighbor was arrested, you might be next in line to move into his slightly better room or apartment. If an over-achieving colleague disappeared, your own crappy work might not look so bad after all.

 

The Tomsk museum and the other museums across the country are built, piece by piece, from testimony of individual family members, colleagues, and friends of victims; from treasured artifacts and items reflecting people’s lives at home and in prison; from photos of individuals and their families; from meticulous archival research by scholars, and even from accidental discoveries made during an afternoon walk. At one point, someone stumbled upon a mass grave site exposed by erosion on a river bank near Tomsk:

If your instinct is to destroy history, or cover up something shameful you did, this and other museums have a message for you. Stories find a way to be told. The ghosts will rise up. As in the Tobolsk Romanov museum, I was struck by the sheer power of facts and stories. In my students’ writing, I purge adverbs. If the facts are there and the story captures the reader, there’s no need to pile on expressions of your feeling, what the Russians call “pafos” (pathos). Just tell what happened, to whom, and when, and that will be enough.

Thank you, everyone who has a story to tell, and thank you, historians (and muzeishchiki) for telling it so effectively.

In US universities students are turning away from the study of history to focus on the world as it is now (or will be in the future, as if we ivory-tower-dwellers knew anything about that). The world around them–at home, in the news, and among their peers–reinforces this message. So, in fact do our universities, whose rhetoric focuses almost exclusively on “the future.”

…innovate, invent, discover, collaborate, serve, build, design, create,…get out of the box, move forward…

How many major institutions of learning (I’m just talking about the US, now) are touting their role as guardians and custodians of the past? I’m not hearing it.  Our students heed the call: they come to us not to learn things, but rather to think up things and make things. I’m for that, and I want some of those new things myself. And I take great pride when I and my students and colleagues come up with new things. But it is true that new things mostly come from old things.  So let’s not forget to take some looks in the rear-view mirror as we “move forward into the future.”

Outside the Tomsk NKVD Museum–as in so many Siberian towns–stands a memorial to the victims of the Great Terror.

Here is the museum’s website:

http://nkvd.tomsk.ru/about/

 

The Tom River

Chekhov’s trip to Sakhalin was cold, long, uncomfortable, dangerous, and, to judge from his reports from the road, mostly wet. At the end of the 19th century, Siberia’s roads were primarily rivers, running south-north; though the Trans-Siberian railway was glimmering in decision-makers’ minds, things would not get underway until a few years later. If you travel anywhere in Russia during the spring, you are going to get caught in the thaw; all that snow melts, leaving you sopping wet and helpless to get where you’re going. From the window of a speeding trans-Siberian train between Ulan-Ude and Khabarovsk, it’s beautiful…

though your (nice, quiet, female) kupe-mate Liza tells you that the serene, shimmery waterscape you’re seeing is actually the aftermath of a disastrous flood.

All of this inclines the mind to contemplation, musing, philosophizing, and complaining. In Chekhov’s case, some of this mental and verbal activity takes place at post stations (while waiting for horses, trying to dry off, and drinking tea). Some of it finds expression in his travel notes “From Siberia” and letters home, and some of it brews quietly inside, fermenting and mixing with impressions. This potent brew will gush forth when the big trip is over and when, for the first time in his life, Chekhov will settle down in a home of his own. How much the Melikhovo fictional masterpieces owe to this period of suffering and reflection cannot be calculated–but I’ll bet it’s more than we usually think. We may not notice because the references to Siberia in his subsequent fiction are muted and few. And of course the Island of Sakhalin, and The Island of Sakhalin, came in between the experience and the fiction.

Art is an alchemy that science, fortunately, cannot explain.

After his wet crossing of the Irtysh and that short interval with Sergei in Tiukalinsk, Chekhov pressed on through various small villages, including the appropriately named Pustynnoe (empty or desolate), BTW not stopping in nearby Omsk, where Sergei and I began. “Empty” may well characterize the annoyances of this leg of his trip, for he was held up by various absences (or post horses, of boats) on his way to the Tom River. Finally, after a difficult crossing, he made it to Tomsk late at night on May 15. He would spend a week here, leaving May 21 (yes, 1890, despite Sergei).

After wind, rain, icy dunkings and soakings, chills, and a cold, it is only natural that Chekhov would be grumpy upon his arrival in Tomsk. He liked the dinners at the Slavyansky Bazaar (BTW he used to eat at the Slavyansky Bazaar in Moscow too), but not much else, and basically holed up in his hotel room. Chekhov’s bad mood and the few words he said about Tomsk would prove formative to the city’s self-image forever after. Words carry weight whose impact can never be predicted.

Chekhov wrote to his family from Tomsk on 20 May [the important bit is translated].

[…]

Два месяца тому назад умер здесь таганрогский таможенный Кузовлев, в нищете.

От нечего делать принялся за дорожные впечатления и посылаю их в «Новое время»; будете читать их приблизительно после 10 июня. Пишу обо всем понемножку: трень-брень. Пишу не для славы, а в отношении денег и в рассуждении взятого аванса.

[now here’s the snarky bit about Tomsk]

Томск скучнейший город. Если судить по тем пьяницам, с которыми я познакомился, и по тем вумным людям, которые приходили ко мне в номер на поклонение, то и люди здесь прескучнейшие. По крайней мере мне с ними так невесело, что я приказал человеку никого не принимать.

Tomsk is a colossally boring town. To judge from the drunks  I met, and from the local eggheads who came to my hotel room to pay their respects, the people here are utterly stultifying. I had such an unpleasant time with them that I ordered the hotel servant not to receive anyone.

Был в бане. Отдавал в стирку белье (по 5 коп. за платок!). Покупал от скуки шоколат.

Благодарю Ивана за книги. Я теперь покоен. Если он не с вами, то напишите ему, что я кланяюсь. Отцу послано письмо. Послал бы таковое и Ивану, но не знаю наверное, где он живет и куда поехал.

Через 2½ дня буду в Красноярске, а через 7½ — 8 в Иркутске. До Иркутска 1500 верст.

Заварил себе кофе и сейчас буду пить. Утро. Скоро зазвонят к поздней обедне.

После Томска начнется тайга. Посмотрим.

[…] Ваш А. Чехов.

Душа моя кричит караул. Помилуйте, мой бедный чемодан-сундук остается в Томске, а покупаю я себе новый чемодан, мягкий и плоский, на к<ото>ром можно сидеть и к<ото>рый не разобьется от тряски. Бедный сундучок таким образом попал в Сибирь на поселение.

Источник: http://chehov-lit.ru/chehov/letters/1890-1892/letter-820.htm

A brief nod to the Tomsk postal service here–how else would he have been able to get books from his brother Ivan? (and of course we are curious as to what books they were):

      

Usually only the nasty part about Tomsk in Chekhov’s letter is quoted, but zooming back provides a context.  Exhausted from the road, Chekhov learns of the death of a home-town acquaintance here in Tomsk; annoyed at the cost of doing laundry

(The cost of doing laundry is one thing that I can attest has not changed in Russia hotels over the ensuing 129 years. Chekhov paid 5 kopecks for a hanky to be washed; today to wash the same item will cost you 50 rubles (which I’m going to guess is about the equivalent by 21st-century standards). Yes, you heard me right-almost a dollar. Your jeans will cost $6 to wash. You gasp, then ask yourself which is better: to spend the whole day stomping on your jeans in the shower or to go out questing for Chekhov during your brief time on Sakhalin Island. It took you several decades to get here, remember]. BTW if you are young and nimble enough to stay in hostels (aka dorm rooms with bunks for eight people and one flooded bathroom down the hall that you share with four other dorm rooms and some local fauna who have managed to crawl up all four flights of stairs, because the other bathroom is out of service [your Russian word of the day: na remont]), you can do an entire load of laundry for 150 rubles (less than you’ll pay in a US laundrymat). I have done this. But oh, the noise, oh, the lines, oh, the miasmas… To be fair, I don’t think they want a professor sleeping with them; it’s kind of a reversal of the Vakhta situation in the train kupe. I get it. And I won’t join you guys at Shooters either. Or Facebook you. Live these frisky years of your life free from prying eyes; they will end soon, and before you know it you will have a toddler lurking at your feet, soaking up everything you say and do with his shockingly sensitive radar.

aware of his debt to his dean, I mean Suvorin, and the consequent need to sit there in our hotel room and write; aware that he was not yet even halfway through his journey): it all just compounds the feelings of exhaustion and boredom he brought to Tomsk. It is from Tomsk that Chekhov sent his first travel notes from the road for publication in Suvorin’s New Time. 

PSS Editors’ notes: In the first six chapters he sent from Tomsk, Chekhov did describe the segment of his trip between Tiumen and Tomsk, explaining in a letter to Suvorin that he was writing it for him personally, because he was not afraid of being “‘too subjective and not afraid thаt there were more thoughts and feelings in them about Chekhov than about Siberia.”  (В первых шести главах, отправленных из Томска, Чехов все же осветил отрезок пути между Тюменью и Томском, оговорив в письме Суворину, что писал лично для него, потому не боялся быть «слишком субъективным и не боялся, что в них больше чеховских чувств и мыслей, чем Сибири»)

I don’t disagree with Chekhov all that often, but in 2019 he is dead wrong about Tomsk. My impressions are different.  What I saw was a charming university town with a lovely riverfront promenade and stunning wooden architecture. I could picture living here–though admittedly you have to factor in that I hit town on a lovely warm summer day, and was welcomed by generous, solicitous hosts who showed me Tomsk’s best features. I saw no drunks (meaning, people who might have seemed drunk from the outside).

But really, Chekhov, if a visitor just passing through can draw sweeping conclusions about a whole town from the sighting of a few drunks in the street, how would the rest of us fare?  Take a stroll near Shooters in Durham some random Saturday night at 2:00 am (uh, or whenever), and a whole throng of future elite, educated white-collar professionals might look and sound no better than these  ditch-hugging Tomsk lushes. And, when you factor in the lurking corporate elements in this picture, my hometown Durham would be running neck and neck with something way worse than Chekhov’s momentarily glimpsed Tomsk.

But Tomsk is no dummy. The town would take sweet revenge in 2004.  As part of its celebration of its 400th birthday (commemorated in part by the stone at your right, if you’re on a grown-up computer), the townspeople took up a collection and installed a statue by sculptor Leontii Usov on the river embankment, offering an inebriated local’s point of view on the transient visitor, entitled, “Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in Tomsk, seen by the eyes of a drunk peasant lying in a ditch and never having read  the story “Kashtanka” (Антон Павлович Чехов в Томске глазами пьяного мужика, лежащего в канаве и не читавшего «Каштанку”. The peasant’s viewing position on the ground and his impaired vision have distorted the great writer’s body proportions. It is a nice touch that the Chekhov statue stands within

eyeshot of The Slavyansky Bazaar, the writer’s dining place of choice in Tomsk. Predictably, Chekhov’s oversized feet and tipped vertical axis, along with other irreverent details provoked an indignant reaction from a small segment of pedantic Tomskian egg-heads. Chekhov would never have gone out barefooted! He is our great genius! How can you show such disrespect to our national heritage?

Oh, how I would love to win the lottery and  fund a statue of Chekhov, author of “Fat and Thin,” “The Malefactor,” “Daughter of Albion,” and hundreds of other hilarious send-ups of human nature. My Chekhov would rolling (in laughter) in his grave, or perhaps in a pas de deux with the inebriated peasant. I would try to persuade the (any) town to place it next to some national hero presiding over the city’s central square amid all the government buildings. Why not bring some life, and laughter, and love, and joy, and dare we say, power, into the public square? The millions of kids gathering out there, upon whose thin, passionate shoulders rests the world’s terrifying future,  sure could use it.

The statue in the center happens to be in Krasnoyarsk, but every Russian provincial town has one.

And don’t think you’re off the hook, USA.

I came upon the beautiful, funny horse, by extraordinary Buryat artist Bato Dashitsyrenov, a couple of weeks later (a few days ago) in Ulan-Ude’s central art museum, and I had to double him here for full effect. Most of the writers so urgently commemorated with their statues and street names and museums and plaques had lots and lots of bad days, many of them in the very cities where their statues stand in all their bronze dignity, intimidating the mortals who dare to approach with anything but a pure, blank heart and a bouquet of flowers. We have addressed this with Tolstoy in Kazan. And I’m sure more opportunities will arise. What is wrong with shaking things up a bit? They were people too, despite the divine spark they harbored within, which may be absent, or more likely suppressed, in your run-of-the-mill egg-head.

Really: why aren’t there more funny statues out there? (In this category, Omsk gets an honorable mention).

Speaking of calming down, ahem, fortunately Tanya  (see below) gave me a little model of the Tomsk Chekhov statue, so I did not have

to steal my Galereya Hotel keychain, (an act which, to my shame, I had considered). Just behind the Chekhov statue–which has become one of Tomsk’s most famous

landmarks (hee hee hee), one can pound out a tune on a durable old piano placed out here on the Tom river bank. This, too, is an idea that every single town in the world should borrow, and not just during carefully curated arts weeks.

It’s OK, we don’t bite.

Anyway, if and when he left his hotel room, Chekhov might have seen something like this:

 

As, astonishingly, did I. What might have seemed dank and backward to a big-city traveler surfing through provincial tоwns in 1890, to me has the look of a world heritage site. And I beg UNESCO to come here and protect this incredible treasure: not just one of these houses, but the whole town.

In Tomsk, Dostoevsky, despite his absence, led me into the generous and alert scholarly care of good people, long-term Dostoevsky Campers, professors Elena Novikova and Olga Sedelnikova (both still glowing from their trip to this summer’s International Symposium in Boston). Translation (and Dostoevsky) also conjured up the very kind Tatyana (Tanya) Korotchenko, an acute and sensitive scholar of literature and translation, who once studied in the US, at the University of Wisconsin. Elena and Tanya showed me around the University and introduced me to some colleagues.

Olga and her beautiful white-furred assistant Nika treated me to a calm, but utterly fascinating drive round Tomsk’s wooden neighborhoods. One very nice thing about Olga is that she drives in the right lane, which soothes your nerves and allows you fully to concentrate on the wonders you are seeing around you.

        

Be sure not to miss the Burger Bar.

   

   

In “From Siberia,” Chekhov tells of a conversation he has with a peasant (Petr Petrovich)  at Krasny Yar while enduring a long wait for a boat to arrive so he can continue his journey. In his folksy way, Petr Petrovich warns of the destruction the railroad will bring:

“Around here, if someone’s been as far as Tomsk, he sticks his nose in the air, like he’s been around the whole world and back. But the papers are saying that they’re going to bring the railroad here soon. Tell me, sir, what’s that going to be like? The machine runs on steam – I get that. But if it has to pass through the village, it’s going to break down the huts and run over people!” (Chapter V), May 13, 1890)

These stunning houses  go on and on, and you can’t get enough, and you worry about them like babies, and you wonder if the fire prevention people are on the case, and you feel it’s time to petition UNESCO. And you wish that Chekhov had mentioned these cool wooden buildings, because if he had, people would have paid attention, maybe, and they would have been loved even more, and preserved even better, than they are now. But then you realize that probably everywhere Chekhov went he saw wooden houses like these, because they were a standard thing in Siberia, and the reason you don’t see so many nowadays is of course that wood burns, and rots, and is replaced by more durable, but less beautiful materials. And you remember that the trans-Siberian railroad passed Tomsk by, meaning that there was no incentive for people to gut the town and turn it into an industrial capital like other Siberian cities, with their noise, and pollution, and their spewings into the rivers, and their big roads built on the bones of dead, beautiful wooden buildings, wide asphalt roads cleared for trucks to speed along, delivering heavy things to the train station; streets lined with hulking, ugly concrete buildings to manufacture stuff in, and other buildings to sell that stuff in, and other buildings for workers to live in, and banks to put all that new money in. And all of it rushing to and from the railroad and taking Tomsk’s precious things away.

This phantom, apocalyptic place, railroaded Tomsk, exists only as a sideshadow, an alternative fate that could have befallen the town and swept its world treasures onto the trash heap, along with the spirits of its people. Thank you, Tomsk, for lying low and letting the fast things pass you by. But now that I think about it, the joke, here too, is on the rest of us.

Olga takes me up to the mountaintop, where a fortress was, where there are other streets lined with yet more, beautiful, wooden houses, and a church, and where you can look down over the city. And the Siberian clouds tell their story.

I think that the next person who travels this route should focus exclusively on the sky.

        

Everything is more exciting when you are with your kind, whatever species. But we are nowhere near finished. There is a whole lot more to see in Tomsk.

The University

It’s not really fair to call it “the” university, since there are lots of institutions of higher learning in Tomsk. But my visit happened to be at Tomsk State University, where Elena teaches, and where Tanya was in the graduate program before taking a position at the nearby Tomsk Polytechnic University. There are an awful lot of smart people in Tomsk, Siberia’s university town: formidable scholars, teachers, translators, researchers, and, of course students. The visitor can feel an abundance of human talent and energy here, a heady mix of youth, irreverence, studiousness, lightheartedness, and dedication to the work and business and mission of education.

Tomsk State University is proud to be the first Russian University founded on Asian territory, opened, after much thinking and planning and building, in 1898.Elena and Tanya take me to see two founders of Tomsk University, Professors Florinsky and our old acquaintance from Tobolsk, Dmitry Mendeleev.

  

Elena (on the right), who is professor and doctor (which means a lot in Russia), teaches and researches in the department of Russian and Foreign Literature, and does a lot of outreach through the “Open University” project. Everyone in Russia is talking about ways to celebrate the upcoming big bicentennial of Dostoevsky’s birth, and a number of Siberian universities are going to hold conferences. Elena and Tanya and I meet the Dean of Philology, and there is some discussion of ways to celebrate the occasion virtually.

Tomsk State University is anchored by its stately white central building; here decision-makers work, and the hallways are lined with portraits of founders and famous professors. The room where important meetings are held doubles as a museum featuring artifacts from Siberian peoples.

,                

   

We take a moment to admire the portrait of Faina Zinovievna Kanunova, revered philologist and professor and long-serving chair of the Russian and Foreign Literature Department who won the Russian state prize and many other honors. I take a minute to ponder how many American university professors ever give some thought to the contributions of their predecessors, who made their institutions what they are. Administrators do think about our workplace’s human history, amid all their other concerns, but do professors? It feels like a Russian thing to me.

In Tomsk I felt, as I had before in Kazan and Tobolsk, a kind of tangible human genealogy in the history of intellectual and educational life. These new names join those of Mendeleev and Florinsky, immortalized in the university courtyard, and serve as a kind of family line of which any of us who spend time studying, researching and teaching, can feel ourselves to be a part.

The great achievement of the Literature department is the authoritative and prize-winning twenty-volume scholarly edition of the collected works of the famous nineteenth-century poet Vasily Zhukovsky, many of whose papers are held here.

That the project is based in Tomsk sets it apart from most of the authoritative scholarly editions of Russian writers, which are generally done in Moscow and St. Petersburg by researchers based in central archives.  Here two professors, Department Chair Vitaly Kiselev and Zhukovsky editor Olga Lebedeva, pose with some of the volumes. Spending time with them, and with Elena and Tanya, who share in their pride in this wonderful project, is starting to inspire me to work harder in my own scholarly explorations. You can take joy in this work.  A supportive environment, with people who are happy when you succeed at something, can sustain you during those long hours spent alone in the basement of the library, or wherever you are with your headphones on, and it makes you a part of this dedicated scholarly family–which extends way beyond the walls of your cramped little box, and even the ever-more tightly-guarded borders of your country.

One very charming and human thing is the cabinet here in the university courtyard, that students can leave books in that other students can pick up, if they need them. We have these in various neighborhoods in the US, usually for children. It’s nice to see it at the center of this very public place. And this may be the time to say that in my conversations with Russian colleagues during this trip, they almost universally express surprise at our system of paid higher education. Shouldn’t university education be free, they ask. Why should our young people, the future of the planet, be saddled with debt that some of them will spend their entire lives paying back, just to get an education that will enable them to become thoughtful, ethical citizens and fulfilled adults?

I have no answer for this, except to say that maybe we can be looking more critically at what it is we pay for when we pay for all that education. And of course, to agitate for change (see above about our children out there on the public square doing the heavy lifting). There are other conversations to have, too, about economic disparities, about political and economic corruption, about corporations, about the nightmare of educational reform. Don’t look now, but the Russian national education bureaucrats have introduced a national multiple-guess assessment test that is administered to graduating seniors, the EG, that is torturing everyone in the system–teachers, parents, and students–except for the educational policy makers who BORROWED IT FROM THE UNITED STATES, who are taking great pride in their innovation, because it enables them to quantify everything. I repeat, there is real suffering going on here. My sympathy to one and all.

Where were we?

Well, we could check in with our ongoing theme of

geographical fuzziness. Your town might be located on a border (Kazan, Ekaterinburg), or it might be located in the center of the universe. It seems that Tomsk, is the center of the universe, or at least the Euro-Asian continent. But come on, let’s call it the center of the universe, a place where we all find ourselves at key moments in our lives.

There is much more to tell about Tomsk, the center of our universe at the moment, and much of it overflows the banks of what this blog can hold. But there does have to be a trip to the Tomsk NKVD Prison Museum. Let us postpone this until tomorrow.

First let us take a quick break to draw energy from the Tomsk Tatyana, patron saint of all those who study.

 

Some cool websites about Chekhov and Tomsk:

https://elib.tomsk.ru/page/819/

photos of old Tomsk:

http://rgo-sib.ru/photo/106.htm

His itinerary:

http://chekhov.libsakh.ru/poezdka-ap-chekhova-na-sakhalin/marshrutom-pisatelja/

The notorious letter from Tomsk: http://chehov-lit.ru/chehov/letters/1890-1892/letter-820.htm

 

I have begun to believe in magic, in fate, in mysterious forces, in the invisible, and in wishes that might come true. Don’t tell my boss, for my workplace values the rational and empirical, and fully believes that science can explain human behavior, and that everything of importance can be quantified. My clients (a.k.a students) tend to believe this too, and need to be broken in gently. Having come upon an unexpectedly free stretch of time, I decided to follow Chekhov’s footsteps to Sakhalin Island, not fully knowing why.  Beyond that there was not much of  plan. It was kind of like throwing myself into the void. This was a void of space, but it began to fill with people.

And the people showed the way.

At Melikhovo in July, Postal Museum director Zhenia mentioned that she was traveling to Sakhalin Island in mid-September to mount an exhibit at the Chekhov’s Island of Sakhalin Book Museum in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Well, now, that’s funny. I’m heading there in mid-September too. Why don’t we meet on Sakhalin, where we can just kind of continue the conversation that we have begun here, and finish our cup of tea? The distance between the two towns

(5768 miles, or 9,282 kilometers, or eight hours, if you remain completely still and happen to be in both places at once; or 5 days and 5 hours by car (if you wear a heavy-duty diaper, hook yourself up to an IV for a continual coffee drip, and don’t sleep); or 6 days, 1 hour plus 3 hours if by train and plane; or 11 months or more if trudging in shackles in a prison convoy through the famous four seasons of Siberia (1. blizzard; 2. flood; 3. mosquitoes; and 4. golden autumn [zolotaia osen’)]; or 43 days if lurching from town to town in railway sleeping cars and stopping sloppily along the way in the fall of 2019; or 2 1/2 months if traveling by river and peasant cart in the spring of 1890)

seemed utterly irrelevant.  The fuzziness here kind of matches the weird mundanity of the plane ticket I bought for my return from Sakhalin to Moscow. Now please concentrate: the plane leaves Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on October 4 at 11:50 a.m. and arrives at Moscow Sheremetyevo on October 4 at 12:25 p.m.

If this doesn’t seem strange to you, go back and reread that sentence (and all of the above).

Anyway, this entire rant is a plea to pan back from our reflexive habits of calculating time, space, and value in primitive units of measurement such as hours, miles, and dollars. If you do so, you might get the queasy feeling that our ways of measuring time and space entail more voodoo and irrationality than we generally allow ourselves to believe. After visiting the “original” Western-Russia/Siberia boundary, which some people suggested was in Kazan, though others disagreed; and after seeing “the” Europe-Asia boundary near Ekaterinburg, which some guy just kind of drew with a quill pen a couple of hundred years ago; after buying my share of train tickets on websites giving departures in Moscow time, then receiving the ticket files with departures given in local time; after a dip into a shaman’s wooden tepee on Lake Baikal, and then a trip to the Ivolginsky Datsan in Buryatia (which, measuring by ordinary time, to you is a couple of weeks into the future, and to me already in the past), I am becoming ever-more inclined to toss the whole concept of linear time and space down the trash chute.  Here there is freedom to be found.

Excuse me, Carol, don’t be an idiot; you have trains to catch.

In Moscow Vladimir Zakharov showed me the facsimile edition of Dostoevsky’s bible, and said something about a new manuscript edition of Chekhov’s book Sakhalin Island. I thought, no, really, how probable is that? But still, the mention of it was enough to send me off to Tobolsk, where I arrived the very week this astonishing new book, Chekhov’s The Island of Sakhalin–a new one, not some musty 126 year-old tome, came out of the press and was whumped down on my table.

I thought, what else could happen??  So I calmed down and went to Omsk for some Dostoevsky time.

But then I met Sergei.

Sergei Anatolyevich Vorobchukov is on the one hand, a busy man; on the other, a man in possession of infinite time, space, and freedom. A skilled engineer and manager who runs his own business and served in the Russian State Duma in the early 2000s, he also reads a lot. At some point he got bitten by the Chekhov bug, got in his car, and just plain drove from Omsk to the island of Sakhalin, stopping in places that Chekhov mentioned in his travel notes “From Sakhalin.”

Let me just emphasize that “drove” here entails overland, on Russian roads.

And all of this is true.

Maybe, like me, you buy into the “romance of the road,” the open highway, freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah.  Maybe you’re used to taking long road trips in the USA, and you may have an image of something like Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, with its neat cloverleaf on- and off-ramps, its brightly-lit gas stations, rest stops, and travel plazas, its smorgasbord of hotels, roadside attractions, stuff for sale, its Triple A and “911”.  Or maybe, like me you like to “get off the road” and tool around through small towns, perhaps lucking into a cool coffee shop or quaint village inn with rocking chairs out front, or some cool maple syrup that someone has tapped out of a nearby local tree. Time for a reality check: subtract all that, along with your image of a road as something smooth and paved, multiply every distance you’ve ever traveled by at least five, crack open a copy of Dead Souls, and you might have a tiny glimpse of what a “road trip to Sakhalin” might mean. Oh, and how are you going to get your car from the Far East coast of Russia actually onto the island once (if) you’ve gotten that far?

The only thing comparable in my experience might be a hole in time I spent with my Yaris at bone-dry “Lake” Sevier in northern Utah by the side of rte. 50, the “loneliest road,” listening to the silence hovering over the arid, salty lake bed.

I wish Sergei would write down his stories. Maybe he will. They are his, not mine, to tell.

Eventually we turn off the main road into Tiukalinsk.

 

                                

Lenin presides here at the center of town. And through the center of town runs the Siberian post road, along which Chekhov rode the second week of May, 1890. A blue-striped pole marks the “Tiukala” postal station stop from 1759. Travelers stand beside it to be photographed. I wish Chekhov had done this.

       

Where can Chekhov be found in Tiukalinsk? Well, it is rumored that the street originally named “Prison” Street (“Tiuremnaya”), now bears the name Chekhov. The town celebrates the writer periodically with a theatrical festival http://eventsinrussia.com/event/17939. There is a museum, but it turns out to have moved out of its original building, and it is not open today anyway.

But in the former museum building–small, whitewashed brick–there’s a sign of life. Two women step out and are accosted for information.  Come on in! They are in the process of opening up a theater space here. The theater is called “TKhAT Imeni Chekhova” (the Chekhov Tiukalinsk Art Theater), echoing Chekhov’s famous “MKhAT” (Moscow Art Theater). It is a community effort, with many contributors, and the fall season will open soon. Everything feels fresh–there’s the smell of fresh paint and varnish, newly sewn costumes, and a bare stage that inspires visitors to leap up and try out dramatic poses.

       

          

We do not see here what we thought we might see–maybe something Chekhovian in the Tiukalinsk Museum. And I’m sure there’s something in there! But that is OK. What would life be like if all of your expecations came true? What we have seen is enough. And we can go back to Omsk.

There are traces of Chekhov in Tiukalinsk, and on the rivers and roads of Omsk oblast, and all over Siberia, and not just on street names or theaters.  Everywhere he went, he saw stories. These stories linger in the air.

Some of these he wrote down. Others he left for us.

It is not Omsk’s fault that many of us know it only because Dostoevsky spent the darkest four years of his life here. And we discover, on our visit here, that there is a lot more to Omsk than the prison fortress (which in fact no longer even exists). We’ll get to that.

But first, let us track Dostoevsky’s steps. Sorry–it’s really clear in the photo I took. The regular line is to prison (heading right) and the dotted line is from. Omsk is kind of 1/4 of the way from the right. Tobolsk is up from there and left, where the angle is. Tobolsk would be on the hypotenuse, if oblique triangles had them.

Having passed through the transit prison at Tobolsk in early January 1859, where, you will recall, he received his Bible from the Decembrist wives Alexandra Muravyova, Natalya Fonvizina (left), and Polina Annenkova (right),

    

he arrived in Omsk on January 23.  You should visit the Omsk Dostoevsky Literary Museum to get a sense of what life was like for him there. Along the way, you can learn about new generations of Siberian writers who, we’d like to think, studied him. This bible on display is a copy of the 1823 edition that Dostoevsky kept with him through his years in prison and for the rest of his life, and that Arkady Grigorievich published over 150 years later in Tobolsk.

Check out this extraordinary website on the subject: F. M. Dostoevsky: Anthology of Life and Works: https://www.fedordostoevsky.ru/biography/evangelie.

While you’re in there, please browse around.  We are not in a hurry.

The Museum occupies the former headquarters of the Omsk Fortress commandants–poetic justice, I’d say.

   

Dostoevsky himself, of course, occupied grimmer quarters.

Upon his arrival in Omsk they did some paperwork, and then he had half his his head shaved and was issued his prison uniform. None of the photos of Dostoevsky date from this period, of course, so it’s worthwhile trying to picture what he looked like with his head shaven and wearing this coat and shackles.

     

Museum Director Victor Vaynerman kindly offers to shackle me using fetters matching those that Dostoevsky wore during his years in the Omsk Fortress. My smirk is not meant to be disrespectful; it expresses a nervous reaction to the prospect of being shackled here for the next four years. Prisoners wore cuffs under their shackles to protect their ankles from injury.

At the museum, you get a chance to compare your height to Dostoevsky’s; he is a couple of inches taller than me.

The museum displays first editions of Dostoevsky’s writing related to his time in Omsk, first and foremost, of course, his Notes from the House of the Dead, which if you haven’t read it, you must turn off your computer and go read it now.  Spend a couple of weeks with the book, then come back and rejoin me here in Omsk.

One of the museum’s walls features a clever display juxtaposing two quotes. In the first, a letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail upon his release from the fortress in  1854. He pans Omsk:

“Omsk is a disgusting excuse for a town. It is practically devoid of trees. In the summer––heat and dusty wind; in the winter, blizzards. I did not see nature. The town is filthy, military, and depraved to the highest degree.”

Омск гадкий городишка. Деревьев почти нет. Летом зной и ветер с песком, зимой буран. Природы я не видел. Городишка грязный, военный и развратный в высшей степени.

The other quote comes from the ecstatic ode to Siberia that opens Notes from the House of the Dead:

The climate is superb, wealthy and hospitable merchants abound, and there are many exceedingly well-off outsiders. The young ladies blossom like roses and are virtuous to the utmost degree. Wild game flies along the streets and heads straight for the hunter.  An unnatural amount of champagne is drunk. The caviar is astonishing.  In some locations the harvest is beyond belief.

Климат превосходный; есть много замечательно богатых и хлебосольных купцов; много чрезвычайно достаточных иногородцев. Барышни цветут розами и нравственны до последней крайности. Дичь летает по улицам и сама натыкается на охотника. Шампанского выпивается неестественно много. Икра удивительная. Урожай бывает в иных местах сам-пятнадцать…

It jumps out at me every time I read House of the Dead. Come on, now, isn’t there anything to say in the middle?  Oh wait, this is Dostoevsky.  And of course the book, and all his writing, seeks ways to find this abundance in the dark prison of our earthly existence.

These illustrations to House of the Dead  by Leonid Lamm should look familiar to those of us who spend time in Duke’s Nasher Art Museum, where we have a remarkable collection of this very series. Come on, Nasher, time to bring them up out of the basement!

During my visit the museum offered a special exhibit of miniatures (including “micro-miniatures”) relating to Dostoevsky’s work by a artist named A.I. Konenko. Miniature fanatics like me could spend a lot of time here, scrutinizing the icon in its case (1/4 inch high), portraits in shells, the print in the books and letters, and the bug with its fetters.

 

OK, enough playing around. Let’s go to prison.

The Omsk Prison Fortress

I am in fun company on this walk. Sergei teaches Russian literature, and, ahem, has written an entire book about the archpriest Avvakum. Students take note. Cool people like Avvakum.  Nastya, Sergei’s former student, now works at this charming cultural center in Omsk, and she knows (and loves) everything there is to know (and love) about the town. Spend a couple of hours with her, and you will want to move here and stay in Omsk for the rest of your life.

  

The prison building itself and its walls fell into ruin (perhaps here, too, poetic justice), but the location is marked.

The site itself tells a story. You enter a parklike square, where a vertical row of logs (hinting at the prison wall) channels your attention toward a remarkable monument. Here along with you is Dostoevsky entering the prison, bearing his burden (crowned by a tiny 21-st-century flock of pigeons, or let’s call them doves, bearing some enigmatic message of hope).  Note that Dostoevsky here stands at ground level. You do have to look up, but you can look him in the eye, though it feels intrusive.

                   

You plunge into silence, pondering the nature of the man’s burden and its relationship to yours.

Then you proceed thoughtfully to the excavation site. Long ago, a big apartment building was constructed here, demolishing the prison’s brick and wood. Beyond a doubt, some grains of dust that Dostoevsky touched remain here, and maybe you even breathed them in, but for us, they are inscrutable.

And I allow myself, briefly, to wonder why I am here.

 

There’s an ad hoc feel to the House of the Dead illustrations posted at the excavation site, which only adds to their power.

As Dostoevsky’s narrator writes in House of the Dead, periodicallyprisoners were taken out of the prison stockade to the nearby church for services:

Walk a bit down the street from past the church, and you find yourself on a completely different kind of square, with a triumphal monument to the writer towering over it. Indeed,

Freedom, a new life, resurrection from the dead….what a glorious moment! Свобода, новая жизнь, воскресенье из мертвых… Экая славная минута!

exclaims the newly freed Dostoevsky’s narrator Goryanchikov at the end of the book. Did I already tell you to go read it?

Having taken a few moments to experience the moment to its fullest, you proceed on to the main part of the compound, which was separate from the prison area. Here the officers and administrators carried out those ostensibly banal functions that we don’t stop to ponder often enough, since they so closely resemble those that we carry out in our own lives, upon which our careers depend.  Though of course some of the officials, say, the notoriously brutal Major Krivtsov, showed their sadistic side once they stepped out of their offices, that does not necessarily let the rest of us off the hook. Kenan Institute, do with this little outburst what you will.

   

I am told that this grating is original to Dostoevsky’s time. The door itself certainly gives off that feel too.  He would have passed by many of these buildings when he was taken out to work. And the hospital that he describes so vividly is still standing, as well as the fortress headquarters.

What we really need to see, though, is the bank of the Irtysh River, for it has become a kind of focal point for our (and our writers’) meditations upon human existence. Most recently we spent time on its banks with Chekhov. And very shortly we will rejoin him there.

For now, in Omsk, Dostoevsky takes Raskolnikov to the riverbank in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment and directs his attention to the opposite shore, with its timeless Old Testament landscape of sheep and Kirgiz yurts. The scene in your mind will look quite different from what you see here in Omsk in the summer of 2019.

Everything here in the real world (whatever that is) feels up close. The buildings of the fortress square are right behind you, and beyond them the roar of traffic, dogs barking, the chatter of people strolling on the square.

Raskolnikov, who is on an alabaster kiln work detail, goes out to the shore by the work shed, sits on some logs piled there, and stares out onto the broad, desolate river.

He heard a song from the distant opposite shore. In the endless steppe, bathed in sunlight, could be seen the black spots of nomads’ yurts. Over there was freedom, and different people lived, completely different from those here, there it seemed that time itself had come to a halt, as though the age of Abraham and his flock had never passed. Raskolnikov sat there, looked out without moving, not shifting his gaze; his thoughts passed into dreams, into contemplation; he though of nothing, but a kind of longing disturbed and tormented him.

.С высокого берега открывалась широкая окрестность. С дальнего другого берега чуть слышно доносилась песня. Там, в облитой солнцем необозримой степи, чуть приметными точками чернелись кочевые юрты. Там была свобода и жили другие люди, совсем не похожие на здешних, там как бы самое время остановилось, точно не прошли еще века Авраама и стад его. Раскольников сидел, смотрел неподвижно, не отрываясь; мысль его переходила в грезы, в созерцание; он ни о чем не думал, но какая-то тоска волновала его и мучила.

Sonya appears suddenly beside him and stretches out her hand…and you can remember the rest.

Как это случилось, он и сам не знал, но вдруг что-то как бы подхватило его и как бы бросило к ее ногам. Он плакал и обнимал ее колени. В первое мгновение она ужасно испугалась, и всё лицо ее помертвело. Она вскочила с места и, задрожав, смотрела на него. Но тотчас же, в тот же миг она всё поняла. В глазах ее засветилось бесконечное счастье; она поняла, и для нее уже не было сомнения, что он любит, бесконечно любит ее и что настала же наконец эта минута…

Feel free to take a little break here.

All the information that helps situate us on the Irtysh river bank in Omsk does not come by chance. It is carefully preserved, researched, published, and taught by generations of muzeishchiki, scholars, citizens, and teachers. Among them are Sergei Demchenkov and Professor Oksana Issers, Dean of the Department of Philology and Media Communications at, ahem, **F.M. DOSTOEVSKY** Omsk State University, who invite me to an informal meeting with students.

What I was picturing as a nice little chat with a dozen or so Dostoevsky enthusiasts turned out to be a sort of big Q&A in a lecture room with upwards of seventy students. When I walked in the room, accompanied by dean and faculty, all of them leapt to their feet. Which teleported me instantly back to Kazan, where I had learned about this custom in Russian classrooms and dreamed of experiencing it at Duke. No one in the room was crinkling fast-food wrappers or sipping at anything, either….What an alert group! We mostly talked about what attracts western readers to Dostoevsky (and Russian literature), about issues of language and translation, and about what (and whether) people read anything anymore. One student noted that it is common to see Omsk as the formative experience underlying all of his masterpieces. I am on board with that. Another handed me their required reading list for the English literature program, which requires them to read ever as much as our Duke students do–and remember, they are reading a lot of it in English…

After our conversation, they stood up and clapped! The dean told me that they are not forced to do so.  And I had the unprecedented and exciting experience of being asked to be photographed  with several clusters of students.

Then there were a couple of TV interviews (one for Omsk city, I think, and another for the student TV program).

Here are some of the news reports:

https://www.omskinform.ru/news/133712

https://www.omsk.kp.ru/online/news/3600105/

http://kvnews.ru/news-feed/v-omske-pobyvala-prezident-mezhdunarodnogo-obshchestva-dostoevskogo

http://philfak.ru/7467

https://omsk.sm-news.ru/omsk-posetila-amerikanskij-professor-izuchayushhij-dostoevskogo-4224/

https://russkiymir.ru/news/262052/

http://www.pulslive.com/news/puls-goroda/luchshe-chekhova-tolko-dostoevskiy.html

It all went to my head and I attempted to snap a selfie in front of the Omsk Department, call it, snapping board mirror.

The sad results of this attempt brought me down to earth.

 

Now Go Freshen Up

Omsk itself, as we started to say before we took our walk around Dostoevsky’s prison places, is well worth a visit. Its downtown, which has undergone active renovations,  features quirky art, attractive little courtyards, and a goodly share of shout-outs to notable people. One such Omsk artist is the artist Mikhail Vrubel, who stands with back turned, mysteriously, to the viewer. Nearby we can visit a newly opened museum (seen here in pink) dedicated to white Russian civil war general Admiral Kolchak, who fought the Bolsheviks. Kolchak has enthusiastic fans here in the city, and we will soon visit Krasnoyars, the location of his ultimate defeat and execution. Also, looking like little cameos up on the drama theater facade, we have a welcome sighting of our old friends Chekhov and Tolstoy.

  

An early governor’s beloved, and mourned young wife  Marinka, invites you to sit next to her on a bench and appreciate her short time on earth. We cannot be sad for her; we are happy to be alive.

At some point, you must go home, I mean to your hotel, which, though called the “Railroad Hotel,” took a 1/2 hour to reach by a predatory taxi driver, who approached you at the front side of the Omsk railway station and neglected to tell you that you could have exited the station at the back and just gone down a set of stairs to the entrance. 500 rubles. On the one hand, down the tubes, on the other, a valuable lesson. And really, who is to blame? You also learn, with a jab of regret, that your hotel is right next door to the DOSTOEVSKY HOSTEL,

Your regret is somewhat tempered by the presence of a cluster of thuggish-looking young men idling at the Dostoevsky Hostel’s entrance. Dusk (and, as it turns out, a raging thunderstorm, with rivers of mud, not to mention overindulgence in reading Dostoevsky) brings out fears that you normally keep securely repressed. Improbably, an angel in half-boots and an umbrella appears out of nowhere and gently leads you down the street in the dark. And you slink home to your safe little railroad hotel next door, where at least they know your name, and have taken your money.

Put transient things out of your mind. Dean Issers has arranged for me to meet a former Duma deputy from Omsk, who has made a practice of taking yearly CAR trips in Chekhov’s footsteps to the Island of Sakhalin. Tomorrow I will meet this man, Sergei Vorobchukov, and he will take me for a wild Chekhov drive.

Homework: sleep well.

Welcome to the Irtysh River, with its city Tobolsk on the cliff above.

On 7 May 1890, not even 1/3 of the way into his journey across Siberia, Chekhov sits in a hut on the banks (upriver, actually, not in Tobolsk, but close enough) and writes a letter to Maria Kiselyova.

My God, I have never experienced anything like this in my whole life! Cruel wind, cold, disgusting rain; you have to get out of the tarantas (which is not covered) and hold the horses: you can only lead the horses over every bridge one by one… Where have I ended up? Where am I? All around is desolation, misery (pustynia, toska); ahead is the bare, gloomy shore of the Irtysh…

Why did Chekhov travel to Sakhalin? The world was his cupcake–he was one of Russia’s most famous writers; he had reached a brilliant stage in his career; he had a productive life in Moscow, tons of friends, publishers eating out of his hands and begging for more, women falling for him right and left. On the debit side, he was in poor health, as pretty much through his adult life, and, as he must have known though he would not admit it, ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him within 14 years.

Why did Chekhov travel to Sakhalin? I am certainly not going to answer this question–no one can. But anyway here I am on this journey, and we have reached this point.

For my colleague and neighbor Radiskav Lapushin, the Irtysh-bank letter to Kiselyova serves as a kind of epicenter for an existential crisis. Chekhov finds himself at this moment alone, hearing the sound of knocking on coffins down deep in the river, and wondering what on earth he is doing here in the middle of nowhere, or in fact, we can add, what is he doing on earth. (Radik’s article can be found at the center of our book, Chekhov’s Letters, where it too serves as a kind of epicenter). Yes, the writer is not just having a bad day. He is writing about what it is like to be alive when everything that makes sense is peeled away. It is a human thing, not merely a writer thing, a Chekhov thing, or a Siberia thing.

During my journey I have had several sightings of the Irtysh, and each one brought me back to this letter, and to Radik’s thoughts about it, and Chekhov’s questions keep rising up.

                              

You may remember this view (to your right, if you’re on an actual computer)  on the Irtysh river plain from our last post, the scene that served as the setting for Surikov’s Ermak painting. The small  river in the foreground is not the Irtysh, it is just a kind of side stream from it. The Irtysh is just barely visible in the background. Trust me, it is there. Look up from the river in each photo and take note of the story that the clouds are telling above it. The sky in Siberia is big. To put it another way, citing Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin, who himself spent time here: “there is a lot of sky”(здесь много неба).

Soon, in Omsk, we will visit the Irtysh again, where it will take us deep into the epilogue of Crime and Punishment, and Raskolnikov will join us and Chekhov on the shore, along with Dostoevsky himself.

But it is hard to tear ourselves from Tobolsk. Things keep happening here.

Sterliad and Vodka

Sterliad’ from the Irtysh is so pure that unlike all other kinds of fish from the river, which have retained pollutants, it can be eaten frozen and raw.  If you are incredibly lucky, Arkady Grigorievich will treat you to this sterliad’ sashimi in his restaurant at the Sibir hotel, where you will be so transfixed by the experience that it will not occur to you to take a photo. It is served with a pickly garnish, and with vodka, the best available (also frozen). Vodka is an excellent disinfectant, good for the immune system. And sterliad’, and Siberia, beg for it.

Oh my goodness.

Your companion eats the backbone, crunching the delicate bones, and so you do too.

Soon there will be Irtysh sudak, cooked in a creamy sauce. And ½ a napoleon.

Hydrate, Carol.

But Chekhov!! Pull yourself together.  Remember why you have come all this way.

The Island of Sakhalin

Arkady Grigorievich brings over something heavy in a big plastic bag and thumps it down on my table. He says, look at this overnight.  He says, there is only one of these; it has just come out of the press, it’s the first one. He says, see you tomorrow.

Then he leaves.

   

There are two volumes. One is a facsimile of the manuscript of Chekhov’s book, The Island of Sakhalin, with the author’s hand-written corrections and crossings-out. The other one contains an analysis of the text, along with the manuscript, photographed now using a special method that allows the wording under the deletions to be revealed. The nature and number of the author’s corrections are tabulated, and the restorations are shown in the printed text of the book, in parallel text format.

    

Yes, now I do remember why I came all this way. Yes, there is a tear in my eye. Astonishingly, I am not even a third of the way through my journey.

Now I must leave Tobolsk, and read every word of this book, and continue on my way to Sakhalin.

 

Where, indeed, if the prison you see in Tobolsk is one built after Dostoevsky passed through, can you find his traces there? And what was that about Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island?  For this we need a guide. Our guide on this journey, proud city citizen Arkady Grigorievich Elfimov, will tie many of our story’s threads together. But first, we must take a detour.

Men of Action

Let us circle around to what is turning into a theme of our journey: the way human beings–especially mighty individuals–carve out a space for civilization, and make their mark on history, in the vast Siberian expanses. Arkady Grigorievich is one in a long line of such individuals. Another is the legendary Cossack ataman Ermak, who dominates the Tobolsk historyscape.  After some drama  with the resident Tatar population in the sixteenth century, Ermak conquered, let’s just say, Siberia, for Ivan the Terrible, and a city began to grow here.

Speaking of Ivan the Terrible, you may recall the story from Uglich about little prince Dmitry’s martyrdom. When the Uglich townspeople took revenge against Ivan the Terrible’s asassins (or innocent government employees, depending on who tells the tale), the tsar punished them by exiling their bell to Tobolsk. Here is its bell tower in the Tobolsk Kremlin:

Natalya, who escorted me around the Kremlin, adheres to the bizarre accident version– scornfully dismissed by my minder in Uglich–according to which little Dmitry was stricken by an epileptic fit and fell upon his dagger, slitting his own throat. In any case, the bell was arrested and, with some effort, for it was heavy, exiled here for a few centuries.

As for Ermak, here he stands in the botanical garden and park, Ermakovo Pole, that Arkady Grigorievich (this blog post’s hero, I remind you) founded.

 

Here he is too in Vasily Surikov’s magnificent 1895 painting, “The Conquest of Siberia by Ermak” (1895), which hangs–as I have recently confirmed in the flesh–in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.  Before setting paint to canvas, Surikov visited this high cliff (now in Ermakovo Pole) overlooking the Irtysh River plain to survey the landscape. Here is how the scene looks today, I mean last week, and how it might have looked when Surikov (himself standing just behind you, or, if you are stuck in a blog, and on a real computer, not your #$%& device, to your left) planned the details of his painting.  Many spirits fill the air here–not just those of Ermak and Surikov, but also those of the Tatars who roamed the land before them, and the spirits of us earthlings who have been lucky enough to visit, even though we have already left.

Some of these spirits live in a young grove of lipa (linden or lime) trees being planted in Ermakovo Pole. Each tree bears a little tag with the name of the person who planted it. Here, among many others, is a tree planted by the Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin. To my surprise and delight, I stray upon the tree planted by Vladimir Nikolaevich Zakharov, another of our blog’s main heroes and recent past president of the International Dostoevsky Society.

   

And lest there be any suspense, I am granted the honor of planting one myself.

 

By the way, speaking of Surikov, himself a very strong person and painter of monstrous great canvases, I was able to visit his home a couple of days ago (or a week into the future, if you are trapped in blog space) in Krasnoyarsk. The house still stands. Squint and you’ll see his statue here, center left.

                        

Inside the home are some of Surikov’s studies for the great canvases, photos, and personal objects, including his traveling painter’s case. Just for your reference, on our journey Krasnoyarsk comes after Tobolsk, Tiumen, Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, and Novokuznetsk. Time and space are being crossed with great rapidity.

The Archpriest Avvkum

But back to Tobolsk, where other great men await their turn. Take the archpriest Avvakum, poster child for the great Russian schism and most famous of the Old Believers. Exiled to Siberia for dissenting with the Nikon reforms in the 17th century, Avvakum alit, among other places, in Tobolsk, along with his defiant flock, and held the old faith here with terrifying fervor. His church still stands (to your right, again, if you are using a normal grown-up device). My students grumble when I assign them Avvakum’s extraordinary autobiography, but I persevere. The mission of education sometimes entails plunging into very strange and distant territory (in time, space, and in the darkest depths of the human mind).  Civilization tames these forces.  Maintaining our feeble grasp on civilization, not to mention our personal convictions, is a continual struggle. In any case I have been excited to find, along my pathway through Siberia, reinforcement for my own passions in encounters with elite Siberian colleagues who have written articles and books on Avvakum. Of them later… meanwhile, and forever, the Old Believer Avvakum holds up his two fingers (foregrounded here) to this very day in permanent reproach to those who would turn Russia from the true path by insisting, among other things, that three fingers be used when crossing oneself. This astonishing little statue of Avvakum stands in Arkady Grigorievich’s study–which we will soon visit.

And while we’re on the subject of larger than life figures, let us not neglect the great Russian scientist Dmitry Mendeleev!! Pre-meds take note.  He was born here in Tobolsk 1834. Who among us has not based our knowledge of chemistry (admittedly weaker in some of us than in others) on his famous periodic table of the elements?  My visit to Ermakovo Pole fortuitously coincided with the dedication of a brand-new monument to Mendeleev, erected here to celebrate this year’s 150th  anniversary of the periodic table.  Present for the ceremony was a throng of Russian academicians. Here Arkady Grigorievich dedicates the monument. Be patient; by the end of this post you will know him well.

The Last Tsar

Not so long ago we were in Ekaterinburg, where we saw the Church on the Blood built in memory of the last Romanovs, who were murdered there. Tobolsk plays its part in that grim drama. Nicholas II, Alexandra, their children, and their faithful retainers, were brought here from St. Petersburg during the revolutionary disturbances there–for their protection? confinement? punishment? control? It is not clear.  They spent the last months of their life in a home here that has been quite recently renovated and, just last year, opened as a museum.

The Romanov Museum in Tobolsk is the last house where they lived that is still standing. The museum was planned, researched, organized, and opened with great care, and it needs to go on your list if you are coming to Tobolsk. It is located in the lower town (here seen from the Kremlin walls).

A diorama shows the configuration of the house and yard.

The museum staff and volunteers have assembled authentic items, photographs, and period furnishings to convey the feel of what it must have been life for the family to live here during this stormy period when (fortunately) they did not yet know their fate.

           

The muzeishchiki, including the director, a tall young priest, guard these facts, . The museum is tasteful, factual, respectful, devoid of hysterics, and devastating.

In the museum it would be easy to miss a small list, posted on a side wall, of the people who made the decision to assassinate the family. The top name on the list Lenin, then comes Sverdlov. I get a twitch, having just seen this corner in Tobolsk, where Sverdlov Street crosses Sverdlov Alley. Not to mention I have just spend 4 days in the city of Sverdlovsk, now (as before) Ekaterinburg, but still the oblast of Sverdlovsk. These names and places and people are mixing together in a disturbing way. And it is history, before your eyes, and muddled in your brain, as it can be when you visit a place and see a completely different landscape than what they saw during their time, but yet it is the same one, and you are a part of it.

 

Their domestic chapel was recreated, as were other rooms in the house, based on photographs taken during the Romanovs’ time here.

 

Above you see the last known photo of the Tsarevich Alexis, and, on the right, Nicholas II’s study.

I repeat, visit this museum.

But What about Chekhov, and What About Dostoevsky?

OK! Let us visit Arkady Grigorievich’s study. Former mayor of Tobolsk, current central force in the Tobolsk Revival Foundation,  metsenat (your new word for the day: philanthropist), collector, patron of the arts, and publisher, Arkady is a man of action and a man of taste. He commissioned the monuments you see in this post, for example, and conjured up the botanical garden. What brought me to Tobolsk, though, is his activity as a publisher and proud citizen of Siberia. Here in his study you will see the full set of his almanac, Tobolsk and All of Siberia:

In addition to the almanac, we will recall, Arkady publishes special editions of great works associated with Siberia, among them the boxed set of Dostoevsky’s Gospel, which I saw at Vladimir Nikolaevich’s home in Moscow a couple of weeks ago, and duly reported on. There are too many such editions for us to share now, for we are in a tearing hurry, but just one will give a taste of the riches stored here. Behold a large manuscript atlas, reproduced on specially produced paper with scientifically recreated ink, full size, just as it looked when it was fresh, over three hundred years ago, and just lying here for you to look at, and even touch.

 

 

Speaking of publishing, Arkady has taken me to a meeting with representatives of the Tobolsk literature-journalism-and culture world (the Pedagogical Institute, the Library Museum on Red (or Beautiful) Square, the Romanov Museum, and of course Arkady Grigorievich), where I witness (and even am invited to participate in) a roundtable about the history of journalism in Tobolsk, and about plans to celebrate a key anniversary of the city’s major newspaper. I am impressed with the intellectual level of this conversation, and with the respect that everyone bears for their city’s (and Siberia’s) history and culture, not to mention its long history as a center of periodical publiction in Siberia (a land which, we could remind ourselves, once extended as far east as the eastern border of Alaska).

After the meeting, and a brief interview with me tacked on, we take a commemorative photo, and I get to sit on the Hero’s Bench. It turns out, that the event (I guess unsurprisingly) was reported in the Tobolsk press: https://tobolsk.ru/news/126/57027/

Carol, you are driving us nuts! What about Chekhov and Dostoevsky?

OK, all right.

Back in Arkady’s study, I feel we are hot on the trail. Indeed, a collection of commemorative medals hanging on the wall catches my eye.  Among them leaps out one of the two great men whom I am pursuing.

 

Make a half turn, and there he is himself just below eye level.

Yes, Dostoevsky was, and is, in Tobolsk. He is here in Arkady’s office, at least two of him.

And what have we here? The Gospel box from Moscow! I mean, from Tobolsk, I mean IN Tobolsk. The Decembrist wives must be nearby….

 

We step out of the office.  Arkady seats me in his car and takes me on a short drive.

We leave small things behind.

On a square near the Kremlin we see him. He is the same, but much bigger, taller and solider than you, above eye level, solid, stern, made to endure, made to provoke thoughts, made to slow you down and so that you can ponder important matters. Dostoevsky took this spot in 2010, with Arkady’s help, and he will stay here for a long, long time to come.

But that is not all.  we splash through a couple of muddy alleyways, where you might hear a stray dog or two barking, and where an official-looking woman in uniform might run out at you, waving her arms and shouting something.  And here stands an active place of incarceration, one that is in a considerably less attractive state than the renovated and cleaned prison museum complex that we have just visited. It is unmarked, dark, concealed behind clean things. I do not think it is on any tourist map. But there it stands. This is the one. Your mind fills with images of what it might have looked and felt like on that cold January day when Dostoevsky was brought here in fetters, not knowing what was to be his future fate. And then, what it would have been like for him when the Decembrist wives (who, as you learn from some other source) voluntarily followed their condemned husbands into indefinite Siberian exile) bribed the guards to let the come visit Dostoevsky and his Petrashevsky group companions, and gave them their copies of the Gospel (let me remind you, this very one), with a secret stash of money sewn into the binding.

Pondering this, and overlaying the sight of this building onto what I know in my head about history and about Dostoevsky, and what has brewed inside for so many years from my reading of his works, reminds me that the words we read bear weight; they are not frivolous, or made up (and this applies to fiction as well as to history.

OK, but what about Chekhov?

What’s the matter with you–wasn’t this enough? And here I am almost ready to go home and think things over for a few years, before resuming my journey.

Time and patience, Tolstoy’s Kutuzov reminds us.

Stay tuned, and all your wishes will come true.

Chance? Coincidence? Angels fluttering about? Or maybe some larger plan? This journey is taking me from Moscow to, as we note with increasing confidence, Sakhalin.  At first I was timid about admitting this, suspecting I would chicken out en route and then have to deal with the shame of explaining to you why.  But gradually Chekhov’s Island of Sakhalin, and the island of Sakhalin itself, has become not only a real plan but also a very strong theme, and a vehicle for the workings of fate. Let us return temporarily to Moscow to pick up the threads.

In Moscow, in July, before setting out, I spent a pleasant evening with Vladimir and Olga Zakharov. As has tended to happen at important times, we began with with my little electronic valet, who had decided not to put through any calls between us, necessitating some unnecessary circling through mud puddles. Even the combined efforts of the immediate past and the present presidents of the International Dostoevsky Society proved futile to bring it to heel.

So we put the device in time out and turned our thoughts to profound matters.

I recommend this strategy in all troublesome situations.

With some effort, Vladimir lifted a weighty box from a bookshelf and lowered it, with a gentle thud, onto a chair. The box was designed to look like a prison cell, complete with barred windows and a metal lock.

It is dark in the photo. It should look dark.

The doors open out, revealing another box, labeled “Евангелие” (Gospel), which itself opens out (I am not going to use the matryoshka metaphor here).

Inside are nestled two large volumes, one a facsimile edition of the Gospel (1923 edition) that, famously, the Decembrist wives (Muravyova, Annenkova and Fonvizina) gave to Dostoevsky during his stopover at the transit prison in Tobolsk. The other book contains a set of commentaries and supporting materials by scholars, including from Vladimipr’s team in Kаrelia, and of course Vladimir himself.

In addition to tracking references to the Gospel texts in Dostoevsky’s works, scholars examined the text using infrared technology to reveal marks that the writer had made in the margins, which are invisible to the naked eye.

I have been around the course a few times, but have never seen anything like this, in the quality of the actual physical thing, as well as of the scholarship within, a brilliant example of what our Russian colleagues call “tekstologia.”

For awhile, we fell out of ordinary time.

There is a story here, of course. It is not only the story of how Sonya Marmeladova read the story of Lazarus to Raskolnikov under the light of single candle; it is not only the story of how the great novels Dostoevsky wrote after his experience of hard-labor prison and exile emerged from his reading of this book; it is also the story of how this actual edition came into being. Vladimir tells me that this is just one of many projects relating to Siberian history and culture, sponsored by the Tobolsk Revival Foundation (фонд “Возрождение Тобольска”). He mentions that a recent project relates to Chekhov’s The Island of Sakhalin. I’m not sure how to take this information (can it really be true, even? Maybe my still-foreign Russian language has deceived me), nor how to envision such a thing in material form, if it does exist. And so it is determined that I will go to Tobolsk.

Nothing took Chekhov here. And Dostoevsky was brought against his will. He arrived in the town, then the capital of Siberia and a major transit point, January of 1850.  Here convicts were sorted and distributed to their ultimate places of imprisonment and exile, and from here, Dostoevsky would be sent onward to Omsk–where we will take you in due time.

TOBOLSK

You may recall a story about what it was like to travel on the all-night train with the Vakhta to Tobolsk. About the stunning beauty of this town, and its rich history, I hope there will be time for me to emote later. But for now, after a quick couple of looks at the historic Tobolsk Kremlin (one out my window…)

                          

we might stop in the prison museum opposite “Red [Beautiful] Square.” The prison was completed actually after Dostoevsky passed through Tobolsk, so these pictures probably belong in someone else’s blog. But in Siberia we must take note of the history of prison and exile, which rises before us at every stop.

I have to say, it’s an impressive complex that one could easily see as a public building of a completely different sort, a school for example. Among the rooms on display are a workshop, with an array of tools and tables, various rooms where prisoners of different faiths could worship, clean, well-maintained corridors, and what seemed to my unpracticed eye to be not completely unpleasant prison cells. There is a  large, colorful chapel with a choir loft accessible to the prison corridor. Everything the heart could desire.

I had a crazy thought that this was not all that different from various dormitories I’ve been in during my lifetime. I’d like to live here! Peace and quiet, no unwanted telemarketing calls, no bills to pay, hours and hours for reading….With some force, I managed to picture what it would have been like here with the full sensual spectrum–not just the visual images of a neatly painted and varnished museum complex, but the sounds, feel, and smells, of a functioning prison in Imperial Russia, and yet more, during the Great Terror of the 1930s.  Sounds: shouts and screams; feel: the lash, fetters, blows; and smells: recall that the cells were packed with unwashed and ill human bodies (or worse, harbored one isolated prisoner), and that the plumbing  in its entirety consisted in a bucket in the corner. Would it be possible to make a museum that conveyed this complete picture?

History, here, there is. In the hallways are posted photos and displays with information about these more unsavory aspects of prison life, and, importantly, the stories of individual prisoners. Here as everyplace else I’ve visited, are given the dates of people’s lifetimes, ending in the year 1937, endless rows of them. And each person has a story.

Outside, you see individual prison exercise yards installed during the Soviet period, which allowed prisoners to be kept isolated from their fellow sufferers even during their short hour outside.

And on the river-side brick wall is posted a plaque to the memory of countless victims of the repressions, who were shot dead right here in this yard.

By the way, you can stay in a hostel in the prison complex, which I would have done if I had known about it:

All these thoughts about prison have distracted me from my quest. Dostoevsky did not see these sights that I am seeing; he passed here before this prison was built.  What IS his place in the geography of Tobolsk? This I learn later, as will you.

Caution. Today there will be easy-to-confuse place names beginning with the letter T.

Though Tiumen comes before Tobolsk on the west-east route, on my trip I started with Tobolsk and worked back. Тime for a map оr two. My guess is that wordpress will delete this stolen item from the blog post, but the fanatics among you can easily find it on Wikipedia for “Siberia,” and steal it for yourselves (if you can sort of guess what it was I posted here).

Anyway, if the map does show up on your screen, you can see my route except for Tobolsk, which is up (actually downriver, but northeast) from Tiumen, and Tomsk, which is a comfortable 4-hour bus ride northeast from Novosibirsk.

Siberian rivers flow north to the cold seas up off Russia’s northern coast. Tobolsk, the first capital of Siberia, and Tomsk, a stunning university town with extraordinary wooden architecture, are not on the main trans-Siberian railroad route but you must visit both of them.

The charm of these two towns may testify to the advantages of being off the map.

Where I am now is Tomsk, and I owe you several blog posts …I got here via Novosibirsk, formerly Novonikolaevsk, from Omsk. Are you dizzy yet? (Helpful tip: you can’t name a Soviet town after a Russian tsar). If you need something to hang on to, take a look at the (or a) map again.

About the places I’ve been there is much to report, in between epic struggles with iffy wi-fi, not to mention my cell phone, which is anal-retentive with photos and holding everything up. You may notice that this post doesn’t have a lot of images in it (yet).

Interval #1: about the cell phone:

I made my predictably regular trip to Beeline in Omsk…(btw Russian has a great word for “predictably regular”–ocherednoi)…

…where the predictably regular (ocherednaya) young lady glared at the phone, shook it a few times in the air, slapped it, and punched in a few numbers. It gave some little squeals, then fell into sullen silence. Then the Beeline girl asked for my passport and after some more jiggling around determined that my phone (and its sim card, I guess, or something)  is registered not to me but to a “foreign citizen.” Which, I remind one and all, I am, but somehow not the right one. (Please don’t confiscate the phone, it’s the only minion I have. It is my traveling companion, even though it sleeps on a three-legged cot in an antechamber, gives off a smell of sour cabbage, and doesn’t always come when I call) Gentle questioning elicits the “fact” that this phone (with, I assume, all its innards) belongs to a male from Uzbekistan. See “fuzzy numbers” bit one paragraph down.

Now I do distinctly remember watching the first Beeline girl, the one in St. Petersburg, peeling the cellophane off the sim card’s packaging, taking the card out, and installing it, before my eyes, in my brand-new phone. Just saying…

And now I have the queasy feeling that I may actually be a double of, or in fact be, an Uzbek citizen who’s been masquerading my whole life as a mousey Russian literature professor from North Carolina.

All this fuzziness and liminality reminds me of another fact I learned today (the “fuzzy numbers fact” I promised). As we all know, the country code for Russian phone numbers is +7.  My number, accordingly, begins with +7. But I am told that you can also dial 8 instead of +7, it’s kind of the same thing. Which plunges me into the deep black hole of Dostoevskian 2×2 = 5. If numbers are interchangeable with each other, then actually, who needs them at all?

On Thursday it will be back to Novosibirsk by bus, then overnight train to Novokuznetsk near the Kazakhstan border, and really off the map, except for what I hope proves to be an exciting Dostoevsky museum. Then back to Novosibirsk on the next overnight train, then eastward, I think next Monday or so, to Krasnoyarsk.

About my thrilling car ride to Tiumen from Tobolsk–a.k.a. short course in Russian driving habits–I will provide a complete report after I recover. But in the meantime let us appreciate Tiumen. I had five hours between my arrival here and my train’s scheduled departure for Omsk.

I sat quietly, in bliss, at a kitchen table with Alexander Medvedev and Galina, who fed me tea, caviar, and fruit and helped me mull things over. This helped me smooth my feathers, which were ruffled from the car ride. Those of us who’ve been around awhile know that it doesn’t get better than a Russian kitchen table. It’s kind of their equivalent of a trip to the spa. Alexander and Galina are specialists in Russian literature and philosophy, which adds to the excitement. Their apartment mate Sandy, who remained aloof throughout the proceedings, aroused long-dormant emotions in me, a rare combination of reverence, awe, and umilenie (the untranslatable Russian word for “tender emotion”).

It is likely he runs the place.

Once we have snacked and rested, Alexander walks me around town.  It is a lovely evening…We begin with the appetizers, a row of photos of old Tiumen, displayed at a park at the city center:

This is what the town would have looked like when Chekhov passed through in the spring of 1890, spending just one day (May 3/15). Chekhov and Dostoevsky both came through Tiumen on their way to someplace else (as I am doing). For Dostoevsky, Tiumen wins the competition between Omsk  and Semipalatinsk. (More on Omsk later).  One of the stands displays Dostoevsky’s famous commentary:

I walked the length and breadth of the city and arrived at the pleasant conclusion that Tiumen considerably surpasses both Omsk and Semipalatinsk. There’s a lot here that attests to Siberia’s identity as a great center of trade, and to the fact that, as Herzen wrote in The Bell, it is among the great world powers.

Though we should not forget what took Dostoevsky to Omsk and Semipalatinsk, which might well have skewed his impressions of those towns, Still, it is good to have the endorsement. And Tiumen does indeed have much to offer. Herewith, the main dish:

A freshly built promenade along the Tura River embankment, colorfully illuminated at night; a large church built more in the Kiev style than I’ve seen this time around, a monastery, beautiful old wooden houses, some flowers

         

(the best pictures here are the ones Alexander took)

….the Institute where Lenin’s body was kept during World War II, having been evacuated in strictest secret from his Mausoleum in Moscow

and many more interesting sights that invite one to spend more time. I also have a glimpse of the University, from outside and inside. And we pass the Post Office; here I realize what a theme post offices have become on this journey.

Without them, what would writers have done? And given the distances, the reliability and efficiency of the Imperial Russian postal service was remarkable. I have to keep reminding myself that this country’s territory takes up eleven time zones. Ours, by contrast, has very small hands, I mean time zones, only three (or maybe four or something, if you throw Hawaii in). Chekhov confidently sent and received money by post, not to mention other things, like, oh, masterpieces of world literature that existed in only one copy.

A vigilant reader of this blog sent me John Randolph’s wonderful article on the subject of the Russian imperial postal service:

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/htmlreader/978-1-78374-373-5/ch5.xhtml#_idTextAnchor051

Anyway, when I go to a city where Chekhov has been, I feel that whether or not there’s any evidence that he visited its post office, I like to think that he did, or walked by, or noticed it. In any case, the Tiumen Post Office deserves a shout out, this one.

It is known that Chekhov stayed one night at the Palais-Royale hotel. It stood on this spot.

The new building hosts an appealing-looking establishment, which, before I took the picture and smudged the sign, was called, uh, something like  “Soleil [or something] Coffee.”

One last Chekhov thing. Readers of his letters will recall what he had to say about the sausage.

В Тюмени я купил себе на дорогу колбасы, но что за колбаса! Когда берешь кусок в рот, то во рту такой запах, как будто вошел в конюшню в тот самый момент, когда кучера снимают портянки; когда же начинаешь жевать, то такое чувство, как будто вцепился зубами в собачий хвост, опачканный в деготь. Тьфу.

In Tiumen I bought some sausage for the road, but what a sausage! When you take a bite, your mouth tastes like what you’d smell if you’d walked into a stable at the precise moment when the coachmen were taking off their foot-cloths; and when you start chewing, you get the sense that you’ve bitten into a dog’s tail that is coated in tar. Bleah.

And then “dessert”: we eat dinner! It’s pretty astonishing what you can see and do in five hours in Tiumen.

And there is still time to go back to the apartment, admire Sandy and pick up my charged devices before we head off for the midnight train. Just have to say, it’s awfully nice to be fed, entertained, taken to the train station and seen off.  Makes you forget that some of this traveling can be a lonely thing.

Here are some great links Alexander sent me about Chekhov (and others) in Tiumen:

https://tumix.ru/news/40185

http://www.citylib-tyumen.ru/for_readers/literaturnaya-zizn/chehov/tyum_kraj

https://gorod-t.info/culture/istoriya/408/

P.S. You’re wondering about the “Vakhta”? I’ll tell you later.