ON THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WRITER'S BIRTH, ON THE 120th ANNIVERSARY OF VISITING CEYLON D. T. KAPUSTIN Candidate of Historical Sciences Anton Pavlovich Chekhov visited Ceylon in November 1890, returning to Odessa by the "roundabout route" - around Asia-from his famous trip to Sakhalin. A visit to a tropical island turned out to be the highlight of the 52-day sea voyage, and Chekhov's memories of it are always filled with joy, light and humor-maybe because of the tropical exoticism, or maybe because of the uplift of spirit that the 30-year-old writer experienced after completing his business in a penal " hell". After returning to Moscow, he wrote (January 5, 1891) to the "precious" A. S. Suvorin, a patron friend and publisher of the popular newspaper Novoe Vremya: "After the toils of Sakhalin and the tropics, my Moscow life now seems to me so petty-bourgeois and boring that I am ready to bite." 1 It should be noted that there are few documents related to visiting the island. These are mostly letters from the writer himself and memoirs of his friends and relatives. However, the research of historians and Czech scholars in recent years allows us to trace the writer's stay in Ceylon in some detail and, most importantly, in a documented way. In the spring of 2008, while on a research trip to Sri Lanka, I also tried to resolve a number of issues related to the stay of the young fiction writer Anton Chekhov on the island. Returning by sea to Odessa was conceived by the writer from the very beginning. A little over a month before his departure, A. Chekhov wrote in a letter dated March 16, 1890, to his fellow writer I. Leontiev (Shcheglov): "My route is as follows: Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Tyumen, Tomsk, Irkutsk, Sretensk, down the Amur River to Nikolaevsk, two months on Sakhalin, Nagasaki, Shanghai, Hankow, Manila, Singapore, Madras, Colombo (in Ceylon), Aden, Port Said, Constantinople, Odessa..." share all the difficulties and delights of the journey, looking forward to: ... Читать далее