We found a cafe on Frunze Street, tucked into the shade of an acacia, and as we drank coffee we watched groups of young women come and go from a nearby institute, all in high-heeled black ankle boots and zippered jackets. A cook in a white coat with vast quivering arms came out of the kitchen every few minutes and set down a large tin tray of fresh-baked pastries on the counter. At tables piled with their English language textbooks, the young women ate pastries and sipped hot tea off spoons, reapplying dark lipliner and face powder from mirrored compacts before going out again into the quiet of the streets. Many of them had lean Mediterranean features, brown-black hair and large dark eyes.
My companion studied the street plan. She had taken over the maps and the camera, full of clear purpose in her hunt for biographical treasure. I was glad to follow her passively through the warm day, sensing the writer’s genial presence in every place we visited, just as one is meant to do in Taganrog. There is reciprocity in the fact that this town has become a museum to Chekhov, for he diffused his personality throughout Taganrog, helping direct it towards the kind of civic self-knowledge that is expressed in museums of local history, libraries and architectural conservation. As an established writer in Moscow, he sent many books to Taganrog’s new library. He had dreamed of founding a museum of local personalities, reflecting their contribution to the development of the Russian south. When a local museum did open in 1898, Chekhov, now famous in Moscow, sensed that the walls of the Alferaki Palace in which it was housed now held in a powerful force: the life of past epochs, and those local individuals who stood out in high relief against the background of the centuries.
Unlike Olenin in Tolstoy’s Cossacks, who gets free of his past as he travels south from Moscow on his uncomfortable train journey down through Tula and Kharkov, Chekhov was heading towards ‘everything known and remembered’. On arrival, he found Taganrog so sleepy and antique-looking that it made him think of Pompeii. After eight years in Moscow, he looked on his new surroundings with wry snobbery mixed with simple affection; a city sophisticate come back to his provincial home town. Sometimes he writes his letters back to friends in Moscow in the voice of the tourist, describing Taganrog’s superb climate, the food, the plumbing, the inadequacy of the beds and local service, and the looks and manners of the women, who, he says, are coarse, amorous and nervous, with good profiles and a taste for clothes in olive green. It ‘smells of Asia’, he writes, and ‘Asia’ was easy code for ‘outside history’. The inhabitants of the town just eat, drink and reproduce, he complains; it is all eggs, kulich and bagels, Santorini wine and suckling babies, with not a book or a newspaper to be found. The lavatories are appalling, everything is grubby and tasteless, and the postman sits down to drink tea after every letter he delivers. In witty letters to clever university friends, Chekhov is droll and patronising about poor showy Taganrog. ‘If I were such a talented architect as you I would knock it down,’ he writes to his friend the architect Fyodor Shekhtel (who, like Isaac Levitan, was a model for one of the whoring students in ‘A Nervous Breakdown’).
Yet in another letter, Chekhov says that Taganrog ‘smells of Europe’. He writes with affection of long-known people; recording who has grown fatter, who thinner, the thrilling electricity in his uncle’s smile, and the ever more impressive civic schemes and luxuries of Achilles Alferaki, Mayor of Taganrog, scion of the wealthiest of the families of Taganrog tycoons, and civic benefactor. Alferaki shared Chekhov’s spirit of gentle satire and acute attentiveness to the particularity of local people. At his home, the late-nineteenth-century beau monde of Taganrog, such as it was, would gather to dance, play music, cards and charades, do rebuses and tableaux vivants and write comic verse. It was Alferaki himself who drew the remarkable caricatures in which the NKVD took such an interest during Stalin’s Terror. (On the back of many of the caricatures, the words ‘taken during the search, 19/XI/-36’ are written in the hand of Andreev-Turkin, curator of the museum.) His caricatures are of Duma members, customs officers, a schoolteacher, the chief of police, foreign consuls (of whom there were sixteen in Taganrog), gawky girls and shy youths, financiers like Negroponte, who ran the Azov-Don Commercial Bank, and Mussuri, head of the steamship company. The Alferaki Album is a necropolis, in which the curious faces of the city’s dead are treasure.
Chekhov is now the public face of the town about which he was so droll and patronising when he returned from Moscow. We visited first the house in which he was born, and filed through its few low rooms with a party of deaf and dumb children, whose teacher told them all about the early life of the great writer in sign language. There were daffodils in bloom at the foot of a great tree. In the tangled shadows of its long branches the little white house was tiny. We went then to his father’s corner shop, on a dusty street that looked like a film set. On the counter in the reconstructed interior were old tea caddies, caviar tins and weighing scales; high in the corner hung a set of icons, the front-room furnishings of a life of diligent piety and unsuccessful trade, behind which the merchant Pavel Chekhov, who had been born a serf, beat his children sore. We visited the local theatre, all red velvet and gilded gesso, built with Italian money for the performance of Italian opera, and the library, designed by Shekhtel, whom Chekhov addressed as ‘Dearest Maestro’ in the letter which jokingly proposed the demolition and reconstruction of the whole town. It was the middle of the afternoon when we came to Chekhov’s school, the Taganrog classical gymnasium, by far the most stately of the Chekhov places we had visited, its large windows looking out from austere high-ceilinged classrooms, across the town square to the sea.
As in so many Russian regional museums, the displays in the Taganrog museum in the baroque Alferaki Palace on Frunze Street rushed from deep to shallow time. Relics of the bronze age, the Ionian Greeks and the Scythians quickly gave way to medieval coins and weighing scales and armour and axe heads of the Polovtsians, and the feathered and beaded caps of the Kalmyks. In Starocherkassk, I had come to like the balance of opulence and simplicity of Don Cossack clothes, made up in orange, purple and yellow brocade, and the adornments set with tourmaline and mother-of-pearl. There were maps and muskets, finely worked and carefully preserved, displayed alongside rule books for good behaviour, health manuals and anthologies of spiritual readings from the Petrine era.
I cannot find an adequate English equivalent for the Russian word kraevedenie, which my dictionary translates as ‘study of local lore, history and economy’. Kraevedenie, which blossomed in the 1920s, is a branch of scholarship devoted to the knowledge of place in all its particularity. The local museums that can be found in towns of every kind throughout this vast land are characterised by the tender attention of the kraevedi, professional devotees of local knowledge. In his introduction to the 1927 book on the Russian countryside in Molotov’s library, Oldenburg praised the thousands of kraevedi of the 1920s as the people destined to bring the city and the countryside together, unify the culture through understanding. Gorky hailed the new science as ‘work whose significance cannot be exaggerated’, understanding that kraevedenie encouraged the ‘growth of our sense of human dignity’. As the contemporary kraeved Sigurd Shmidt remarked in a recent essay (in which he lamented the systematic murderous purge of Soviet kraevedenie in the 1930s), it is a form of local love, of spiritual work. (Sigurd Shmidt, son of the polar explorer Otto Shmidt, was raised in No. 3. He edited the Encyclopedia of Moscow (1998) from which I have learned most of what I know about the city.) Here in Taganrog, kraevedenie reveals itself as distinctly Chekhovian in spirit, at once modest and profound, grand in vision and attentive to the miniature, alert to the quirks in history and human personality, long-sighted, all-forgiving. Chekhov observed people close up, but he also knew how to withdraw his gaze to the far distance from which human failings look smaller.