To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 5 June 1890. Irkutsk.

Written 5 June 1890 from Irkutsk to Alexei Nikolaevich Pleshcheyev (1825-1893), the poet, elder man of letters, and editor at Severny vestnik who had become one of Chekhov’s closest literary correspondents and something of a patron figure to him in these years. Chekhov had left Moscow on 21 April 1890 for the overland journey across Siberia to the penal colony of Sakhalin, a trip of roughly 4,000 miles undertaken partly as a journalistic and scientific project (it would produce Ostrov Sakhalin) and partly, biographers agree, as a deliberate act of self-testing after the death of his brother Nikolai the previous year. This letter, written on reaching Irkutsk, is his first substantial account of the journey’s hardest stretch – from the Urals across the Siberian rivers in spring flood to Lake Baikal – and he would not reach Sakhalin itself for another six weeks.

The letter opens with Chekhov’s relief at being clean and decently dressed again after weeks on the road, then organizes the whole ordeal into three self-described “epochs”: the 1500 versts from Tyumen to Tomsk, crossed amid the spring floods with the carriage repeatedly swapped for a rowboat; the 500 versts from Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk through nearly impassable mud, which he renders as low physical comedy (the broken cart, the mud like thick jam, himself reduced to wordless swearing); and the final 1566 versts from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk through heat, wildfire smoke, and dust. He closes with a brief, almost dismissive note that the Yenisei and the taiga were the only genuinely new sights, that the Siberian landscape otherwise resembles European Russia, and – pointedly, given Siberia’s reputation – that the road is entirely safe, robbers and revolvers being unnecessary. The letter ends with warm, conventional affection for Pleshcheyev and his family.