he adopt (the only place where Rimsky gave way to Stasov was in the opening civic scene: it enabled him to begin Sadko with the large set-piece for orchestra and chorus that had become an almost mandatory feature for Russian nationalist opera). There was nothing in the music to re-create the Eastern feel of the symphonic suite - other than the common stock of ornamental features which composers in the past had used to evoke the 'exotic Orient' (Rimsky used it here to summon up the other-worldly Sea Kingdom). With the help of the Slavophile folklorists who had criticized Stasov, Rimsky made Sadko a 'Russian opera', with a civic Christian message for the public at the end. At the height of the wedding scene the Sea King calls upon the seas to overflow and 'destroy the Orthodox people!' But just then a Russian pilgrim (St Nicholas of Mozhaisk in the bylina) appears on the scene to break the Sea King's spell and send Sadko back to Novgorod. By a miracle the Sea Princess is transformed into the river Volkhova, providing Novgorod with an outlet to the sea. Her disappearance is meant to represent the demise of paganism and the triumph of the Christian spirit in Russia - a spirit symbolized by the building of the church of St Boris and St Gleb. In the end, it seems, the conception of Sadko as a story linking Russia to the Asian steppe was far too controversial to produce on stage. Sadko, after all, was a national myth - as important to the Russians as Beowulf is to the English or the Kalevala to the Finns. The only place where Asia left its imprint on the opera was in Stasov's design for the title page of the score. Stasov used the motifs of medieval manuscripts which he identified as clearly oriental in origin. The middle letter 'D' is formed into the shape of a skomorokh with his gusli. He sits there like an idol or a buddha of the East. The rosette underneath the letter 'S' was taken from a portal in the palace of Isphahan.⁹⁶ The opera's Christian message was subtly undermined by its very first utterance.

5

In April 1890 Chekhov left from Moscow on a three-month trek to Sakhalin, a barren devil's island in the Okhotsk sea, 800 kilometres north of Japan, where the Tsarist government sentenced some of its

26. Vladimir Stasov: title page of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera score Sadko

(1897). The title features an authentic fourteenth-century Novgorodian

capital 'D' formed around a skomorokh or minstrel playing the gusli

most dangerous criminals to penal servitude. Few of Chekhov's friends could understand why the newly famous writer should abandon everything for such a long and miserable trip, especially in view of his own poor health. Chekhov himself told Suvorin that he was 'departing

totally convinced that my journey will yield a valuable contribution neither to literature nor to science'.⁹⁷ But self-deprecation was natural to him. Whether he was driven by the end of a romance,* the need to find new inspiration for his work, the recent death of his brother Nikolai from tuberculosis, or simply the desire to escape from the oppressive atmosphere of his own illness, it would appear that Chekhov felt a desperate need to get away and achieve something 'serious' before he died.

One of Chekhov's heroes was the traveller and writer Nikolai Przhevalsky, who had opened up the world of Central Asia and Tibet to the Russian reading public when Chekhov was a boy. On Przhevalsky's death, Chekhov wrote a eulogy which tells us a great deal about his state of mind. 'One Przhevalsky', Chekhov wrote,

is worth dozens of scholarly institutions and hundreds of fine books… In our sick times, when European societies are seized by indolence, heroes are as necessary as the sun. Their personalities are living proof that besides people who out of boredom write trifling tales, unneeded plans and dissertations, there are people with a clear faith and objective who perform great feats.⁹⁸

Chekhov wanted to become a Przhevalsky - to carry out some obvious achievement for humanity and write something of greater consequence than the 'trifling tales' he had penned so far. He read a huge amount in preparation for the trip, researching everything from the geology to the penal settlement of the remote island, to the point where he complained that he was being driven to insanity: Mania Sachalinosa.⁹⁹

Chekhov's original aim, as far as one can tell from his correspondence, was to 'repay a little of my debt to the science of medicine' by focusing attention on the treatment of the prisoners in Sakhalin. 'I regret that I am not a sentimentalist', he wrote to Suvorin,