Complete Works of A.P. Chekhov, Vol. 1

it seemed all the time that the fabric of our Russian life was completely foreign to the native Amurians, that Pushkin and Gogol are incomprehensible here and therefore unnecessary, our history is boring, and we, visitors from Russia, seem like foreigners. In religious and political matters, I noticed complete indifference here. The priests I saw on the Amur eat non-Lenten food during fasting periods, and among other things, I was told about one of them, dressed in a white silk caftan, that he engages in gold poaching, competing with his own spiritual children. If you want to make an Amurian bored and yawn, talk to him about politics, about the Russian government, about Russian art. And the morality here is of a special kind, not ours. Chivalrous treatment of women is elevated almost to a cult, and at the same time, it is not considered reprehensible to yield one's wife to a friend for money; or better yet: on one hand, the absence of class prejudices—here, one treats a convict as an equal—and on the other, it is no sin to shoot a Chinese vagrant in the forest like a dog, or even to poach on the gorbashiki humpback salmon.

But I will continue about myself. Not having found shelter, toward evening I decided to head to the Baikal. But here was a new trouble: a considerable swell had kicked up, and the boatmen, the Gilyaks, would not agree to take me for any amount of money. Again, I walked along the shore and did not know what to do with myself. Meanwhile, the sun was already setting, and the waves on the Amur were darkening. On this bank and the other, Gilyak dogs were howling furiously. And why did I come here? I asked myself, and my journey appeared to me extremely frivolous. And the thought that the katorga was already near, that in a few days I would disembark on Sakhalin soil without a single letter of recommendation, that they might ask me to return—this thought troubled me unpleasantly. But finally, two Gilyaks agreed to take me for a ruble, and in a boat knocked together from three boards, I safely reached the Baikal.

This is a sea-type steamer of medium size, a merchant ship which, after the Baikal and Amur steamers, seemed to me quite tolerable. It makes voyages between Nikolayevsk, Vladivostok, and Japanese ports,