2020 Sep 21
Towards the latter part of 1890, the revered Russian author Anton Pavlovich Chekhov supposedly stumbled upon Lanka on his way back from a journey to the Siberian prison island Sakhalin. Still ‘Ceylon’ back then, the British colony offered a few frames but many marvels. Even though his stay only lasted for around 58 hours, this island in the Indian ocean left quite a mark on him and his literature.
Chekhov’s visit to Sakhalin, a penal colony of imperial Russia, took a toll on him and left him disconsolate. The general speculation is that his outlook on life changed in its entirety following this Siberian expedition. Chekhov took Lanka in with a full heart, especially in contrast with his time in “Hell’, as he had been accustomed to calling Sakhalin. “The Island of Ceylon – a paradise on earth in a fairy-tale setting,” he was quoted saying.
On the long voyage back to his homeland, from mid-October to early December 1890, Chekhov sailed on a slow, comfortable Russian steamer named “Petersburg.” The ship harboured in Singapore, Ceylon, and several other ports along the way. He doesn’t seem to remember much about Singapore, other than that it made him almost burst into tears for some obscure reason. The highlight of his sail was Ceylon.
Chekhov spent around two nights and three days in Lanka. The journey’s documentation is fragmented; the picturing thus is almost wholly based on the letters that were written back and forth. “I travelled more than seventy miles by train, and enjoyed my fill of palm groves and bronze-skinned women,” he wrote in recollection. Chekhov spent a night at the Grand Orient Hotel right by the Colombo harbour and then took a train to Kandy.
Holding to his reputation as a womaniser, the Russian was able to strike up a brief relationship here as well. The passionate encounter ‘under a palm tree on a moonlit night with the black-eyed girl’ was so exceptional that the seasoned Russian was compelled to write home about it. Word has it that even islandic rain failed to stop him that night.
Chekhov was also fascinated by the strange-looking ruddy mongoose of Lanka. He went on to describe it in a letter as “a crossbreed of rat, crocodile, tiger and monkey’’ and supposedly bought two mongooses from Lanka. However, one of them turned out to be a palm cat instead of a mongoose and continued to cause considerable trouble for the remainder of its life.
Lanka for Chekhov did not stop at bronze women and mongooses. It was here that he started writing his famous short story, Gusev, which evolves around a sea voyage of two sick soldiers. The narrative carries a melancholic tone throughout, which was endemic in Chekhov’s culminating writings. The mutual unsurpassable isolation of human beings that is rooted in the impossibility of understanding each other is the theme of the story. Gusev holds the stamp “Nov 24th, 1890, Colombo” at the end of the original manuscript. As such, there is much room for one to wonder, whether it merely was by chance that the Russian writer began on a tale of this specific sort during his hasty stop. Perhaps the Ceylonese life played a part in stirring his conscience.
The stories that proceed Chekhov’s return to Russia share a common a critical take on the society and its ruling. Veteran author Martin Wickramasinghe writes briefly but with reason and clarity, on account of the Russian’s Lankan connection. Palpable relations are drawn by him, between the Sri Lankan society and Chekhovian literature.
The kinds of characters that Chekhov presents are not extraordinary figures. Olga Ivanovna, the superficial woman from Chekhov’s “Grasshopper,” bears astounding semblance to the lives of bourgeois women in the post-colonial Lanka. “The Teacher of Literature” features Nikitin, a married man in his late twenties who has grown weary of life. His story is identical to that of Prince Siddhartha. His merry wife’s neck, plump shoulders and throat, everything convinces Nikitin of unbearable futility.
It is with sympathy and understanding that Chekhov writes about people and their problems. With subtle articulation, he underscores the perpetual dissatisfaction that envelopes human life. Maybe this plays a part in bringing him so close to Sri Lankan hearts
