Time never stops. You struggled through the days… Saw them become months and years! The end of my katorga term was slowly approaching. Either because that moment was so long anticipated or because the new status of exile-settler would hardly alter my external circumstances, I was not especially giddy. In material terms, my new status was even worse than the previous one: along with footwear and fabric for clothing, I stopped getting the food ration (1 pood 27 pounds of flour, 12½ pounds of meat, and 5 pounds of groats) that is issued to exiled penal laborers. As before, I was deprived of freedom of movement and, most importantly, did not have the right to go to the mainland: I still had to tolerate an indefinite number of years on Sakhalin. This waiting for something new as if it were brighter underscores all the adversities of exile life. My loss of many close friends during the recent years was especially difficult. Also, my comrades who remained were weakening in spirit and becoming very irritable. My interest towards all things Sakhalin notably slackened. And during those years, the general backdrop of life in Tymovsk District was darkened by frequent murders and suicides.

Everything became difficult, suffocating. Following the influenza that tormented one and all in Rykovsk during summer 1893, there emerged a sort of moral depression, a spiritual influenza… So as to dispel the accumulated gases of that inescapable swamp of Sakhalin katorga life, there had to be breathed some sweet, fresh air from the outside.

News of a visit by the Amur Territory's assistant governor-general, Nikolai Ivanovich Grodekov, was such a breath of fresh air.

The administration roused itself to get ready for this important guest's arrival. Everyone still recalled the earlier visit to Sakhalin by the late governor-general Baron N. A. Korf. For everyone, that had been a real holiday. He’d visited us in Rykovsk settlement on a warm, bright, July day. Exile-settlers and women with children in bright cotton prints were standing in two huge crowds around a triumphal gate— a tall wooden arch covered in greenery— specially built for the guest. There, a grateful exile-settler greeted him with bread and salt and delivered, on behalf of the entire exile community, a short speech, in answer to which Nikolai Andreevich precipitately granted him peasant status.