I had made this journey to the south with a friend who was writing a book on Chekhov’s life. The year after he returned from Moscow to Taganrog, the town of his birth, Chekhov wrote a story set on this road. ‘Beauties’ is the recollection of a gymnasium student’s drive with his grandfather on a parched August day. To shelter from the hot dry wind they stop in an Armenian village, Bakhchi-Sala, where the boy’s grandfather knows a rich Armenian whose face is like a caricature. The man’s daughter, by contrast, is the most beautiful person the schoolboy has ever seen. She is an ‘authentic beauty’ of the classical type. Every feature is correct in line. Nature has not made the slightest error in the composition of her face. The boy’s appreciation of the Armenian girl is absolutely without desire, pleasure or joy. Instead her beauty brings on a heavy nagging sadness. In the second part of the story, at a railway station, he sees a beauty of an utterly different kind. She has fair Russian features, captivating in their disorder. He imagines the melancholy station-master in love with the careless laughing girl, living out his days by the train timetable, faithful to a plain wife, weighed down with the sadness and loss bestowed on him by his chance encounter with the beautiful. Wasted on this desert air, beauty seems all the more gratuitous on the part of nature; its only purpose, to mark the cruelty of time.
Beyond the sign to Tanais were a few trees, wind-hooped and bare, alone on the plain. A small herd of cows grazed among the artemisia, thistles and needle grass near the road. The morning was cloudless, the sky deep blue. As Chekhov observed, the distance on the steppe is lilac in colour. The furthest reaches are always empty, lines of sight extending into a beckoning distance beyond the point where the eye can make out any shape. This landscape is a place of privilege for the long-sighted, like Vassya, one of the briefly glimpsed characters in Chekhov’s story ‘The Steppe’, who, beyond the world seen by others, sees another world all of his own, in which foxes, hares and birds of prey keep a careful distance from men.
In the decades before Chekhov wrote his steppe stories, historical periods floating far apart in time had gathered and come into view, as classical archaeologists, working with ancient Greek texts like the Histories of Herodotus and Strabo’s Geographica, began to search some of the many hundreds of Scythian, Maeotian and Sarmatian burial mounds that had long grown into the landscape of the southern steppe, and to ask local shepherds for their legends of buried treasure.
Even now, this landscape, with its fallow collective farms grazed by small peasant herds, does not smell so much of Rus as it does of Royal Scythia and the seafaring Greeks. The story of the region is the story of the encounter between steppe and sea. The wonders concealed under the sandy shores of Azovia were left by Greeks and Bosporan kings: sailors, traders and colonisers who spread their civilisation to the north and east. After them came mounted ‘barbarians’ to lay that civilisation waste, followed by Turkic tribes. For centuries, the Polovtsians and Pechenegs lived in tents, and ate and slept by their fires, fighting battles and settling treaties with the princes of early Christian Rus. Peace was broken again by the Mongol armies of Khan Baty, who established the powerful state of the Golden Horde in the fourteenth century. The revenue-minded Mongol overlords allowed Genoese traders to build a factoria named Tana in the delta, where the city of Azov now stands. After the Mongols, the region was ruled by Crimean khans, vassals of the Ottoman empire, against which Russia struggled over four hundred years for control over the fertile steppe land, with its precious exit routes to the southern seas.
The ruins of Tanais lie a little way inland, on former Cossack farmland, near the settlement of Nedvigovka. Before it disappeared into the earth Tanais had been a town for seven hundred years. It was once a Hellenistic emporium at the very mouth of the great river Tana, with its back to the nomad lands of the steppe, facing across the sea towards the Greek entrepôts spread along on the southern shores of Lake Maeotis, as the Azov was anciently known, and the wide straits that lead down into the Black Sea. It was a frontier city; the biggest bazaar for the barbarians after Panticapaeum, the geographer Strabo said, which (like Novgorod under Ivan the Terrible) had been devastated and burned at the end of the first century BC, as an insubordinate outpost, by its own ruler, King Polemon. Several hundred years later, marauders came again to these lands; not on ships this time, but on horseback: Goths and Huns, armed with bows and arrows. Houses burned, stone towers fell, and after their fires had gone out the wild grasses grew back over the hewn stones of Tanais. Earth, river and shoreline changed places.
Chekhov grew up in a landscape that had recently, in almost random fashion, yielded up precious antiquities to the imperial museums of the great northern cities. He was still a schoolboy at the classical gymnasium in Taganrog (remote in every way from St Petersburg and Moscow), when Friedrich Nietzsche characterised the ‘age of historical culture’ in his essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’. The culture of the nineteenth century, the age of the archaeologist and the philological scholar, is not really a culture at all, Nietzsche said, ‘but only a kind of knowledge of culture’, an age of senile occupations, choking on sterile knowledge of the mightier civilisations of the past.
Yet here on the steppe, archaeological discovery took on something of the freedom and wildness of the place. The first archaeologists of the Russian south were military men like Colonel Ivan Stempkovsky, governor of Kerch, who used the intervals between fighting the French and the Ottomans to discover the ‘fortune’ that lay beneath the soil of the empire’s contested borderlands. Though archaeology had been taught as an aspect of the history of art at Moscow University since 1809, the subject was not yet a distinct ‘science’. Stempkovsky exemplified a new awareness of the past as treasure to be unearthed, collected, studied and domesticated. Amateur archaeologist, corresponding member of the French Academy, Stempkovsky presided over the founding of museums in Kerch (which was built over the Greek city of Panticapaeum) and Odessa in 1823, which displayed local finds not considered fine enough for the growing collections of antiquities in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Though he and his kind were despised as dilettantes by the academics in the capital cities, Stempkovsky devised a programme for the archaeological excavation of the south, proposing societies for field and study work, and a chain of specialised archaeological museums. On his way to a military posting on the Volga, he traced this road between Taganrog and Rostov in search of Tanais, the ordered polis that he knew had once existed on these empty or haphazardly settled spaces. From reading Strabo’s enigmatic one-liners in French, he guessed that Tanais would be found close to the Don mouth. Near Nedvigovka, he unearthed ancient fortifications, discerning the form of a town, finding fragments of an amphora and coins marking the reigns of the Bosporan kings Sauromates and Cotys. Meanwhile, as Cossacks ploughed the landscape of burial mounds and ruins that the Tsar encouraged them to settle on this politically hot imperial frontier, they also chanced upon treasure, which they were free to dispose of as they wished.
Buried in the steppe, eye beads of glass and agate, bracelets and earrings of wrought silver and gold, mirrors made of bronze beaten into discs, arrow tips of iron and bone … all tell of trading cultures exchanging styles, the lines between them never quite clear. Not long after Stempkovsky’s death, Pavel Leontiev, a young classics professor from Moscow University, came south to confirm Stempkovsky’s conjecture. He found the remains of a later town, more crudely built than any Greek settlement, with shards of roughly made ceramics with no refinement of ornament, and coins no older than the first century. Disenchanted, he concluded that the place was not, after all, Tanais. In 1867, the Imperial Archaeological Commission, still searching for treasures to display in the exhibition halls of the Hermitage, renewed the excavation at Nedvigovka under the direction of the numismatist Baron Vladimir von Tiesenhausen. At the same time, workers breaking rocks to lay the railway track that skirts the seashore broke through to the buried city. The Don News, and even newspapers in faraway St Petersburg, talked of a gigantic underground passageway, a water channel from the Don to Tanais. There were seductive rumours of great stores of buried treasure, and Count Stroganov, head of the Archaeological Commission in the Russian capital, came south to discuss the matter with the Ataman of the Don Cossacks. No great treasure was found, and soon digging stopped at Nedvigovka, leaving local peasants to take what they wanted from the ruined city. More local rumours of treasure led to a brief dig early in the twentieth century, led by the archaeologist Nikolai Veselovsky, but it yielded little. It was only after the Second World War, when Soviet archaeology revived under men like Artsykhovsky and Yanin, that systematic excavation began and the boundaries of Tanais were confirmed. Digs unearthed traces of fishing and agriculture, of glass-making, smithies and large amphorae that had once contained oil or the bodies of children dead in infancy. Archaeologists identified a necropolis and ritual objects that suggested the worship of a supreme deity.