The New Yorker:

By Janet Malcolm
October 22, 2001 

In the winter of 1897, when the consumptive Anton Chekhov was living in Nice on doctor’s orders, he was asked by a Russian editor to write a story “on a subject taken from life abroad.” Chekhov declined, explaining, “I am able to write only from memory, I never write directly from observed life. I must let the subject filter through my memory, until only what is important and typical in it remains in the filter.” But one of Chekhov’s works—“The Island of Sakhalin” (1895), a book reporting on a three-month visit to the prison colony of Sakhalin—forms an exception to the rule. It was written not from memory but from file cards and scholarly books and reports, and conceived as a work of social and natural science rather than as a literary text. (Chekhov even briefly considered submitting it to Moscow University’s medical school as a dissertation attesting to his qualifications to teach there.) Not surprisingly, therefore, “The Island of Sakhalin” is a worthy and often interesting work, but rarely a moving one, and never a brilliant one. It appears that even Chekhov, when writing as an academic, doesn’t write like Chekhov.

His customary artist’s fearlessness gives way to a kind of humility, almost a servility, before the ideal of objectivity and the protocols of scientific methodology. Like a convict chained to a wheelbarrow (one of the punishments at Sakhalin), he drags along the burden of his demographic, geographic, agricultural, ethnographic, zoological, and botanical facts. He cannot omit anything; his narrative line is constantly being derailed by his data. In an autobiographical note that he wrote for a reunion of his medical-school class, Chekhov registered his awareness that “the principles of creative art do not always admit of full accord with scientific data; death by poison cannot be represented on stage as it actually happens.” In the Sakhalin book, the conflict between science and art is almost always resolved in science’s favor. Chekhov tells it like it is, and allows his narrative to go where his mountain of information pushes it, which is all over the place, and ultimately nowhere. 

Go to link