Sakhalin

Reading notes

• The Avenger §25 Sakhalin

  Sakhalin was a real, remote island penal colony of the Russian Empire in the Far East, used to exile convicts and political prisoners; Chekhov himself would travel there in 1890 to document conditions, three years after writing this story. The clerk's line that "society would be delighted if the government exiled all husbands to Sakhalin" is black comedy built on a real and dreaded destination, not an invented threat -- for a contemporary reader the reference would have carried the full weight of Sakhalin's reputation for hardship and remoteness.

• Lights §40 in essence and in its results a convict's life on the island of Sakhalin is no different from a life in Nice

  Ananyev's 26-year-old self reaches for the starkest possible contrast -- Sakhalin, the Russian Empire's remote Far Eastern penal colony, against Nice, the fashionable French Riviera resort -- specifically in order to flatten it: his youthful nihilism holds that no distinction of circumstance, however extreme, carries any real meaning. Chekhov would travel to Sakhalin himself two years after this story's publication, in 1890, to document conditions there; "Lights" predates that journey and reflects no first-hand knowledge of the place.

• To V. A. Tikhonov, 14 September 1891. Moscow. §5 I am writing about Sakhalin

  Refers to Chekhov's ongoing composition of "Ostrov Sakhalin" (Sakhalin Island), his book-length nonfiction study of the penal colony he had traveled to and investigated in 1890.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 16 October 1891. Moscow. §9 when shall I write my Sakhalin?

  The book that would become \emph{The Island of Sakhalin}, Chekhov's account of his 1890 journey to and investigation of the penal colony; he had been working on it steadily since Bogimovo and continued to describe it as overdue and waiting throughout this period.

• To P. I. Chaykovsky, 18 October 1891. Moscow. §6 "Sakhalin" is not yet ready.

  A brief, characteristically self-deprecating status report on the book that would become \emph{The Island of Sakhalin}, the massive nonfiction account of Chekhov's 1890 journey to the penal colony; as elsewhere in this period's letters (e.g., \S5, where he calls it a work that "would go on living after me for a hundred years"), the Sakhalin project weighed on him as an unfinished, larger obligation running alongside the more immediately pressing serialization of "The Duel."

• To V. A. Tikhonov, 21 November 1891. Moscow. §7 "exotic" photographs that I brought back from my voyage around the world

  The photographs are souvenirs of Chekhov's return journey from the Sakhalin penal colony earlier in 1891, a sea voyage home through Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Ceylon) and the Suez Canal to Odessa; he offers them here as illustrations for Tikhonov's newly edited "Sever," an illustrated journal that ran engravings alongside its text.

• To F. A. Kumanin, 26 January 1892. Moscow. §4 a convict's journey to Sakhalin

  "Каторжную поездку" ("a convict's journey") is Chekhov's own wry pun: \emph{каторга} (katorga) is the technical Russian term for penal servitude, the very status of Sakhalin as an island of exile and hard labor. In listing his own biographical facts as flatly as a birth date or a degree, Chekhov dryly applies the convict's vocabulary to his own 1890 trip -- he made the journey by choice, to study the island's penal system and census its inhabitants for what became \emph{Sakhalin Island}, but the joke lands precisely because the destination really was a katorga colony.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 5 March 1891. Moscow. §4 the Sakhalin work

  The book that would become "Ostrov Sakhalin" (Sakhalin Island), based on Chekhov's 1890 journey to and census of the penal colony; he worries here that delaying its composition past his still-fresh memory of the trip risks losing material, a concern that would in fact contribute to the book's slow, years-long completion.

• To M. N. Galkin-Vrasky, 20 January 1890. Petersburg. §5 Eastern Siberia

  The letter's stated destination narrows from "Eastern Siberia" broadly to Sakhalin Island specifically, "both its middle part and its southern" -- an early, precise statement of the itinerary for the journey Chekhov would make that spring, which resulted in \emph{Sakhalin Island} (Остров Сахалин).

• To M. P. Chekhov, 28 January 1890. Petersburg. §6 The route: the Kama river, Perm, Tyumen, Tomsk, Irkutsk, the Amur, Sakhalin, Japan, China, Colombo, Port Said, Constantinople, and Odessa. I'll be in Manila too.

  One of the fullest single-sentence statements in the corpus of Chekhov's planned Sakhalin expedition route: down the Kama by river, overland through Perm, Tyumen, Tomsk, and Irkutsk in Siberia, along the Amur to Sakhalin itself, then the return leg by sea through Japan, China, Colombo, Port Said, Constantinople, and Odessa, with a stop in Manila. Written eight days after the formal petition to Galkin-Vraskoy (head of the Main Prison Administration, whose cooperation this letter reports as "nearly all settled"), this is an early and unusually complete itinerary for the journey Chekhov undertook that April and which produced \emph{Sakhalin Island} (Остров Сахалин); the actual route he traveled that spring departed from this outbound plan (going overland the whole way out rather than starting by river), while the return leg through Asia and the Suez Canal is close to what he in fact followed that December.

• To S. N. Filippov, 2 February 1890. Petersburg. §7 I want to strike a year or a year and a half out of my life

  Chekhov here explicitly reframes the forthcoming Sakhalin trip: not solely a research expedition into the island's convict system (already the declared purpose of the formal petition in), but a deliberate excision of a stretch of his own life -- language that anticipates the more famous formulations of this same idea in his other 1890 letters (e.g. to Suvorin) about needing to break decisively with his current existence before he can properly begin a new period of work. The number itself ("a year or a year and a half") is an estimate, not a fixed itinerary; compare the concrete travel route given four days earlier in.

• To K. S. Barantsevich, 9 February 1890. Moscow. §8 I'm off to Sakhalin

  Chekhov's planned early-April 1890 departure for Sakhalin Island, for his survey of the penal-colony population there; see also the farewell note to the same addressee.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 15 February 1890. Moscow. §6 the 35,000 couriers who supposedly galloped to me from the ministries to invite me to become governor-general of Sakhalin

  The second rumor: a garbled version of real news (that Chekhov was arranging travel to Sakhalin as a private researcher. his formal petition to Galkin-Vraskoy in) had apparently reached the Lintvaryov household, by way of Chekhov's brother Misha, in an inflated and absurd form -- as though the imperial government itself were courting Chekhov to administer the island as governor-general. Chekhov's exaggerated number ("35,000 couriers") is his own comic amplification of the rumor's absurdity, not a claim anyone made in earnest.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 15 February 1890. Moscow. §7 Mania Sachalinosa

  Chekhov's own mock-Latin coinage -- a Sakhalin-mania, formed on the pattern of a clinical diagnosis (as if a pseudo-scientific species name) -- describing his single-minded absorption in Sakhalin research to the exclusion of everything else. Left untransliterated/untranslated as his invented phrase, per corpus practice for this kind of wordplay coinage (compare "Bolvanov," glossed at, and "Pupopupyrushkina," glossed at).

• To M. I. Chaykovsky, 16 February 1890. Moscow. §10 I'm going to Sakhalin in April.

  Chekhov's planned April 1890 departure for his journey across Siberia to the Sakhalin penal colony, mentioned here as practical news closing out a letter otherwise devoted entirely to literary criticism -- the same departure date given in sibling letters from this period (e.g.).

• To A. S. Suvorin, 28 February 1890. Moscow. §7 On Sakhalin the fish are very good, but there are no spirits

  A deadpan aside mixing genuine advance knowledge of Sakhalin's conditions (its fisheries were in fact a significant local resource) with a wry note on its lack of alcohol -- notable given the letter's earlier joke about the Petersburg "casks of wine" Chekhov had been drinking, and typical of how he alternates between the expedition's gravity and small comic deflations of it.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 4 March 1890. Moscow. §8 Написал страниц пять "истории исследования"… Начал и географию

  This is an early, concrete progress report on what would become Chekhov's book \emph{Ostrov Sakhalin} (\emph{The Island of Sakhalin}): he has drafted roughly five pages toward a "history of the exploration" section and has begun a geographical section ("with degrees and with capes"), a few weeks before his April 1890 departure for the island itself. The self-assessment ("not bad, as though knowledgeably and with authority") is immediately undercut by the confession in the next sentence.

• To N. M. Lintvareva, 5 March 1890. Moscow. §5 I am sending myself, at my own expense

  Chekhov is explicitly correcting a rumor his brother Misha had apparently passed on to the Lintvaryov household -- that some official body had "commissioned" or dispatched him to Sakhalin. He insists the trip and its considerable cost are entirely his own initiative, undertaken "по своим надобностям" ("on business of my own"/"for my own purposes"), not at anyone's instruction. This matches his other letters from the same weeks (e.g. his petition to Galkin-Vraskoy) seeking cooperation for a private research journey rather than an official appointment.

• To N. M. Lintvareva, 5 March 1890. Moscow. §5 many bears and escaped convicts

  Sakhalin's function as a katorga (penal-labor) colony meant a resident population of convicts and exiles alongside its notoriously harsh wilderness; escaped convicts and bears were both genuine, if statistically minor, hazards of the interior. Chekhov's gallows-humor request not to be "remembered unkindly" if either kills him is deliberate dark comedy rather than a real expression of dread, translated at full force per corpus policy -- no supplied verdict, no softened phrasing.

• To N. M. Lintvareva, 5 March 1890. Moscow. §6 I shall send you the book

  The promised book is what became \emph{Ostrov Sakhalin} (\emph{The Island of Sakhalin}), Chekhov's book-length study of the penal colony's convicts and settlers, published several years after the 1890 journey. His preemptive self-deprecation here -- "dull, specialized, consisting of nothing but figures" -- anticipates the finished work's dense statistical and documentary character, a deliberate departure from his fiction.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 15 March 1890. Moscow. §3 голова настроена на сахалинский лад

  "My head is tuned to the Sakhalin key" -- a musical figure (лад, "key"/"mode") for Chekhov's mental state a few weeks before his April 1890 departure for the island: his attention has already shifted so fully onto the Sakhalin project that he professes to be temporarily unable to judge belles-lettres at all ("unable to tell a sack from a mat"), even his own just-finished story. Continuous with the same pre-journey preoccupation reported in sibling letters from this window (e.g.'s account of drafting the Sakhalin book's opening pages).

• To A. P. Lensky, 16 March 1890. Moscow. §4 Sakhalin work

  Refers to Chekhov's preparation for his journey to the Sakhalin penal colony -- reading, correspondence, and organizational labor -- which he undertook that same spring, departing in April 1890 as anticipated in \S5 of this letter.

• To I. L. Leontyev, 16 March 1890. Moscow. §3 I am now not a man of letters but a Sakhalin man

  Chekhov's "муза... надела синие очки" ("my muse has put on blue spectacles") plays on the image of a scholar's or an invalid's tinted eyeglasses to dramatize his temporary trade of belles-lettres for the fact-gathering discipline ("ethnography and geology") of the coming Sakhalin census; "сахалинец" ("a Sakhalin man") is his own coinage, not a standard Russian word, self-mockingly recasting his identity around the destination months before he arrives there.

• To I. L. Leontyev, 16 March 1890. Moscow. §5 My route is as follows: Nizhny, Perm, Tyumen, Tomsk, Irkutsk, Sretensk, down the Amur to Nikolaevsk, two months on Sakhalin, Nagasaki, Shanghai, Hankou, Manila, Singapore, Madras, Colombo (on Ceylon), Aden, Port Said, Constantinople, Odessa, Moscow, Petersburg, Tserkovnaya Street.

  The fullest single statement of Chekhov's itinerary in this stretch of the correspondence: overland across Siberia (Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Tyumen, Tomsk, Irkutsk, Sretensk), by river down the Amur to Nikolaevsk, two months on Sakhalin itself, then a sea voyage home through East and South Asia and the Near East (Nagasaki, Shanghai, Hankou, Manila, Singapore, Madras, Colombo, Aden, Port Said, Constantinople, Odessa) before returning to Moscow and Petersburg -- the last item, "Tserkovnaya Street," is simply his own Moscow home address, appended almost as an afterthought to a sentence that has otherwise circled the globe. Compare the earlier and less complete outbound plan in (28 January 1890, to brother Misha), written before the Amur river-route and the full return leg through Asia had been settled; the version here, six weeks later, is close to the itinerary he in fact followed, though he did not in the end land in Japan.

• To M. I. Chaykovsky, 16 April 1890. Moscow. §3 Everything you write before 25 July I shall receive; anything written later will no longer find me on that island.

  Chekhov gives Modest a precise postal window rather than a vague one: mail must be sent early enough to reach Sakhalin by the time he departs the island. The date functions as a practical cutoff, not a literary flourish -- it reflects how irregular and slow the mail connection to the Far East was in 1890, a point Chekhov makes more fully elsewhere in the Sakhalin letters about the region's isolation.

• To M. I. Chaykovsky, 16 April 1890. Moscow. §3 Letters sent before June will go by the dry route, through Siberia.

  The "dry route" (сухой путь) is the overland route across Siberia that Chekhov himself was about to travel by cart and river steamer -- the same route he describes at length in the Siberian travel letters written over the following weeks. Mail sent early enough could follow him along this route; later mail would have to wait for the sea connection via Odessa described in the same section.

• To the Chekhovs, 23 April 1890. Volga, parokhod "Aleksandr Nevsky". §20 Homo Sachaliensis

  Chekhov's own pseudo-scientific Latin coinage -- "Sakhalin Man," modeled on binomial-style Latin species names (cf. Homo sapiens) -- gives his approaching expedition to the penal colony of Sakhalin a mock-taxonomic identity, as though the journey were already reclassifying him as a new specimen. The bracketed gloss "{сахалинец (лат.).}" / "{a Sakhalin man (Lat.).}" is Chekhov's own aside in the source text, not an editorial addition, and is carried through as such. The joke recurs as a running self-identification in Chekhov's letters of this journey (see also the sign-offs of neighboring letters in this batch), functioning as a private shorthand for the whole undertaking before he has even reached the island.

• To the Chekhovs, 11 July 1890. Sakhalin. §1 Sakhalin

  A penal-colony island off Russia's Pacific coast. Chekhov's destination on an eleven-week journey across Siberia to conduct a census of its convict and settler population; this telegram announces his safe arrival.

• To N. M. Lintvareva, 16 July 1890. Sakhalin. §1 16 July 1890. Sakhalin.

  A milestone in this corpus: this is Chekhov's first item actually written and dated FROM Sakhalin Island itself, rather than en route to it. His documented arrival on the island is commonly dated around 11 July 1890 (old style) -- so this telegram, dated the 16th, was sent roughly five days after landfall, once he had reached a post with telegraph access. Every earlier 1890 item in this corpus (the whole run of Siberian-crossing letters and wires, e.g.) was written from the road or from a river steamer approaching the island; this is the first to carry a Sakhalin dateline. The occasion is fittingly small and human rather than grand -- not a dispatch about the census work that will occupy him for the next several months, but a short, anxious wire asking after family news -- which is itself characteristic: the monumental undertaking announces itself, on the page, as an ordinary man worried he hasn't heard from home.

• To M. P. Chekhova, 17 July 1890. Sakhalin. §1 17 July 1890. Sakhalin.

  One of Chekhov's earliest items actually sent from Sakhalin Island itself: dated six days after his documented arrival on 11 July 1890, and one day after this corpus's first Sakhalin-dated item, the telegram (16 July, to Lintvaryova, a bare anxious wire asking after family silence). Where that telegram was worry directed outward -- "Ours obstinately keep silent" -- this one is the answering reassurance: Chekhov has now received a telegram from home in turn, and every clipped clause here ("Well. Lodgings good. People kind. Conditions favorable.") answers that anxiety point by point before he turns to news of his own (the autumn return, "much of interest") and a roll call of regards to the Sumy circle. Read together and are a matched pair -- worry sent, reassurance returned -- within twenty-four hours of each other, both from the same telegraph office at the start of the Sakhalin sojourn.

• To N. A. Leikin, 10 December 1890. Moscow. §4 took a census of the entire Sakhalin population

  This one clause compresses the central achievement of the whole Sakhalin expedition: over roughly two months on the island Chekhov personally interviewed nearly its entire convict and settler population using a card-index system of his own devising, producing an archive of some ten thousand completed cards that became the empirical spine of \textit{Ostrov Sakhalin} (\textit{The Island of Sakhalin}, serialized 1893, book 1895) -- see's glossary for the fuller account ("the card-system census: roughly ten thousand interviews"), written to Suvorin from Sakhalin itself while the work was fresh. Here, three weeks after returning home, Chekhov reduces the same achievement to a single breathless item in a catalogue of travel anecdotes ("for which purpose I went through all the prisons, houses, and huts"), the register entirely different from the earnest, sometimes anguished reporting of the on-the-spot letters -- consistent with this letter's overall function as a comic, catching-up piece for an old friend rather than a serious accounting.

• To I. L. Leontyev, 10 December 1890. Moscow. §4 I have been in the hell that Sakhalin represents, and in the paradise, that is, on the island of Ceylon.

  The letter's central image, repeated in near-identical form in Chekhov's other homecoming letters of this same week: the eight-month journey bracketed two extremes on a single trip, the penal colony of Sakhalin (outbound, overland) figured as hell, and the island of Ceylon, a stop on the sea voyage home, figured as its paradisal opposite. The juxtaposition is deliberately schematic -- a traveler's summary offered instead of the "endlessly long" full account he says he will not attempt in a letter.

• To I. L. Leontyev, 10 December 1890. Moscow. §6 three months and three days

  Chekhov's own tally of his time on Sakhalin conducting the household-by-household census that became the material for Sakhalin Island (Остров Сахалин): he arrived in July 1890 and departed in mid-October, a span he here compresses into the precise, almost bureaucratic phrase "3 месяца и 3 дня" -- a bookkeeper's exactness applied to an experience he elsewhere calls overwhelming.

• To G. M. Chekhov, 29 December 1890. Moscow. §5 прожил на Сахалине 3 месяца и 3 дня

  The same figure -- three months and three days -- that Chekhov gives in the companion letters of this period (e.g. to Suvorin, where the arithmetic briefly slips to "3 plus 2 days" before being corrected in to Leikin). Here, writing to a Taganrog relative rather than a literary correspondent, the whole Sakhalin-and-return narrative is compressed to a single dense paragraph -- "as hard as counting the leaves on a tree" -- in contrast to the multi-paragraph, more emotionally graded account he gave Suvorin three weeks earlier (compare, and see the crossref at S5).

• To A. S. Suvorin, 5 January 1891. Moscow. §5 after my labors on Sakhalin and the tropics

  Chekhov had returned to Moscow in December 1890 from his months-long journey to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island and the long sea voyage home by way of Ceylon, Singapore, and the Suez Canal; his irritation with "petty-bourgeois" Moscow life recurs as a note in the letters written just after his return, including (\S8), where he likewise complains of feeling unwell and out of sorts since coming home.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 5 January 1891. Moscow. §5 work for a crust of bread keeps me from getting on with Sakhalin

  "Sakhalin" here refers to the book \emph{Ostrov Sakhalin} (Sakhalin Island) Chekhov was preparing from his journey, which paying literary work kept interrupting -- a complaint that recurs across the letters of this period.

• To P. N. Isakov, 20 January 1891. Petersburg. §5 interesting Sakhalin

  Chekhov had returned from his journey to the Sakhalin penal colony the previous December (1890) and was, at the time of this letter, still working up his notes toward what would become "Sakhalin Island"; here he mentions wanting to read something on the subject to the Society but finding his "Sakhalin diary" material too fragmentary to present.

• To A. F. Koni, 26 January 1891. Petersburg. §7 SENSITIVITY FLAG -- child prostitution and child pregnancy

  Chekhov reports, in flat documentary register and without editorializing, that girls on Sakhalin took up prostitution from age twelve (sometimes before their first menstruation) and that he observed thirteen-year-old kept women and fifteen-year-old pregnant girls. This is Chekhov's own field material from his 1890 census, rendered plainly as he wrote it, per Hermitsh Press's corpus-wide policy of translating documentary content faithfully rather than softening or omitting it; it is not a slur and requires no no-softening call of the kind flagged in (an ethnic slur), but reader-facing apparatus (site display, any content notes) should flag this section as containing descriptions of child sexual exploitation and abuse, given the difficulty of the material for general readers.

• To A. F. Koni, 26 January 1891. Petersburg. §26 congenital syphilis is very rare

  Chekhov's summary clinical observation, closing the extended case material of \S7--\S25: he did not find epidemic or infectious disease to be the chief hazard to Sakhalin's children, but rather conditions -- blindness, filth, skin disease -- that he attributes to simple neglect (\textit{заброс}) rather than illness proper.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 31 January 1891. Moscow. §8 The letter I sent from Sakhalin on the 31st of August

  A wry aside on the slowness of mail from Sakhalin: a letter posted the previous August, during Chekhov's return journey, took some five months to reach Moscow.

• To V. O. Kononovich, 27 February 1891. Moscow. §7 I have not yet printed a single line about Sakhalin

  A statement of editorial restraint Chekhov repeats elsewhere in this period of correspondence: he is withholding all Sakhalin material from periodical publication until \emph{Sakhalin Island} itself is finished, resisting the temptation (and the income) of placing excerpts or sketches piecemeal in the press.

• To I. P. Chekhov, 13 March 1891. Petersburg. §5 Another 2,200 volumes have been sent off to Sakhalin

  A further installment in the ongoing school-library book drive for the Sakhalin schools that Chekhov had been organizing since his return from the island the previous winter (cf., where the mechanics of an earlier, itemized shipment -- purchased partly on credit from Suvorin's bookshop -- are laid out in detail).

• To M. P. Chekhova, 16 March 1891. Petersburg. §9 the Sakhalin schools

  Chekhov's ongoing fundraising effort for schools on Sakhalin, which he continued to promote among friends and family after his return from the island the previous year; here he specifically enlists Levitan and Kundasova as potential donors or solicitors, to be approached through Masha.

• To the Chekhovs, April 1891. Nice. §7 I have been traveling continuously for a whole year

  Chekhov tallies the itinerary of the past twelve months: the 1890 journey out to and back from the Sakhalin penal colony (the subject of his book Sakhalin Island), followed almost immediately by two further trips to Petersburg and then on to Italy and the present Riviera tour -- the cumulative exhaustion behind the letter's closing remark, two sections later, about being "bored" even as he reports on roulette winnings and restaurant satire.

• To A. A. Dolzhenko, 14 May 1891. Aleksin. §8 Nikolsky. "The Island of Sakhalin and Its Fauna."

  A natural-history study of Sakhalin, the penal-colony island Chekhov had visited the previous year and on which he was preparing his own book; consistent with his continued research reading in this period, as also reflected in (\S5-\S6). The author "Nikolsky" is named only in this list and, like the letter's other cited authors, is treated as a bibliographic reference rather than a full entity.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 27 May 1891. Bogimovo. §5 Sakhalin sits on my neck

  Shorthand throughout this stretch of correspondence for the still-unfinished book on Sakhalin (later \emph{Ostrov Sakhalin}), the research and writing burden Chekhov describes at length here as slow, painstaking, and joyless.

• To F. A. Chervinsky, 2 July 1891. Bogimovo. §3 even the Sakhalin chancery sends its official packets to Taganrog

  A reference to the official correspondence generated by Chekhov's 1890 journey to Sakhalin to conduct a one-man convict census; even that government office, he complains, has his old hometown down as his address, six years after he last lived there.

• To M. V. Kiseleva, 20 July 1891. Bogimovo. §4 my Sakhalin

  Shorthand for the book Chekhov is writing based on his 1890 journey to the Sakhalin penal colony (published as "Sakhalin Island"), which occupied much of his working time during the summer of 1891 at Bogimovo.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 24–25 July 1891. Bogimovo. §3 penal-servitude and dull

  "Каторжными" ("penal-servitude," from katorga, the Russian system of penal labor) is a pointed word choice given that the "other work" in question is the Sakhalin book, itself an account of a penal colony; the grim pun is characteristic of Chekhov's letters from this stretch of the Sakhalin writing.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 6 August 1891. Bogimovo. §13 I was on Sakhalin and still haven't received a single kopeck for it

  Chekhov's rebuttal turns to his own unpaid, money-losing labor on the Sakhalin book -- the same project referenced as "penal-servitude and dull" work in the companion letter section 3 -- to counter Alexander's complaint about being underpaid for his own reporting.

• Notebooks. Diaries §4021 the southeastern shore of Sakhalin

  Sakhalin Island, the Russian penal colony off the Pacific coast that Chekhov traveled across and censused in 1890, the subject of his book Ostrov Sakhalin; this notebook opens with excerpts headed "From the Sakhalin Diary."