Sakhalin Island by Anton Chekhov

Author:Anton Chekhov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2017-03-17T16:15:37+00:00

19

The exiles’ diet. What the prisoners eat, and how they eat it. Their clothing. The church. School. Literacy.

While he is living on a government allowance, the Sakhalin exile receives daily: three funty of bread, forty zolotniks* of meat, around fifteen zolotniks of groats and various cooked foodstuffs to the value of one copeck; on church fast days one funt of fish is substituted for the meat. For determining how far this allowance conforms to the true needs of the exile, the generally accepted purely academic method is profoundly unsatisfactory, consisting as it does of a comparative and, besides, purely superficial evaluation of statistics relating to the dietary allowances of various population groups abroad and in Russia. If, in the prisons of Saxony and Prussia, the convicts receive meat only three times per week, and if on each occasion the quantity does not even reach one-third of a funt, and if the Tambov peasant consumes four funty of bread a day, that does not imply that the Sakhalin exile receives a lot of meat and not much bread: it simply means that the German prison authorities are afraid of being suspected of false phil­anthropy, and that the diet of the Tambov countryman has an exceptionally high bread content. It is very important from a practical point of view that the evaluation of the food consumed by any group of the population should commence not with a quantitative, but a qualitative analysis, and that, at the same time, a careful study should be made of the natural conditions and circumstances of everyday life under which that group lives; without the very strictest particularization, the

conclusions to the question will be one-sided and, very probably, only convincing to pure formalists.

One day, the Inspector of Agriculture, Mr von Friken, and I were returning from Krasny Yar to Alexandrovsk, I in a tarantas, he on horseback. It was hot, and in the taiga it was stifling. The prisoners who were working on the road between the post and Krasny Yar, without any headgear, and in shirts which were wet with sweat, most likely taking me for an official, unexpectedly stopped my horses when I drew level with them, and submitted a complaint to me that they were being issued with bread which it was simply impossible to eat. When I told them they would do better to approach the authorities, they replied:

“We’ve talked to Senior Overseer Davydov, and he just said to us, you’re a bunch of mutineers.”

The bread was indeed dreadful. When broken open it shone in the sunlight with tiny droplets of water, stuck to the fingers and had the appearance of a muddy, glutinous paste, which it was unpleasant to hold. Several portions were brought to me, and all of it was equally underbaked, made of poorly ground flour, and obviously there was an unbelievably large overplus* of bread-weight to flour used. It had been baked at Novo-Mikhailovka under the supervision of Senior Overseer Davydov.

The three funty of bread which are included in

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