How Chekhov met with a “golden pen”
Part II
Chekhov arrived in Sakhalin in July. On the peninsula, he talked a lot with the exiles and met Sophia Bluvstein (“Golden Pen”). In his book “Island of Sakhalin” 5 Chekhov described their meeting:
“Of the sitting in single cameras, the famous Sofya Bluvstein, a gold pen, convicted of escaping from Siberia into hard labor for three years, is particularly attention. This is a small, thin, already graying woman with a rumpled, old woman’s face. She has shackles in her arms; On the bunks, only a fur coat made of gray sheepskin, which serves her with warm clothes and bed. She walks around her cell from corner to corner, and it seems that she sniffs the air all the time, like a mouse in a mousetrap, and her expression is mouse. Looking at her, I can’t believe that until recently she was beautiful to such an extent that she fascinated her jailers, as, for example, in Smolensk, where the overseer helped her to run and fled with her. In Sakhalin, she at first, like all women sent here, lived outside the prison, in a free apartment; She tried to run and dressed up for this by a soldier, but was detained “
The first edition of the book (1895) is available in the National Electronic Library:
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
