In 1890 Anton Chekhov, a promising 30-year-old writer, set out across Siberia to a remote prison island, Sakhalin, which was much closer to Japan than to Chekhov’s home in Moscow. In the days before the Trans-Siberian Railway, reaching Sakhalin required an epic journey of two and a half months. At that point no one understood that the 20th century would make Chekhov the world’s most influential writer of short fiction as well as the most enduring of modern playwrights. Still, Sakhalin was a surprising interruption in what was already a burgeoning career.

Anyone who reads about Chekhov encounters a reference to Sakhalin. I’ve run into it dozens of times and have…