The Island of Sakhalin

Written after Chekhov's 1890 journey and published in the early 1890s, this work is a documentary account of the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin island. Chekhov travels the settlements, interviews convicts, officials, and indigenous Gilyak and Ainu people, and records census figures, flogging, cohabitation, child welfare, and the climate of the mines and fisheries. The tone is reportorial rather than confessional. The book is an investigative travel study of a prison island, not a play and not a novel of Siberian exile.

Bound in pale grey-brown cloth with a design in red and gold by Sue Bradbury. Dark red endleaves. Dark red slipcase.