![]() ![]() After confessing to killing her child a prisoner wept bitterly, but then (in Brian Reeve’s translation) “wiped her eyes and asked, ‘Fancy buyin’ a nice little bit o’ pickled cabbage?’” Despite lashings and stints in a punishment cell, an old con had refused to work in the end the guards gave up, and he strolled around, singing. Afterwards he wrote many of his finest stories, as well as “The Seagull”, “Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard”.Įven in “Sakhalin Island”, his account of the expedition, the artist in Chekhov keeps elbowing aside the social reformer, and amid the demographic details that he amassed are a trove of exquisite vignettes. Just before he set out, his play “The Wood Demon” had flopped. It coloured his view of authority and redoubled his commitment to describe life as it was, compassionately but without illusions. Today, two museums are devoted to Chekhov on Sakhalin, which is dominated by giant energy projects. They made doomed bids to escape, often butchering each other in the process, desperate to cross the strait and breathe the air of freedom before they died. And the boozing! The bedbugs! Like covid-era readers taking their licensed strolls, many inmates were able to roam around, but they could never see their loved ones. Bears scooped salmon from the rivers, but the human food was terrible. Virtually all the women, convict or free, had been forced into prostitution. ![]() On Sakhalin, chains clanked incessantly and the floggings gave Chekhov nightmares. ![]()
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