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