The port at Taganrog
The school stood, high on the cliff overlooking the Azov Sea, in the parish grounds of the Greek Orthodox Church of St Constantine, and was located in the middle of Greek Street (where the wealthier members of its congregation all lived). Unl'ke the richly adorned church, whose icons were covered w ith miniature gold and suver sh'os brought by grateful sailors who had pray ed for the intercession of saints during storms at sea, the school was decidedly spartan. The rows of black desks in its one large room had to make do for all six classes, w th seventy-odd pupils ranging in age from six to twenty, and ruled over by a tall, bearded Cephalonian with red hair.4 When the school's unacceptably low standards and disciplinarian teaching methods were eventually uncovered, Nikolai and Anton were sent to join their elder brother, Alexander, at the Taganrog gymnasium. There they received a rigorous classical education, and Pavel Egorovich was forced to temper his naive idealization of all that Greece stood for. Chekhov later enjoyed sending it up obliquely in his popular one-act farce The Wedding (1889), in which the father of the bride, a retired collegiate registrar, asks increasingly ridiculous questions of his guest, Kharlampy Dymba, a Greek confect )ner with poor Russian, a character reputedly based on a resident of aganrog:
ZhigaloV: Have you got tigers in Greece?
DYMBA: We have.
zhigalov: And lions?
Dymba: Lions too. It's Russia which has nothing, but Greece has everything. I have there father, uncle, brothers, but here I don't have nothing.5
The confectioner's uniform reply to enquiries as to whether Greece has whales, lobsters, part cular kinds of mushrooms, and even collegiate registrars, led to the phrase 'Greece has everything' permanently entering the Russian language after a popular Soviet film was made of the play in the 1940s. In subsequent decades, as shops became emptier and emptier and the queues outside them ever lengthier, disaffected citizens jokingly used the phrase to refer ironically to the Soviet Union, parodying hyperbolic Communist propaganda.
A.s well as the disastrous year spent at the Greek school, Chekhov also had to endure several years of getting up in the small hours to sing at the Greek Monastery in Taganrog before he was ten years old. The Greek archimandrite in the Monastery's large white-walled church decided to introduce early monvng services in Russian on Sundays in order to increase the income raised from collections, and Chekhov's
Petrovskaya Street, Taganrog
over-zealous father leaped at the chance to lead the choir. Apart from attending the lunch at the Monastery's feast day every year, along with aganrog's most important Greek dignitaries, the only entertainment for the three miserable young Chekhov boys, stuck in their cleros up on the first floor, was watching birds feed their young in nests they had made inside the grilles covering the church's round windows.6
At the end of his life Chekhov claimed to have no memory at all of the modern Greek he once learned, and when he was fifteen he had to stay down a class because he failed his end of year exams in ancient Greek. Although his writings are sprinkled with occasional phrases in Latin, a language which came in useful for his medical studies, there are almost none in Greek, perhaps due to the unpleasant associations. And it was perhaps to exorcize some ghosts that many years later he created the character of the tyrannical Greek teacher Belikov in his famous story 'The Man in a Case', for whom the classical languages are 'just like his galoshes and umbrella really, hiding him from real life': '"How resonant and beautiful the Greek language is!" he would say with a sweet expression; and as if to prove the truth of his words, his eyes would narrow and he would raise his finger and say "Anthropos!"' So Chekhov was not exactly a Greek fan. But even he would have probably been amazed by recent archaeological discoveries in his home town, which suggest that Taganrog was the site of the oldest and most northerly ancient Greek colony in the entire Black Sea area.7
Sometimes during particularly cold winters up north, Chekhov started to dream of retu ;ng to Taganrog so that he could spend nis old age sitting in the sun. He told his younger cousin Georgi that he wished he could buy a little house by the sea, then he regretted not having the money to build a castle by the flight of vertiginous stone steps which descends from Greek Street all the way down to the shore.8 Built in the 1820s in imitation of the famous Aciopolis steps in Athens by one of Taganrog's wealthy Greeks, they served as a model for the sta:rcase in Odessa later immortalized by Eisenste' 1 in Battleship Potemkin.9 Chekhov was obviously thinking about the turreted mansion by the top of the steps lived in by Tchaikovsk/'s brother, wt ich had a fine sea v;ew. (ppolit Tchaikovsky was a retted naval officer with a shipping business, and after he moved back to St Petersburg n 1894, Chekhov told Georgi he would buy his house if he was rich. Tchaikovsky had been taken by his brother out to sea and driven around town in his cabriolet on the
The Stone Steps
occasions when he had come to visit, and the Taganrog connection undoubtedly piaved a role m cementing the friendship that he formed with Chekhov in 188.9; Georgi was later to work for Ippolit's shipping agency.
If Chekhov had not become infected with tuberculosis and had indeed been able to retire to his castle with the sea view in Taiunroe
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he would probably have stul been around when the city began installing a proper sanitation system in the 1930s, following the belated provision of running water. It was when a sewage pipe was laid in the bay of Taganrog below Ippolit Tchaikovsky's house that fragments of pottery started washing up on the shore and were deposited at the foot of the stone steps. Perhaps if Chekhov had been able to understand the stories he had heard about Odysseus in his first year of school, he might have been interested to know that these fragments of pottery turned out to be Greek, and very old indeed - about seventh-century ВС. Archaeologists took an immediate interest because there was 110 record of any ancient Greek settlement in the Taganrog area, but plans to carry out serious excavation were impeded first by the war* then by ideological problems. Finally they were forgotten about.