Karl Khristoforovich Landsberg

A Sakhalin convict-settler at whose home Chekhov dined during his 1890 visit -- one of the island's most notorious exiles. Karl Landsberg, a former Life-Guards officer and graduate of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, was convicted in a sensational 1879 Petersburg murder case (killing a moneylender and his servant) and sentenced to katorga; by the time of Chekhov's visit he had served roughly a decade of hard labor and had risen, through the informal privileges available to well-connected and capable convicts, to a position of relative comfort and local trust, eventually managing a wayside station and, in some accounts, later helping oversee prisoner road-building on the island. His case was widely known in educated Russian society, which is presumably why Chekhov names him without further explanation, expecting Suvorin to recognize the name -- a working demonstration of the very stratification within the convict population (well-placed offenders living almost like free settlers alongside men chained to wheelbarrows) that structures Chekhov's Sakhalin reporting generally, including in this same letter's \S8.