Chekhov’s trip to Sakhalin puts lockdown in perspective

ALONG THE Siberian highway, between Tyumen and Tomsk, Anton Chekhov stayed the night in a coach driver’s cabin. Two months earlier a gentlewoman had stopped there with her newborn boy. Suspecting that he was illegitimate, and childless herself, the driver’s wife offered to take him in. The lady left him with the couple while she decided—and then vanished. Was he theirs or not? “Please help, for God’s sake!” the driver implored as his wife, besotted with the baby, fled the room in tears.

It was May 1890 and Chekhov was on his way to Sakhalin, an island north of Japan which was then a huge Russian penal colony. For the stir-crazy, his trip is a consoling reminder of travel’s hazards. Chekhov nearly perished in a collision with a mail troika and might have drowned in a flood. Notionally it was spring, but on the approach to Tomsk there was deep snow. And the terrible rutted roads, the oceans of mud, the endless taiga, the maddening mosquitoes…When at last he crossed the Tatar Strait to Sakhalin it was ablaze with forest fires. He felt he was entering hell.

Unlike some writers who trekked across Siberia, Chekhov went voluntarily. The journey took almost three months, and he spent as long again on the island. His aim was to survey the prisoners and publicise their conditions—which make the confinement of lockdown look like...