Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port in southern Russia. His father was a former serf. In 1879, after receiving a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, he moved to Moscow to study medicine. During his university years he helped support his family by writing stories and sketches for humorous magazines. By 1888 he was contributing to Russia's most prestigious literary journals and regarded as a major writer. He also started writing plays: his first full-length play, Ivanov, was produced in 1887. After undertaking a journey to visit the penal colony on the Siberian island of Sakhalin in 1890, he settled on a country estate outside Moscow, where he continued to write and practise medicine. His failing health forced him to move to Yalta in 1898, where he wrote his most famous short story, 'The Lady with the Little Dog' (1899), and two of his best-known plays: Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), written with Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre in mind. In 1901 he married the company's leading actress, Olga Knipper. He died from tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, in July 1904 at the age of 44.

In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with his notes and extracts from his letters to relatives and associates.