Sakhalin Island

In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin.

Highly valuable both as a detailed depiction of the Tsarist system of penal servitude and as an insight into Chekhov's motivations and objectives for visiting the colony and writing the expose, "Sakhalin Island" is a haunting work of tremendous importance which had a huge impact both on Chekhov's subsequent work and on Russian society.