Siberia, he would, as a writer, be refused permission to visit the prisons
in Sahalin, and therefore tried to get a free pass from the head of the
prison administration, Galkin-Vrasskoy. When this proved fruitless he set
off in April, 1890, with no credentials but his card as a newspaper
correspondent.

The Siberian railway did not then exist, and only after great hardships,
being held up by floods and by the impassable state of the roads, Chekhov
succeeded in reaching Sahalin on the 11th of July, having driven nearly
3,000 miles. He stayed three months on the island, traversed it from north
to south, made a census of the population, talked to every one of the ten
thousand convicts, and made a careful study of the convict system.
Apparently the chief reason for all this was the consciousness that "We
have destroyed millions of men in prisons.... It is not the superintendents
of the prisons who are to blame, but all of us." In Russia it was not
possible to be a "free artist and nothing more."

Chekhov left Sahalin in October and returned to Europe by way of India and
the Suez Canal. He wanted to visit Japan, but the steamer was not allowed
to put in at the port on account of cholera.

In the Indian Ocean he used to bathe by diving off the forecastle deck when
the steamer was going at full speed, and catching a rope which was let down
from the stern. Once while he was doing this he saw a shark and a shoal of
pilot fish close to him in the water, as he describes in his story "Gusev."

The fruits of this journey were a series of articles in _Russkaya Myssl_
on the island of Sahalin, and two short stories, "Gusev" and "In Exile."
His articles on Sahalin were looked on with a favourable eye in Petersburg,
and, who knows, it is possible that the reforms which followed in regard to