Chekhov was very familiar v* ;th the palace of Alexander I. From childhood he had heard stories of how his grandmother had been given refuge, together with her two daughters, in the former town governor's house next door when they first arr ved in Taganrog penniless in 1847. His mother was then twelve years old, and she later told stories to her children aDout how the custodian at the palace next door had knocked down part of the stone wall div ding the two gardens and built a gate so that she and Пег sister could play with his daughter Lyudmila. When be was twelve years old Chekhov, with his two elder brothers, was part of a choir which performed at the services held in the palace chapel during Easter and on Trinity Sunday. This was the last choir run by Chekhov's father. The Greek Monastery appointed for its main church a priest who spoke only Greek, and who had no interest in holding any services in Russian; then the new Church of St Mitrofan employed a paid choir when it was completed, so Pavel Egorovich was eventually forced to take his choristers elsewhere. The Taganrog aristocracy chose to attend the services at the modest palace chapel, with its faded carpets and flimsy linen iconostasis, and Chekhov's father clearly hoped its scions would be impressed w h his ability to raise such delightful, Godfearing children. The boys invar'ably failed to live up to his unreal expectations, however, and usually misbehaved.23
Alexander I's widow herself died within a few months of her husband, as she was travelling back from Taganrog to St Petersburg. Before she left, she set aside some money for a bronze statue of her husband to be erected in the town. Since Alexander's body had been taken to Le in state at the Greek Monastery (lead for his coffin was so scarce :t apparently had to be taken from the nearest available roof), Elizaveta deeded that the statue should be erected in the square in front of it. The unveiling took place in 1831, to the accompaniment of a 101- gun salute, bell-ringing in all the town's churches, and municipal ilium.nations.
Ill
The British
The capture of Kertch and the occupation of the Sea of Azov will greatly cripple the operations of the Russians ,.. with us it ;s merely a question of expense, with the Russians it is a question as to the limits of physical possibility.
Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, 1855
Just under a century before fragments of Greek pottery began to be washed up on the Taganrog shore, the stone steps near which Chekhov expressed a wish to own a house became the scene of an attempted assault by British sailors. The Cr mean War clearly left a lasting impression on the town's inhaKtants. When writing to a colleague about plans for a museum commemorating Taganrog's history in 1897, Chekhov mentioned as a possib^ exhibit a picture his aunt had on her wall depicting the British bombardment of the town.24 One does not automatically associate Chekhov with the Crimean War, but h;s family became ineluctably caught up in its repercussions because they lived only a few hundred miles from tne ma<n battleground at Sevastopol, Russia's naval headquarters in the Black Sea. Taganrog came under attack for a whole summer by Her Majesty's Navy.
Chekhov's parents married six months after the start of the war on 29 October 1854 - the same week Florence NighCngale arrived to attend to the wounded ;n the British M :tary Hospital in Scutari across the Bosphorus from Constantinople - and the couple's first summer together in Taganrog as husband and wife was blighted by attacks from Royal Navy gunboats. Evgenia had become pregnant almost immediately after marry tig Pavel, and it was a blessing that they eventually decided to leave Taganrog temporarily for safety reasons; also that the British naval officers took pains to prosecute their miSS;on in as humane a way as possible.
The Sea of Azov was used as a vital supply route by the Russ.an army, and Taganrog was the most important trading port on its shores at that time. With an important grain store and coal and iron deposits nearby, the town was naturally drawn into the theatre of war when the Allies marshalled 15,000 troops and launched their campaign to take maritime control of the area. The success of the campaign was to lead directly to victory for the Allies over the Russians at Sevastopol a few months later. The Sea of Azoff is open to us,' reported William Howard Russell to The Times on 26 May 1855 after the strategically important capture of Kertch at the mouth of the Black Sea a few days earlier. And our flying squadron of steam gunboats is searching it from end to end,' he continued, 'burning and destroying the ships and trading vessels of the Russians, crushing their forts, and carrying terror and dismay along the seaboard of their inland lake.'25 Together with his French counterpart, Captain Edmund Lyons, commander of the Miranda, sailed a flotilla of eighteen vessels into the Azov Sea immediately after Kertch had been taken. It was the first time that the flag of a British admiral was flown in these waters, and the Allies now started moving up the coast, bombarding first the ships, stores and government offices at Berd.r.nsk, then doing the same at Genitchi when the town refused to surrender. By this time, 249 boats had already been destroyed, as well as the equivalent of two months of food rations for 100,000 Russian soldiers. The Russians helped in this effort by destroying enormous quantities of grain and flour themselves at Kertch.
Lyons then headed for Taganrog with twenty gunboats armed with howitzers and rockets, and on 1 June was obliged to anchor several miles outside the town, due to its shallow waters.26 Two days later, he was able to send a lengthy dispatch to his father Rear-Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, Commander-in-Chief of the Black Sea fleet, describing a successful campaign begur at three o'clock that morning on the Recruit, an ex-Prussian iion gunboat:
... so heavy a fire opened that although the enemy made repeated attempts to get down to the houses lining the beach, so as to save the long range of store houses from destruction, they never succeeded in doing so 'n sufficient numbers ... By 3pm, all the long ranges of stores of grain, plank and tar and the vessels on the stocks were in a blaze, as well as the custom house and other government buildings, and unfortunately but unavoidably the town n many places . . . The loss of the enemy in men must have been severe, as many were seen to fall. . . The only casualty n carr) ing out this service, was one pr vate of the Royal Ma-ine Artillery, severely wounded in the face by a musket- ball . . .27
Lyons reported that a Russ. an sergeant, who deserted and gave himself up to a French boat, stated the number of (mostly Cossack) troops n the town to have been in the region of 3,200, of whom 800 had arrived the night before. The allies, on the other hand, had about 600 men on 43 boats. Similar procedures ensued at Mariupol and Eisk up the coast, not surprisingly leaving the whole coastline 'in a state of tenor'.
Amongst the frightened inhabitants of Taganrog that early summer morning were Pavel and Evgenia Chekhov, Pavel's brother Mitrofan, and Evgenia's mother, sister and brother. Lyons took pains in his report to his father to note that civilian casualties had been expressly avoided insofar as it was poss">le: 'Many large buildings had the black flag hoisted, as a sign, I presume, of their being hospitals, these were most carefully respected by us, as were the churches, and as far as possible private houses.'28 In fact there were eleven casualties and eighteen wounaed.29 Two hundred houses were also destroyed and a cannon ball remains lodged to this day in the belfry of the Church of St Nicholas, which stands close to the town harbour. The Russian version of events is, of course, somewhat different, war reportage being what it is. Their account maincains that, despite six and a half hours of bombardment, it was a combination of Taganrog's steep cliffs and the valour of its Cossack defenders which prevented 300 AUud infantry from entering the town via its Stone Steps. The AlUes met unexpectedly strong resistance from the Russians, according to the diary of one British officer to whom it seemed that the spirit of perseverance had transferred from the defenders of Sevastopol.30