Works of A.P. Chekhov, Vol. 10: Sakhalin Island

A motorboat approached the steamer, towing a barge. They had brought convicts to unload the steamer. Tatar speech and swearing could be heard.

— "Don't let them on the steamer!" a shout rang out from the deck. — "Don't let them! They will rob the whole steamer at night!"

— "It's not so bad here in Alexandrovsk," the mechanic said to me, noticing what a heavy impression the shore had made on me, — "but just wait until you see Due! The shore there is completely sheer, with dark gorges and coal seams... a gloomy shore! We used to carry 200–300 convicts on the Baikal to Due, and I saw how many of them cried at the sight of the shore."

— "It's not them, but us who are the convicts here," the captain said with irritation. — "It's quiet here now, but you should see it in the autumn: wind, snowstorms, cold, waves crashing over the side—it's enough to make you perish!"

I stayed the night on the steamer. Early in the morning, around five o'clock, I was loudly awakened: "Hurry, hurry! The boat is leaving for the shore for the last time! We are weighing anchor now!" A minute later, I was already sitting in the motorboat, and next to me was a young official with an angry, sleepy face. The boat whistled and we went to the shore, dragging two barges with convicts behind us. Exhausted by night work and insomnia, the prisoners were listless and sullen, silent the whole time. Their faces were covered with dew. I now recall several Caucasians with sharp features and fur hats pulled down to their eyebrows.

— "Allow me to introduce myself," the official said to me: — "Collegiate Registrar D."

This was my first Sakhalin acquaintance, a poet, author of the scathing poem Sakhalin, which began: "Tell me, doctor, for it is not for nothing..." Later, he often visited me and walked with me around Alexandrovsk and its surroundings, telling me anecdotes or endlessly reading poems of his own composition. On long winter nights, he writes liberal novellas, but given the opportunity, he likes to imply that he is a Collegiate Registrar and holds a position of the X class; when a peasant woman, having come to him on business, called him Mr. D., he was offended and shouted angrily at her: "I am not Mr. D. to you, but Your Excellency!" On the way to the shore, I asked him about life on Sakhalin, how things were, and he would sigh ominously and say: "Oh, you will see!" The sun was already high. What was gloomy and dark yesterday and had so frightened the imagination was now drowning in the brilliance of the early morning; the thick, clumsy Zhonkier with its lighthouse, the "Three Brothers," and the high, steep shores, which are visible for tens of versts on both sides, the transparent mist on the mountains, and the smoke from the fire created a not-unpleasant scene in the brilliance of the sun and sea.