Sakhalin Island

"First, I have to say that I’m a big fan of Chekhov and his short stories. But to me this book – which has been called so many things: journalism, travel-writing et cetera… – is about Chekhov going out into the world and looking at it. We see everything through Chekhov’s eyes. And there’s a lot of good storytelling in the book, and he was not hesitant to use ‘I’, but that ‘I’ is absent. The ‘I’ isn’t the point of the book – the ‘I’ doesn’t matter to Chekhov at this point. What matters to him here are the people he writes about. “If you write without questioning your own life, without questioning your ‘I’, your book is not going to be one we can trust ” When Chekhov was writing about this journey, memoir as a genre wasn’t really what it is today. In today’s market I can imagine this book being written as a memoir, and marketed as a memoir. And that would narrow its scope so much. I’m not really interested in Chekhov’s personal story here. When you read his letters from this period you realise there are lots of personal stories involved in this trip, but what comes to the surface instead is the people he meets – like the little girl being exiled with her father, hanging on to his chain. That little detail, of the five-year-old girl, is a Chekhov story in itself. And the reason it works so well is because Chekhov’s ‘I’ is quiet; there’s an absence of Chekhov, and yet he’s present on every page. You can feel him there, watching, listening, noting, feeling for the people he meets. I think that’s what makes it an anti-memoir – it’s not a narrative about himself, it’s a narrative about what he sees and how he sees it. Yes, and yet still the writer did not focus on himself. For generations now – and I think it’s especially true in the present generation – we’ve been told that our stories matter most. We forget that we can give centre stage to other stories without making ourselves disappear. It’s a question of focus. The writers I respect are generally those who choose to shed light on others, even in their memoirs. And isn’t that great? I think to acknowledge and to accept that one’s power is limited is an essential part of being a writer. Writers in whatever genre, fiction and non-fiction, can forget to acknowledge the limits of what they can do, or of what they should do. Writers tend to try to make themselves bigger – to give themselves a bigger role in the story – but Chekhov really kept himself at true life-size. He was not diminishing himself – some writers might go to the other extreme and completely diminish themselves. But he didn’t do that either. It’s so rare that a writer can get it exactly right and exist in his or her work of non-fiction at true life-size, not too big and not too small. I think it is very significant. And so are the letters he wrote on the trip. Yes, and they’re very different to his public writing about the journey. The letters and the fiction show that he had other things that he wanted to say about what he saw, and other ways of saying it. There were many other things to show. But Chekhov couldn’t say everything, or show everything, in the same book – he had to choose which things to say and where."