Thank you, Jansy, for your kind words. Speaking of "magnetic" islands (btw., there is real Magnetic Island just offshore Australia's east coast), let me evoke Sakhalin, uzun ada ("long island") in its own right, the place of penal servitude and exile in Imperial Russia until 1905 (Chekhov visited Sakhalin in 1890, met all its inhabitants, taking the census, and wrote the book "The Island Sakhalin," 1894), and the so-called "Solovki" (the Solovetsky islands), the archipelago in the White Sea, the ancient monastery on which was turned into an especially cruel labour camp (visited and apologetically described by Chekhov's friend Gorky in 1929) in the Lenin-Stalin era.
Among invented islands, from Utopia to Zembla, may I mention Vozdushnyi ostrov ("Island in the Air"), a little known uncollected poem by VN (1929).
 
Alexey Sklyarenko
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