SOURCE: Rayfield, Donald. “The Consequences of Sakhalin.” In Understanding Chekhov, pp. 93–113. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Rayfield considers Chekhov's short stories in relation to the latter's Sakhalin journey.

Disillusionment in literature and in critical reception was one factor that impelled Chekhov in 1890 to desert literature for an investigatory journey to Sakhalin. But he had other reasons for his self-imposed ordeal, for which the preparations were inexorably thorough once the initial decision had been taken. Why Sakhalin? Perhaps because it was the most arduous and longest journey he could undertake, without having to speak a foreign language or obtain a passport; certainly because it was Russia's Devil's Island, and as the most terrible of penal settlements it seemed to Chekhov an inferno into which an artist must descend, if he was to get at the roots of the evil and misery which beset him on...