place
Vilyuisk
also: Вилюйск
A remote, notoriously isolated town in the Yakut region of northeastern Siberia, invoked here by Chekhov only as a joking threat of administrative exile for Shcheglov's overproduction of plays -- the era's byword for the harshest, most out-of-the-way place one could be banished to (later famous as the exile-place of Nikolai Chernyshevsky).
Reading notes
- To I. L. Leontyev, 26 December 1890. Moscow. §6 I would hand you over to a court-martial ... or at the very least exile you by administrative order to Vilyuisk
A mock-legal escalation typical of Chekhov's joking threats to close friends (compare the similar mock-punitive register elsewhere in the corpus): a court-martial (военно-полевой суд) and administrative exile (a real category of tsarist punishment, imposed without trial) to Vilyuisk, a remote Yakut-region town proverbial for its harsh isolation -- both named purely for comic overstatement, aimed affectionately at Shcheglov's playwriting habit rather than at anything requiring real censure.