Grove Koger
Today’s post from my book When the Going Was Good deals with a highly unusual travel narrative by a writer known primarily for his plays and short stories, Anton Chekhov, who was born January 29, 1860.
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The Island of Sakhalin: Travel Notes (Ostrov Sakhalin: Izputevykh zapisok; Moscow: Russkaya mysl’, 1895)
Although educated as a doctor, Anton Chekhov had developed an early interest in literature and the theater. By the time he was thirty he had written a number of stories and plays, including his first notable achievement in the latter category, Ivanov. In this 1887 play, Chekhov treated the familiar Russian subject of the “superfluous” man, a theme whose suggestions of spiritual crisis had personal meaning. He already knew that he had tuberculosis, and after his brother Nikolai died in 1889 and another play received a critical drubbing, he announced that he wanted to “live for half a year as I have never lived up to this time.”
Chekhov had always enjoyed reading explorers’ accounts, and now resolved to visit the island of Sakhalin, a grim penal colony lying half a world away off the coast of Siberia. After receiving official permission, he set out in May 1890, but it took him nearly three months to complete the journey (by train, carriage, and riverboat) to Russia’s eastern seaboard. Chekhov stayed another three months on the island itself, conducting an examination of the colony’s administration and taking a numbingly thorough census of its population.
The Island of Sakhalin actuallybegins with Chekhov’s arrival at the port of Nikolayevsk near the island. The book combines aspects of a travelogue with meticulous observations of the lives of prisoners, guards, and exiles. Chekhov describes the island’s terrifying natural setting and ferocious weather, notes the degradation of its landscape by its colonizers, and observes the brutalizing effect of imprisonment and corporal punishment upon its inhabitants—all in the same determinedly detached tone. In a letter home, Chekhov called Sakhalin “hell,” but in his book he was a firm if sympathetic doctor, intent on describing what might well have been the many symptoms of an extraordinary disease. Writing in the New Yorker in 2015, Indian-American author Akhil Sharma called it “the best work of journalism written in the nineteenth century.”
The editions of Chekhov’s book published by Washington Square Press (New York, 1967) and Greenwood Press (Westport, Conn., 1977) as The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin include an introduction by Robert Payne; however, the translation by Luba and Michael Terpak has been criticized as inaccurate. Subsequent editions from Century (London, 1987) and the Folio Society (London, 1989) reproduce the same translation but include an introduction by Irina Ratushinskaya. The Ian Faulkner edition (Cambridge, 1993) published as A Journey to Sakhalin is translated and introduced by Brian Reeve and includes “Across Siberia,” Chekhov’s account of the first part of his journey, as well as an introduction, notes, maps, several appendices, and a selection of period photographs.
For more information about the author, I recommend Toby W. Clyman, ed., A Chekhov Companion (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985); Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001); James McConkey, To a Distant Island (New York: Dutton, 1984); V.S. Pritchett, Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free (New York: Random House, 1988); Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York: Holt, 1997); and Juras T. Ryfa, The Problem of Genre and the Quest for Justice in Chekhov’s “The Island of Sakhalin” (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999).
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The photograph at the top of today’s post shows the village of Krasnyy Yar on Sakhalin, and is reproduced courtesy of the Aleksandrovsk Municipal History and Literature Museum in Alekandrovsk-Sakhalinskiy. The portrait of Chekhov (by an unknown photographer) dates from 1900 and is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, and the map is reproduced courtesy of the site Open Democracy.
World Enough 
