The late 1980s found me in grad school at San Francisco State University doing, among other things, deep dives into the novels of Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth and the plays of Anton Chekhov (as well as biographies of Conrad and Chekhov) as the "Three Major Authors" on whom I would be taking oral exams for my Masters in English Lit/Creative Writing. Somewhere along the line during those days, a fellow student gave me her copy of To a Distant Island as a gift because it is a memoir by McConkey that has Chekhov as its central figure. How does that work? Toward the end of his life, in 1890, Chekhov made a long arduous trip by boat, train and carriage from Moscow all the way to Sakhalin Island, off Russia's Pacific Coast. McConkey tells us in this book's first paragraph that Chekhov "had been undergoing a depression so severe that his most recent biographer believes he might have been nearing a breakdown" and that this was "a journey of over sixty-five hundred miles, or more than a quarter of our planet's circumference." The trip's avowed goal was to study and document the allegedly horrific penal colonies that the Russian government was running on the Island. But as McConkey, via Chekhov's own letters and the book he wrote about the trip, tells us that Chekhov's real goal was to shake himself loose of this depression by plunging into the unknown and experiencing life away from the restrictions of Moscow society and his own growing fame as a writer. He made it to Sakhalin and spent three months interviewing thousands of prisoners and their families, as well as the island's administrators and other inhabitants of the place. Conditions were even worse than Chekhov had expected. He ultimately wrote a book about his findings, The Island of Sakhalin.

OK, back to McConkey. In the mid-80s, McConkey decided to write a memoir about his family's year in Florence, Italy in the early 1970s. McConkey was on sabbatical from his tenure at an unnamed university, driven away from the school by the late-60s turmoil on campus that he had found himself drawn into but ultimately repelled and distressed by. While in Italy, he came upon a volume of Chekhov's Sakhalin letters and became fascinated, going on to read everything he could find of these letters and of Chekhov's life. From the letters, McConkey imagines and creates a novel-like narrative for Chekhov's journey, interspersing known facts with his own fancy. He makes an admittedly conjectural examination of Chekhov's motivations and psychological evolution during his travels. But this is, as I said up top, ultimately a memoir. McConkey endeavors to thread his own memories of his family's stay in Italy throughout his telling of his Chekhov tale. The problem here is that while the thematic connections between the two story lines were evidently clear to McConkey, he fails, in my view, to present them effectively (or at all) for the reader. Also, McConkey's problems, the issues he's come to Italy to heal from, do not seem that dire. After a tumultuous and depressing year or two on a college campus, he is able to spring free (knowing his job will await him upon return) to have a pleasant year with his loving wife and two sons in Italy. It is hardly on par with a 30-year old man trying to remain in denial about his worsening consumption throwing himself alone through winter across 6,500 miles of wilderness to spend three months in a horrifying prison colony. McConkey tries to bring depth to the work with speculative explorations of Chekhov's mindset and present psychological themes for us to consider. But while McConkey's writing is quite good and his points are generally lucid, it's ultimately hard to care about his speculations, and I ultimately found myself skimming these passages.

I was mostly happy to finally be reading this book. It's been sitting on various shelves in various homes of mine for over 30 years, after all! And I did learn a lot about Chekov's Sakhalin journey, which I had never really explored. Other than reading a short story collection or two over the past three decades, it had been a while since I really visited with Chekhov at all, a writer whose work and life had once been a source of great interest for me and brought me quite a bit of intellectual and artistic enjoyment. But I would recommend this book only to those with a particular interest in Chekhov's life. Anyway, now I can finally tell my friend that I read the book she gave me in 1989! ( )

In April of the year 1890, a group of friends boards a train in Moscow heads northeast for Yaroslavl. It is an odd collection of intelligentsia: a doctor and his wife, a Jewish painter who is her current lover, two musicians, a young and beautiful teacher, and a world-class mathematician who hides her intelligence under flamboyant clothes. There is also an elderly, infirm woman who wrings her hands and grips her walking cane with white fingers, and a young man and woman who are obviously the old woman’s son and daughter. The train compartment is too small to hold so many and so odd an assortment of people; the group shifts and eddies as they spill out into the passageway and into adjoining compartments. But the restlessness of the friends, obvious in their edgy and forced hilarity and in the way they shift from seat to seat, is held in check by the last of the party, the one man whom they all seem to circumnavigate, whose internal gravity seems to keep them all in orbit. A stolid, respectable man, who might even be thought of as affable if it weren’t for the remote and aloof air that shrouds him. He talks quietly with the elderly, worried woman who must also be his mother, and gently with the woman who is his sister. He makes small talk with the painter and the musicians, he smiles, but doesn’t flirt with the mathematician and the teacher. They all watch him anxiously, out of the corners of their eyes. They are worried for him, because when the train reaches Yaroslavl they will all turn around and return to Moscow, but he will continue on, bound literally for the ends of the earth, and none of them—not his mother, his sister or the women who wish to be his lovers—none of them know why he is going. . .read full review