At the beginning of his southern exile, Pushkin had spent three
Olga as Masha in Three Sisters, 1901
blissful weeks in Gurzuf in the autumn of 1820 during his extended tour of the Caucasus and the Crimea with his new friends the Raevskys. They had stayed in the large house built by the Due de Richelieu when he was Governor-General of New Russia in the early 1800s, on land originally owned by Potemkin. When he was not wandering round the beautiful park that Richelieu had created, Pushkin spent lazy days eating grapes and swimming in the sea, hence the subsequent naming of a large rock after him in one of the village's small bays. By chance it was this very bay that had come up for sale, and Chekhov was excited by the prospect of being able to tie up his own boat there and go fishing. The house was a traditional Tatar saklya and rather decrepit - just three tiny wooden rooms - but it had a red nled roof, a veranda to sit out in, and a short flight of steep steps leading down the cliff to the pebbly beach below. It also had a garden in which there was all of one tree: a mulberry. Why should this tree have rerr.nded Chekhov of the opening lines of Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila, which he was to quote in his new play Three Sisters, begun n spr ng 1900? Pushkin talks about
Stanislavsky as Vershimn in Three Sisters, 1901
an oak, after all. The link between the mulberry tree and the oak tree m Pushkin's poem was Taganrog.
In the summer of 2002, botanists from the University of Rostov-on- Don were urgently summoned со Taganrog. They had been :n\ ted by local businessmen to inspect the remains of an enormous tree which had recently burned down. ' he businessmen were hoping it could somehow be resurrected.12 This was no ordinary tree, of course, but the famous old oak of Taganrog which had supposedly inspired the opening 1-nes of Ruslan and Lyudmila: 'A green oak by the curving shore / And on that oak a golden chain.' They are among Pushkin's best-known lines. They are also Masha's enigmatic opening lines in Th?ee Sisters. Journalists descended on Taganrog when news first spread about the sudden demise of the 'Pushkin oak', but they unexpectedly ran into difficulties when trying to identify exactly which oak tree had inspired Russia's national poet. There were many venerable oak trees in Taganrog, it turned out, the oldest dating from the early eighteenth century (Peter the Great had given express orders to Count Apraksin that acorns be planted after he founded the town in 1698). Some locals maintained that the celebrated 'Pushkin oak' actually stood outside the town; others were altogether more sceptical, aware of the existence of dozens of 'Pushkin oaks' throughout Russia with equal claims to authenticity.13 It was not actually all that surprising that there were difficulties identifying the 'Pushkin oak', because the oak, it turned out, was a mulberry tree - a white mulberry, in fact, the kind.Used4to produce silk, of which there had traditionally been many in Taganrog. Unlike Chekhov, who began to cultivate trees the minute he acquired some land of his own and was later to advise the Taganrog town authorities about which trees they should plant, Pushkin, it seems, was less knowledgeable about such mundane things as tree species. But people in Taganrog were generally willing to forgive the poet who mistook a mulberry for an oak in their desire to claim their town as a source of poetic inspiration. Pushkin had, after all, been infatuated at the time with one of the young female members of his party, and was not renowned as an expert in arboricultural matters.
The fabled mulberry tree had stood for 200 years in the grounds of Taganrog's most historic landmark: the unassuming building on Greek Street where Alexander I had mysteriously died in 1825. A one-storey mansion built in the early nineteenth-century Russian classical style, it had been initially acquired by General Pyotr Papkov, who wished to expand his adjoini lg property. In 1816 it became the official residence of the governor of Taganrog, Papkov's post from 1810 to 1822, but he preferred to use it as accommodation for distinguished guests, while continuing to reside in his old house next door. Alexander I and his retinue thus stayed here during his tour of Russia in 1818, and Pushkin became a guest of General Papkov while en route for the Caucasus with members of the Raevsky farrrly at the end of May 1820 - just a few months before his visit to Gurzuf and the Crimea. The first edition of Ruslan and Lyudmila was published that July, but the prologue, which begins wich the famous lines about the green oak and the curving shore, was written four years later. There s indeed a fine view of the curvmg shore'ine of the Azov Sea several hundred feet below the high cliff on which Taganrog is simated, and the mulberry tree in the garden of General Papkov's house would certainly have been in full leaf ac that time of year. 'And on that oak a golden chain'? Before the tree was set on fire by vandals, locals claimed that it was still possible to see the marks left by the chains that had supposedly been fixed со its branches to encourage them grow outwards rather than vertically.14 As well as the water nymph sitting in the branches of his oak, Pi sh in's poem also has a learned cat wliich walks round the tree, alternately singing a song when it turns rignt, and telling a story when it turns left. When the 'Palace of Alexander Г opened, shortly after the Tsar s untimely death, as Russia's first memorial museum, it was guarded by clean-shaven Cossacks with sabres, and legend has it that they maintained contact with each other precisely in this way when patrolling the perimeter of the palace grounds, As we know, Chekhov was very fam. iar with the Palace of Alexander I and the 'Pushkin oak', having been made by his father to sing long services in the chapel there as a young boy, so the mulberry tree in his garden at Gurzuf, overlooking the Pushkin Rock, may well have reminded him of the mulberry tree in Taganrog when he began work on Three Sisters. Moreover, his new cottage n Gurzuf was also perched high above a curving shore and bathed in a warm, southerly climate, of course (as indeed was his house in Yalta: mulberries were among the first trees he had planted there even before he moved n). It is tempting to think that concealed within the quotation of Pushkin's lines are a series of complex personal associations to do with death, the difficult relationship Chekhov had with h s father, his chjdhood, his enforced exile in the Crimea, and the complications of entering into a relationship with someone who lived far away. Chekhov had, after all, recently been to Taganrog (for the last time, as it turned out), where he had once been a pu]>ti of numerous teachers like Masha's husband, Kulygin, at the classical gymnasium he attended. More significantly, news of the unexpected death of his father in October 1898 had set off a chain of events which resulted in him selling his beloved Melikhovo estate and moving permanently to Yalta. After handing over the Melikhovo keys to its new owner in July 1899, Chekhov had headed back south to the Ci mea, stopping off in Taganrog on the way. He could not have failed to think about his ch Idhood, his father, and his own mortality during that visit. The sister of one of his old school friends later recalled see ng a man standing alone on the shore staring out to sea as she drove by with her husband 'a a carriage one day. It was Chekhov.15 Three Sisters begi is with musings about the death of a father the previous year. Chekhov began thinking about Three Sisters |ust a little over a year after his own father died.