“Medicine is my lawful wedded wife”

 Anton Chekhov

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As a doctor I have taken, as my theme “Medicine is my lawful wedded wife”.

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But I shall digress for a moment and explain my affection and interest in your country, Ukraine. From 1889 my grandmother, Annie Gwen Jones spent three very happy years in Hughesovka, now the city of Donetsk, as tutor to the granddaughters of John Hughes, founder of the great metropolis. Stories of her unforgettable experiences she related to her son,[i] Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones. He achieved success after success in his university career and having learnt to speak Russian fluently he planned a pilgrimage to the town for which his mother had so much fondness. He visited Ukraine three times. In his final visit he was shocked by the terrible situation of hunger. His last visit was in 1933 when he endeavoured to bring to the world with his many articles, awareness of the genocide-famine, the Holodomor and knowledge of the many millions who died from starvation in Ukraine.  But he was humiliated by Walter Duranty, denigrated, called a liar, placed on the Black list of the secret police, accused of espionage by Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs and ostracised by the British Establishment[ii]. Great must have been his disappointment for no longer would he be able continue in his field of interest. Despite his youth he was an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, its history, its literature and the political situation. Two years later my uncle, Gareth died in mysterious circumstances investigating the designs of the Japanese in Inner Mongolia.  It was, without doubt, a politically motivated assassination. The saga is indeed a true story of Chekhovian proportions. Annie Gwen had the same social conscience as Anton Chekhov.

.But back to my theme “Medicine is my lawful wedded wife but Literature is my mistress. When I am bored with the one I turn to the other.” I shall leave ‘Literature is my mistress’ to others more knowledgeable than I. As a doctor, the practice of medicine would have instilled in him a discipline of mind, an analytical approach to his subject, a precision and attention to detail. In a letter to his friend, Alexey Plescheyev he complained that in his story, though well received, The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy should not “discuss matters about which he understands nothing”.[iii] But above all Chekhov was a keen observer of humanity. He would have studied the lives of his patients.  Great men who have two disciplines in life usually bring brilliance to their achievements.

 For his time Chekhov was an excellent doctor though in the late 19^th century there was very little effective medication. He, himself, believed that there had been many advances over the previous 50 years. To quote John Hutchinson: “No where in Europe did the discoveries of Koch, Mechnikov and Pasteur have as much potential as in Russia where mortality rates from infectious diseases were staggeringly high”[iv] Chekhov would have seen the magic of birth, the happiness and sometimes the sadness of true love and the deep sorrow of death.  He treated every spectrum of society. As a doctor he had the great   privilege of meeting people from all walks of life, from the humble and poor peasant to the indolent, impoverished aristocracy of the Tsarist period. All this fuelled his deep understanding of human nature with all its weaknesses and wretchedness.  Deep down all the flesh is the same in the eyes of God. Chekhov was a man of great compassion. This depth of insight into the human psyche and his enquiring mind would have coloured his story telling and influenced his profuse output of literature and plays. 

 Added to his creative writing he drew also from his own personal experiences. In his own life he had suffered from a tyrannical father, Pavel Chekhov, who struck his children, a religious zealot. “Pavel Chekhov has been seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy. Chekhov's mother, Yevgeniya, who was an excellent storyteller, entertained her children with tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia”[v] was the source of inspiration to him. "Our talents we got from our father, Chekhov, but our soul from our mother."[vi] Alcoholism   featured in his family.  He admonished his brother, Alexander who drank heavily, “1 ask you to remember that your mother’s youth was ruined by despotism and lies.”[vii] He felt keenly over the death his alcoholic brother, Nikolay from consumption. 

When his father had been made bankrupt, the family fled from their home in Tananrog to live in Moscow. On his first visit to their new dwelling place he was shocked at the squalor in which they were existing, and over the years he looked after their wellbeing and living situation for the rest of their lives. Early in his student days Chekhov wrote at first short humorous stories to support the family. He soon came to the notice of Nikolay Leikin and for him under the name of Antonshe Chekhonite contributed to the journal, Fragments.  

Shortly after he graduated from medical school he coughed up blood, and he would have known that this heralded the death-knell of consumption.  It is said, “No man can look at the burning sun without quickly shifting his gaze.” He would only be able to face the future in denial and escape to his mistress, Literature. With this shadow over him he would have wished to leave a legacy. No doubt this lead to his frenetic life style and appetite for living.

It is a common observation that consumptives, whether they are evading the knowledge of their disease or not, tend to conceal their fears by doubling the fervour of their imagination and especially their feverish yet detached, seeing, feeling and (most noticeable in Chekhov) their denial of what is burning them.[viii]

In 1886 he came to the attention of Alexey Suvorin, the proprietor of the prestigious, but right wing New Times for whom he wrote more serious articles.  Chekhov was a prolific letter writer and his letters particularly to those to Suvorin, from whom he kept no secrets, were of a very personal nature. They give us a great insight in to his character. His high principles of honesty were beyond reproach and though he had sins of the flesh, he never condemned morally. He later fell out with Suvorin over the Dreyfus affair as the latter held the views of the intolerance of the Jews, prevalent in Tsarist Russia at the time.

In the summer of 1889 he nursed his brother, Nikolay prior his death from consumption. This lose affected him deeply and at about this time, in his melancholic musing he was impelled to write about a gloomy emeritus Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch, in A Dreary story. The Professor was approaching his demise. It portrays much of Chekhov’s own state of mind at this time, aware of his own mortality. [ix]

“Unfortunately, I am not a philosopher and not a theologian. I know perfectly well that I cannot live more than another six months; it might be supposed that I ought now to be chiefly concerned with the question of the shadowy life beyond the grave, and the visions that will visit my slumbers in the tomb. But for some reason my soul refuses to recognize these questions, though my mind is fully alive to their importance. Just as twenty, thirty years ago, so now, on the threshold of death, I am interested in nothing but science. As I yield up my last breath I shall still believe that science is the most important, the most splendid, the most essential thing in the life of man; that it always has been and will be the highest manifestation of love and that only by means of it will man conquer himself and nature. This faith is perhaps naive and may rest on false assumptions, but it is not my fault that I believe that and nothing else; I cannot overcome in myself this belief”

Soon Chekhov was to plan his arduous journey to the Russian penal colony island of Sakhalin, a distance of about 4,000 miles and which would take him three months to travel.  Many have questioned why he wished to make this bold venture, but would he not wish to escape the inevitable – his own end.  Would he have not wished to accomplish something in the name of science as his legacy?  As well he had not completed his dissertation after his graduation. It may have been foolhardy adventure knowing his medical condition, but he wished to accomplish a noteworthy undertaking, to reach the goal - the heights of a personal achievement.

 Through his brother, Mikail he became interested in penal servitude and this no doubt this may have introduced to him to the idea of visiting the Russian penal colony of Sakhalin    He may have been influenced by the writings of the explorer, George Kennan, who was sympathetic to political prisoners, in Russia's vast penal and exile system.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          In `In a letter to Suvorin, Chekhov wrote:

 “Sakhalin can be useless and uninteresting only to a so­ciety which does not exile thousands of people to it - of men to rot in prison, have destroyed them - casually without thinking, barba­rously… have depraved them, have multiplied crim­inals, and the blame for all this we have thrown upon the gaolers and red-nosed superintendents. Now all ed­ucated Europe knows that it is not the superintendents that are to blame, but all of us.”[x]

Prior to his visit to Sakhalin Chekhov undertook a great deal of research and helped by his family and his sister, Maria Pavlovna at least 60 documents were read. “I must turn myself into geologist and then a meteorologist and then an ethnologist.” His arduous expedition across Siberia started a few days after April 15^th 1890 commencing with an uneventful journey on the Volga. Reaching Tomsk the trip became more hazardous. His hooded sledge ‘bucked, crashed, and screeched’ over icy ground.  Crossing by ferry he is driven on to Tymen by a tarantass, a horse-drawn carriage.

  Speeding along the ‘Siberian high road’ one troika crashed into the carriage and then another and another. Chekhov was tossed to the ground with his suitcases and bundles on top of him. The shaft broke and in the cold he struggled at a  walking pace to a nearby village.                                                                                                                                                                          

He travelled on to Irkusk a matter of approximately 1,000 miles, but due floods once again, on more than one occasion he had to travel by boat as well as by horse and foot. He traversed through mud, water and terrific storms - an ordeal for the convicts, often fettered, as they would have to trudge through this grim terrain to Sakhalin. 

And yet he had to negotiate the dreaded Kolulka - notorious part of the route noted for accidents. As it was the axle of his carriage broke over the atrocious                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

 “Liquid mud, in which your wheels sink, alternates with dry hummocks and potholes; from the log paths and planked foot paths drowning in liquid manure, logs jut out like ribs; driving over these churns people’s insides up, and snaps the axles of carriages. But at last the countryside has come to an end, and we are on the dreaded Kozulka. The road here is indeed awful.[xi]

From Irkusk he travelled on to the vast lake Baikal which he crossed by boat and then another 660 miles to the river Amur which separates China from Siberia,

 On the Amur, 27^th June 1890, he wrote to Suvorin,  from Blagoveshchzensk:[xii]

It is quite beyond my powers[to describe] the beauties of the banks of the Amur … Crags, cliffs, forests, thousands of ducks, herons and all kinds of fowl with viciously long bills, and wilderness all around. … It is beautiful, with vast open spaces and freedom, and it’s warm. Switzerland and France have never known such freedom: the poorest exile breathes more freely on the Amur than the highest general in Russia.

 Chekhov arrived in Nikolayevsk on July 5^th 1890 and proceeded to embark on the ship, the Baikal that would take him across the Tatar Straits to the town of Alexandrodrovsk post in north Sakhalin - the largest settlement and administrative center. Though it was mid-summer he found the weather and conditions on the island insufferable. He then began his meticulous task of the census of all the inhabitants.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

At the time of Chekhov's visit, there were approximately 10,000 convicts and exiles living on the island, along with smaller numbers of indigenous Gilyak and Ainu. Chekhov indicated the number of households and population of each settlement, and its breakdown by penal status of residents in his census.

“He devised a card of twelve questions, which re­quested simple particulars of each settler’s status, age, religion, education and year of arrival, and included the very cogent question: Married in Russia or in Sakhalin? He claimed to have filled out ten thousand of those cards,”[xiii] from all the inhabitants of the island. The categories of residents comprised of the prisoners, the settled-exiles and peasant-in-exiles - the peasants who were free to return to Siberia, but not to their hometown. He was not allowed to interview political prisoners.  Chekhov describes the horrendous prison conditions.

 What Chekhov witnessed on Sakhalin shocked and angered him, including floggings, embezzlement of supplies, and forced prostitution of women, he wrote, "There were times I felt that I saw before me the extreme limits of man's degradation."[xiv] He was particularly moved by the plight of the children living in the penal colony with their parents.

   On 11^th September 1890, Chekhov wrote to Alexey Suvorin from onboard the Baikal in the Tatar Straits, sailing from north to south describing the degradation of the humanity:[xv]

  By the way, I patiently carried out a census of the entire population of Sakhalin. I went to all the settlements, visited every hut and talked with everyone. I used a card system to take notes, and now have records of about ten thousand convicts and settlers. In other words, there are no convicts or settlers on Sakhalin with whom I did not meet and talk. I was especially glad to be able to make records of the children, and hope that this information will prove to be of value for the future.

I was present at a flogging, after which I had nightmares for three or four nights about the executioner and the dreadful flogging-bench. I talked to convicts who were chained to their wheelbarrows. … All in all it was a huge strain on my nerves and I vowed never again to come to Sakhalin.

There were times when he undertook his medical duties and on one occasion in the infirmary a little boy was brought in to have a boil on his neck lanced. The first two scalpels presented to Chekhov were blunt. A solution of carbolic acid asked for but evidently, this liquid was not used here very often. There was no washbasin, no balls of cotton wool, no probes, no decent scissors and not even water in sufficient quantity.

            On 26^th January 1891 from St Petersburg to Anatoly Koni he put pen to paper and expressed his feelings:[xvi]

I shall try to describe in some detail the situation of children and young people on Sakhalin. It is quite extraordinary. I saw starving children, girls as young as thirteen acting as kept women, girls of fifteen pregnant. Girls start a life of prostitution as young as twelve, sometimes before the onset of menstruation. Church and school exist only on paper; the upbringing of children depends entirely on the environment they happen to live in and the surroundings of a penal colony.

From Sakhalin Chekhov returned home by Voluntary Fleet steamship and was in Moscow by December 9^th 1890. Life must have seemed very mundane after his adventurous journey to Sakhalin. Following the adrenalin of such a journey he would have felt despondency from the tedium of the return home.

 And on 20^th December 1890 in letter from Moscow letter to Ivan Leontiev he wrote, “I can say I have lived! I’ve had everything I want. I have been to Hell which is Sakhalin and in Paradise which was Ceylon.” Though in his letters he seemed cheerful, his illness must have come apparent to him.

Chekhov later concluded that charity and subscription were not the answer, but that the government had a duty to finance humane treatment of the convicts. His findings were published in 1893 and 1894 as Ostrov Sakhalin (The Island of Sakhalin), a work of social science - not literature - worthy and informative rather than brilliant.

His dissertation which he did not completer until 1895 was not accepted by the Academy of Sciences as it was not sufficiently scientific, though his articles had a profound effect on the public of  the Tsarist regime at the time.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

On Chekhov’s return from Sakhalin his imagination flourished even more than before, though in a somewhat morbid fashion. The knowledge of his own demise hovered over him. In the short story, Gusev[xvii] reflects Chekhov’s deeper thoughts of death and it was possible that he saw himself in the guise of the character, Gusev. This discharged soldier was returning home on sick leave. In his own account Chekhov described the sea journey from Sakhalin during which he saw two men, who had died on the voyage, wrapped in sackcloth and committed to burial at sea. This distressed him.  In his imagination he sees the passage of the body of one of them sinking through the waters to his grave down on the seabed. It was as though he saw a vision of his own body making the descent.

The Murder is another somewhat morose story and reflects Chekhov’s time in Sakhalin.  The main character, Yakov Ivanitch loses faith in God, commits a murder with his sister, Aglaia. Four of those involved were found guilty of the act with mercenary motives. Yakov Ivanitch was sentenced to penal servitude for twenty years; Aglaia for thirteen and a half; Sergey Nikanoritch to ten; Dashutka to six. Yakov Ivanitch was sent to the Russian penal colony - to Voevodsky prison, the grimmest and most forbidding of all the prisons in Sakhalin. In the end only in his sufferings did he find his faith again – he turned again to God.  The description of the last chapter of the story portrays the grim life of the convicts in the penal colony.[xviii] 

To a doctor, Ward No. 6 is one of his most interesting and powerful stories.  The squalid condition of the wards in the mental hospital, Chekhov had, without a doubt, seen in the course of his work.  The portrayal of the mental patient Gromov as a paranoid schizophrenic is classic description of the condition.  One appreciates Chekhov’s philosophy of life in Gromov, who, in his more lucid moments discoursed with the Doctor Andrey Yefimitch Ragin, the doctor in the hospital.  The table turned and a scheming young Doctor Yevgeny Fyodoritch Hobotov commits Dr Ragin to the asylum. The story comes to a close as the latter dies.[xix]

 On his return from Sakhalin Chekhov’s restless nature did not leave him and he accompanied Suvorin and his son on a grand tour of Europe. In 1892 Chekhov bought a small country estate names Melikhovo south of Moscow.

 But his symptoms of tuberculosis became more apparent and he was advised to spend time in a warmer climate. He spent the winter in Nice in1897. His father died in 1898 and following this he made the move to the Crimea where he built a house in Yalta. There his mother and faithful sister, Masha joined him.  A keen gardener, he had planted cherries trees in Melikhovo and was to cultivate his small garden in Yalta. The house is now a museum complete with his surgical instruments.  In the garden there is a bench known as Gorky’s seat. In the last few years of his life he married the actress, Olga Knipper to whom he wrote, from his heart, the most affectionate letters. Chekhov, in her company, died in Badenweiler, in the Black Forest on July 2^nd   1904 at the age of 44 years.

 Throughout his life he often complained of lack of money but he did not stint himself in his philanthropic contributions. As I have already mentioned he cared for his parents.  He helped in paying for the education of the daughter of an apprentice who worked in his father’s shop. He endeavoured on his own initiative to organise relief for famine victims in the Nizhny Novgorod district, as ‘The Moscow Red Cross is a den of thieves’.[xx] In the summer of 1892 he helped with the cholera epidemic.  (According to Annie Gwen Jones, my grandmother, she fled with the Hughes family from Hughesovka on account of the cholera riots. The town folk blamed the Jews for causing the epidemic.). At Melikhovo many poor local people consulted him for which he made no charge and he supervised the building of two schools while there. He contributed time to a National Census and donated his books to the Tananrog Public Library.

 A fictionalized account of many of Chekhov's own anxieties and experiences may be seen in story My Life. He left no autobiography, but his letters probably give a greater insight to his private thoughts and into the character of the man than any personalised account of My Life would have done.[xxi]

 “Medicine is my legally wedded wife but Literature is my mistress. When I am bored with the one I turn to the other.” As I have already said I shall leave “Literature is my mistress” to those who are more knowledgeable than I about Chekhov. One thing I am sure is that he was never bored.

 He was a man of deep sensitivity. He had an immense imagination and was blessed with an astounding intellect. Though cynical about the human race, he was a man with a deep social conscience and had a great concern for humanity. His benevolence was extensive and he accomplished a formidable amount in his short life. His visit to the penal colony of Sakhalin was a soul inspiring experience to him.

 Though Chekhov, himself was modest about his Literature, he achieved during his short life a tremendous amount leaving his writings as a magnificent legacy to posterity.