The colony looked like it would sink into the bog of permafrost underneath it but it never did. It towered over a carpet of arctic lichens and scrubland like an apparition of a place imprinted on time and existence, the view around it never changed. The steel fence coiled around the brick edifice like a drunken domino line of panels knocked and dented askew and topped with a rattle of barbed wire. And the place spoke none of its inhumane ordeals.

Those who had frequented it for years had a disdainful association with the institution, but they were fortuned enough to not be the out-of-towners, whose journey consisted of five, six hours on the repugnant intercity train. Those folks simply abandoned the obligation of visiting, ruing the day they ever introduced life into this world.

The idea for the play came from the head warden, Vasily Mikhailovich, who liked to dabble in the soluble world of the arts though he did not have sufficient creativity for it. He believed he should do something to instil a trait or a sense of purpose in the delinquents, and he liked Chekhov and his ability to champion the undignified to the readers.

The warden was swamped lately and the pressures of the economy had been only a smidgen of it. It was the institution’s hapless fate that had him on the verge of a psychosomatic lapse. Their supply of pearl barley was nearly out and no one would send him as much as a kopeck from Moscow. He had gotten the prison cook to dilute the meek servings of kasha with water – more and more of it each day until it thinned the consistency to the point it could barely be felt on the tongue. He may have been austere in his manner but Vasily Mikhailovich was not without a conscience; he believed he could blot out the inefficiencies of the old ways with a supplication of fairness and discipline. And he followed a noble example – Anton Makarenko, the famed educator whose successes in rehabilitating criminal youths after the Civil War had become legend.

Doleful, doleful Vasily Mikhailovich, he tried so hard to surmount the trials that daunted him with little to no avail. The accumulation of everything had caused him to wander from the world around him into long, irregular strains of thought. They put him out of work for hours. He would just sit in his office thinking about the old summers, the taiga, a cheery young girl with a dress of armure and an illustrious smile. The memories seized upon him, embosoming him with their undesirable force. He had many things to think of but he could not allay these unruly strains of thought. And why did he like Chekhov? Well, there’s an answer to that too.

Some decades ago the young Vasily Mikhailovich learned one of Anton Pavlovich’s stories in his otherwise unremarkable Russian class. The House with a Mezzanine. The effects of that story have never been evident on the young Vasily until now; the mundane days haunting an old painter, his distant obsession with a lively young soul. Vasily Mikhailovich couldn’t help but see himself in that poor, introverted sod.

That was the House with a Mezzanine. This one was Boys. Also a Chekhov. No one expected much of a crowd to show up but all were moved to see the sizeable assembly that gathered outside the soot-spritzed building on that drab, overcast day. Spring, 1st May. 1994. The first Easter the country had been allowed to celebrate. The settlement’s revered, hardworking backbone joined the ranks – miners and nurses and staff from the local petrochemical plant; the next in a long line of local enterprises rumoured to be facing foreclosure.

Families of some of the inmates came too, though it was a much smaller crowd to the one that showed up for the bygone New Year’s. Each one brought copious parcels of food and clothes bundled into chequered nylon bags that were fastened to their wobbly, buck-wheeled trolleys. The warden threatened the arrest of anyone who attempted to hand items over to the inmates. He made himself clear on that fact back on New Year’s, though he had less and less confidence in whose authority he was enforcing. For the first time in his life he felt like he was being taken as an idiot. The uniform he donned no longer extended its credibility. At times his own friends had passed the occasional comment: ‘Vasya, what are you hanging onto the coattails of a decaying corpse for? Think innovatively – we’re capitalists now!’

In the dark sports hall he tried to keep a straight face as he watched the bodies pass by him, the shoes carrying in with them the entire upper stratum of topsoil, dead leaves and all. Stiff as a gavel. In summer, primordial soup. The tundra, as Mikhail Gulko would call it. On the tundra… On the broad road… Where the ambulance rushes… Vorkuta, Leningrad.

Agrippina V, the prison pedagogue, stood at the door of the hall, watching and nodding along to the clop of shoes against the lino floor, the shadows coupling tensely behind her. As Vasily Mikhailovich watched her he recounted the letters he sent to his superiors regarding their situation, two of them having mentioned the defective phone line. The thought of waiting for a response made his palms twitch; the whole daunting dose of admin had worn away at him like a rough current whelming a rock. He hadn’t the vaguest foresight of the mess he would get himself into when he moved him and his wife out to this hellhole in the tundra to perform the role. But again – this had been the least of it.

In these past nine months, he had seen things that even at his age had made an unpalatable impression on him. The bureaucratic quagmire had little to do with it. In those slow-ticking months he had become acquainted with the histories of his young prisoners. The strange array of crimes that featured in their files. Killing of kin, infanticide. Boys murdering grandparents. A thirteen-year-old beating his young sister to a brutal death and then sitting watching as she gasped her last breaths. And so it went. Intravenous drug use, rape, grave bodily harm. At the end of it there had always been something he didn’t expect or understand: apathy in its most extreme form. It made him think back to his own less-than-savoury days as a street youth. And he thought, give him drunk humour. Give him bad sausage. Give him the claims of repression the disloyal had shamelessly dredged up. But this…

Agrippina V took the microphone in her hands as she stood in that dim light with her large bust swelling. As it moved he could see the film of perspiration form on her upper lip. When she took a breath the hall silenced and turned at once as if charmed by her queer mantra. ‘Russia! In the fierce days of Batu Khan… Who halted the Mongol flood, if not you?’

Bryusov. The crowd watched her. The floorboards garbled beneath. To Vasily she looked like a legless figurine propped up by a shady spectre in a dream. Carrying with her something of the distant past. Something he clasped.

She waited a moment. ‘Christ is risen!’

The crowd roared back: ‘Indeed he is risen!’ Their drunk voices merged like the arctic wind.

In his neighbourhood, five pensioners had gone missing. Weeks went by before anybody had thought to raise the alarm: everyone had enough on their minds with the inflation and the constant power cuts. He heard only after. Their bodies were found behind the apartment building, stuffed down a manhole wrapped up in household rugs. On the news they said they had been victims of property fraud or some new kind of crime the people in those parts had scarcely heard of. Vasily Mikhailovich thought about it a lot but none of the thoughts ever came to anything. It was all new and fresh and neither he nor anyone had any experience with it. The unimaginable greed. The depraved pathways to gratification.

‘We are proud to present to you our well-rehearsed spectacle! An adaptation of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s “Boys”. Please, give a warm round of applause to our young lads, who went through admirable efforts to bring the production to life.’

No sooner had Agrippina V uttered her big words than the cast of the play emerged behind her, trudging out onstage with slim waists and haggard faces, hands a thoughtless blue-yellow from the miscellaneous labours they had been called upon to perform. Their faces conjuring only a faint spectre of youthhood.

Children. Some young as ten. Their expressions worn away by the everlasting grind. Agrippina V stood by to supervise them as they assumed their places on stage, taking up the props that were carelessly scattered around. The audience clapped. Agrippina V smiled. As the slovenly figures took their positions, she walked down the creaking steps and left the stage for good. Then the play began.

Vasily Mikhailovich watched and became encapsulated, by the play but mostly by the thoughts that swirled around him. His eager trips to the Komsomol. Motorbike rides through the pastures. These memories and all other memories that everyday had escaped further and further from him and yet they never disappeared. No matter how much he had wanted them to. Maybe he clung onto them out of some faint, inconspicuous impulse that tried to offset the shame and self-flagellation that came hand-in-hand with the now detested social reset.

So he sat. A man of middle age, a paragon of a bygone authority, a world perished. The gilded stars on his epaulettes shone with that spectacular gleam that was him personified. He sat indulging a chimera that offered him no succour.

He watched the young inmates frolicking before him with their fake dresses and yarn wigs, their lives becoming mercurial in his spectacle. Vessels that travelled nameless and creedless through the illimitable passage of tomorrow that had little regard for the here and now.

For all of his love for Chekhov there was something in it that he could not stomach. The damning looks in their eyes, reflecting all that had been bad around him. The letters he had sent to his superiors. The food shortages, power cuts. The criminality. Things that could be soothed away by the sweet farce of memory.

Replace the abuse, replace the corruption. Replace the millions of homeless and the suicide and drug use. Hold the truth, package it. Desert it. He is Chekhov; he is the painter. And this is a scene in his play.