Chekov at Sakhalin

Seamus Heaney

"..................... rang as clearly as the convicts’ chains That haunted him."

In the poem Chekov on Sakhalin the 30 year old Anton Chekhov, determined to repay his "debt to medicine," set off from civilized Russia to investigate the penal colonies on Sakhalin Island, off the east coast of Siberia and spent three months documenting the extreme degradation of the prisoners there.

The cognac quaffed and savoured by Chekhov alone and in private on the way there, represents the self-centred pleasure of artistic creation. In an interview given in 1979, Seamus Heaney endorsed a fellow writer’s lament that “you feel bloody well guilty about writing”. The guilt may also be extending to Heaney’s apolitical stance. The hunger strikes took place in Long Kesh while Station Island was being written. The poem is placed “at the intersections of politics and poetry” For a discussion on this see for example Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn by Stephanie Schwerter Palgrave Macmillan 2013.

My friend Michael is the model and I have subjected his immaculate coat to six years in Sakhalin. The ball and chain and wheel barrow are based on old photographs taken of the prisoners in Sakhalin.

The poem Chekov on Sakhalin is from Station Island 1984.

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