To make my work easier, and to cut down on time, I was very obligingly offered assistants, but as my main aim in conducting the census was not its results but the impressions received during the making of it, I used somebody else’s help only on rare occasions. In the settlements that I visited I went round all the cabins and noted down the heads of the households, members of their families, tenants and workmen. In order as far as possible to visit all the inhabited spots, and to become somewhat closer acquainted with the life of the majority of the exiles, I resorted to a device which, in my position, seemed the only way. This second lie, combined with the first, is why “Sakhalin Island” is often mistakenly seen as medical anthropology instead of what it always was: investigative journalism. To others, he said that he was taking a simple survey of the size of household groups. He told some that he was doing an academic thesis to complete medical-degree requirements.

Getting permission to make the three-month journey to visit the prison colony required Chekhov to tell many different lies to many different people. This was soon after his brother’s death from tuberculosis and not so long after learning that he, too, had the disease, and was likely to die. But it has even more to do with the lies that Chekhov told to get access to the prison colony.Ĭhekhov began preparing to go to Siberia in 1889. The fact that so few people know of the book, and that among Western critics (not necessarily Russian ones) it is considered a minor masterpiece instead of a major one-inferior to Alexander Herzen’s journals, for example-has something to do with how journalism is rarely considered literature.

Photograph courtesy archivio GBB / Contrasto / ReduxĪnton Chekhov’s “Sakhalin Island,” his long investigation of prison conditions in Siberia, is the best work of journalism written in the nineteenth century.

The Story of a Nobody by Anton Chekhov