Chekhov decided in 1890 to visit Sakhalin Island in the Pacific, a place where Russian criminals had been exiled since 1857, partly due to a debt he had with medicine that would serve as the basis for his doctoral thesis (which, once completed, was not accepted).
In three months, he conducted a sociological study of the convicts, with different statuses depending on the years of sentence and release, but he was clear in his statements: “A place where man, whether free or imprisoned, must endure intolerable suffering.” “We have let millions of men rot in prison, in vain, without reason, barbarically; we have forced them to travel thousands of kilometers in the cold, chained; we have made them contract syphilis, we have corrupted them; and for all this, we blame the drunken jailers.”
The censorship expurgated the book, and it was not published in full until 1895. It can be considered the first report on a penal colony made with modern standards of objectivity. In that era, 1890, something was done for the sick, but nothing for the detainees; the prison problem was of no interest to jurists.
Chekhov considered that stay something painful, a true hell, which led him to write: “How beautiful this world is! There is only one thing in it that does not work: the human being.”