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. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with his notes and extracts from his letters to relatives and associates.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 which had a huge impact both on Chekhov's career and on Russian society.

Chekhov often said that 'I am a doctor by trade and sometimes I do literary work in my free time', a surprising claim, given his status as a giant of 20th century drama. This literary-biographical study uncovers new sides to him, as both a medical professional and humanitarian, and tells the story of Chekhov's trip to Sakhalin Island in the harsh wastes of Siberia. Anton Chekhov practiced medicine for most of his life and engaged in humanitarian work which took him away from writing for months. He placed one such trip though, across the unforgiving terrain of Siberia to write about the penal island of Sakhalin, above all others. Chekhov's Sakhalin Journey, written by a neuroscientist and practicing clinician, uses this trip and Chekhov's own account of it to shed light on hitherto overlooked aspects of his life. In doing so, it shows that to understand the man we need his medicine as well as his literature, and we need to assess his life from his perspective as well as ours.

Overwhelmed by what he felt was the worthlessness of his great success as a writer, Chekhov (1860-1904) decided to leave everything behind him and go to the far reaches of Siberia - to the terrible Russian penal colony on Sakhalin Island. This book mixes his witty, charming letters back to friends on his long journey with his grim account of the reality of life in one of the worst places on earth. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things- Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

In 1890 the Russian author Chekhov undertook an historic journey across Siberia to the convict island of Sakhalin. A hundred years later, in an isolated artist's retreat, a Soviet film unit prepares to commemorate his journey by using a technique that will cause their chosen actor to not only play the role of the playwright, but to believe that he is Chekhov. But the situations Mikhail acts out diverge wildly from known biographical facts when Chekhov hears of an explosion in the Tunguska region of Siberia. Yet the real Tunguska explosion occurred in 1908 - so how could Chekhov have possible heard of it in 1890?

An enlightening, nuanced, and accessible introduction to the life and work of one of the greatest writers of short fiction in history. Anton Chekhov’s stories and plays endure, far beyond the Russian context, as outstanding modern literary models. In a brief, remarkable life, Chekhov rose from lower-class, provincial roots to become a physician, leading writer, and philanthropist, all in the face of a progressive fatal disease. In this new biography, Michael C. Finke analyzes Chekhov’s major stories, plays, and nonfiction in the context of his life, both fleshing out the key features of Chekhov’s poetics of prose and drama and revealing key continuities across genres, as well as between his lesser-studied early writings and the later works. An excellent resource for readers new to Chekhov, this book also presents much original scholarship and is an accessible, comprehensive overview of one of the greatest modern dramatists and writers of short fiction in history.