This photo album belonged to the family of Mikhail Chekhov — Anton Chekhov’s younger brother and biographer. He wrote the book “Around Chekhov: Encounters and Impressions”. Mikhail and his sister Maria helped to preserve Anton Chekhov’s house in Yalta which is now home to the writer’s museum. Mikhail Chekhov had two children — Sergey and Yevgeniya.

Sergey Mikhailovich Chekhov, the writer’s nephew, was a Soviet graphic artist and curator of the family archive. He graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts, worked as a scenic designer, and was a head lecturer at the Stage Production Department of the Moscow Art Theater School. Sergey Chekhov designed over 130 books, including “The Genealogy of Anton Chekhov”, “Through the Chekhov’s Places of the Moscow Region”, and “Melikhovo”.

His son, Sergey Sergeyevich, enjoyed painting watercolors and drawing with colored pencils since he was a child, studying art under his father’s guidance. He graduated from the Moscow Art School and later from the Department of Monumental Art at the Surikov Institute. Sergey Sergeyevich Chekhov worked in the techniques of linocut and etching but became particularly famous as a muralist.

In the summer of 1958, both the father and the son repeated Anton Chekhov’s journey to Sakhalin Island. Over two months, they traveled to places that the writer visited in 1890, as well as the northern regions of the Sakhalin Region and the Kuril Islands. The artists made dozens of sketches and photographs. “There is so much beauty around us that a film roll does not last long at all”, Sergey Mikhailovich Chekhov wrote.

This album contains 35 black-and-white photos and two prints. They depict the flora and fauna of Sakhalin, its architecture, indigenous peoples and their traditional crafts, the Japanese-style building of the Museum of Local Lore, and Anton Chekhov’s places in Taganrog — the gymnasium and the theater.

The album was donated to the museum by Valentina Chekhova, the widow of Sergey Mikhailovich Chekhov. The second page of the cover features an inscription in blue ink, “To the Museum of Anton Chekhov’s Book ‘Sakhalin Island’ in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk from Valentina Chekhova. March 25, 1990. Moscow.”

This is a hardcover photo album produced by the “Svetoch” factory with the image of the Borovitskaya Tower of the Moscow Kremlin. Along the upper edge of the cover, there is an inscription in blue ink that reads, “Sergey Sergeyevich Chekhov”.