place
the Urals
also: Урал, Уральские горы, Уральская область, Ural Mountains, Ural province
The Ural Mountains, the traditional dividing range between European and Asian Russia; Chekhov crosses them by rail on the leg of his journey to Sakhalin that brings him to Yekaterinburg, remarking in the companion letter of the same date that "my right leg is in Europe, and my left is in Asia." The region is also home to the novelist Mamin-Sibiryak, whose regional fiction Chekhov notes is more talked-of locally than Tolstoy's.