EPILOGUE: CHEKHOV STREET
It was not long after Chekhov's death that his friends in Moscow began to raise the idea of founding a museum dedicated to his memory. Viktor Goltsev, the editor of Russian Thought, took the lead in 1906, but he died before the first very modest Chekhov museum opened in a room in Moscow's main research library six years later.1 In the meantime, Chekhov's numerous correspondents had begun to donate letters he had written to them. The first edition of Chekhov letters, published in 1909, was a complete rev elation to the thousands of hij fans across Russia who had no conception ther of the details of his private life, or the range and quality of his epistolary legacy, let alone its sheer quantity. It was not until much later that the house where the Chekhovs had lived during the 1880s on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya was turned into a museum. First came the renaming of Malaya Dmitrovka as Chekhov Street to mark the fortieth anniversary of Chekhov's death, an event which was also accompanied by the erection of statues and plaques. The retiring Chekhov would no doubt have breathed a sigh of relief to know that the street named after him reverted to its old name of Malaya Dmitrovka after the collapse of Soviet power; the Chekhov metro station however, one of Moscow's newest, remains. The 'Chest of Drawers' finally opened to the Soviet public in 1954, and then underwent several years of kapitalnyi remont at the beginning of the twenty-first century in preparation for the next major anniversary: the centenary of Chekhov's death in July 2004. The trees that used to surround the house were ail chopped down under Stalm, and it is nowadays difficult to imagine the vehicle-infested concrete ;ungle being the peacefu1 thoroughfare it was m the 1880s. The house now sits quaintly behind mostly stationary traffic, dwarfed by enormous buildings on either side.
The transformation of Melikhovo into a literary shrine took longer. The house was destroyed after the Revolution, and by the 1930s the estate had fallen into complete disrepair. The museum that opened in 1960, the centenary of Chekhov's birth, is a painstakingly built replica, on which work had begun two decades earlier. The village of Lopasnya was renamed Chekhov, and its old post office re-opened as the Museum of Chekhov's Letters. Another focus of literary pilgrimage for Chekhov fans in the Moscow region is the two-room exhibition about his time as a dachnik, housed in a pavilion in the grounds of the New Jerusalem Monastery (which was returned to the Orthodox Church in 1994, after seventy-six years of functioning as a regional museum). The exhibition has not weathered very well, but after looking at one of Chekhov's black ties, preserved for posterity behind dusty glass, at his brother Ivan's wedding pictures and his s'ster Maria's sketch book, visitors can retire to the cafe next door and sit among the potted plants, where a friendly old lady with her hair in a bun serves tea in spotted orange cups from a gleaming samovar, with a choice of cabbage or appie pies.
The cherry trees that now grow in the garden of Chekhov's birthplace in Taganrog are the descendants of saplings planted in 1928, in preparation for the opening of the house as a memorial museum. The 'Chekhov Cottage' has since become a major Hterary landmark in Taganrog, along with museums set up at Chekhov's former school and m the br lding where his father kept his grocer's shop. It was the first Chekhov museum to be opened in one of his former residences in Russia, and the street where it stands was the first in Russia to be renamed Chekhov Street in the wi ter's honour. One wonders what Chekhov would make of Taganrog in its post-Sov;et incarnation. When Andrei Sedov, a reporter for the daily newspapei Komsomoiskaya pravda, was sent from Moscow to investigate the murder of the city's mayor in November 2002, he derided that Chekhov's celebrated story 'Ward No. 6' was not only a devastating indictment of insanity and injustice in late imperial Russia, but prophet]: of conditions in early twenty-first-century Taganrog. An Izvestiya journalist on the same beat noted that Mayor Shi o, who had been preparing to celebrate twelve years of office in the week he was murdered, had been an unlikely victor at the 2000 mayoral election. Investigations into his alleged involvement in cases of embezzlement and other scandals had led to a very low rating in the op lion polls, but support from Moscow via a presidential aide, a native of Taganrog serving in the State Duma, had clearly been very helpful.
'Ward No. 6' is set in the psychiatric ward of a run-down provincial hospital, whose brutal regime resembles that of a prison rather than a place of treatment. It is an asylum in which sane people are incarcerated if they start to question the status quo too closely. One such inmate is Ivan Gromov, a sensitive and impoverished young student in the Dostoevskian mould who, one day in the street, comes across a couple of shackled convicts being marched along by four police guards. Since violence is condoned almost as an act of mercy in the town in which Gromov Lves, and the local authorities seem quite imperv ous to people's suffering, he comes to the reasonable conclus on that innocent citizens might easily be wrongly arrested, and chen starts to develop a paranoia that he too might be clapped in irons. Judges, police and doctors, he reasons, have become so mured to corruption and injustice 'that they are no different to the peasant who slaughters sheep and cattle in the backyard and does not notice the blood'. When Gromov realizes there can be no ustice in this 'filthy little town a hundred miles from the raTway' he becomes ncreas.ngly disturbed. It is no surprise, therefore, when Andre' Ragin, the doctor called out to visit him before he is committed, merely prescr ibes some drops and declares that 'people should not be prevented from going mad'. But this, ironically, is the fate meted out to Ragin when his conscience is finally awakened by Ivan's unrelenting voice of protest during lengthy conversations they hold during his ward visits. Ragin exempHfies much of the pessimistic stoicism of the second-century Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius, to whose writings Chekhov devoted much time. 'There il no log'C or morality i the fact that I am a doctor and you are insane; it's <ust pure chance,' he tells Gromov one day. Soon he too is locked up and regularly beaten by Nikita, the retired soldier employed as a guard, who uses violence to keep order in the ward. Ragin's own vigorous protest agu.nst his incarceration is an eloquent vindication of Gromov's belief that people should never just stand by when v ltness to human suffer ng; evil needs to be fought
Chekhov wrote 'Ward No. 6' when he was still under the strong impression of his visit to Sakhalin. When it was published in 1892, the story was immediately ha:,ed by the 1 beral intelligentsia as allegorical of the corruption and stifling reaction of Russian society after ten years of Alexander Ill's rule. 'Ward No. 6 is everywhere. It's Russia!' exclaimed the writer Leskov. The young Lenin felt he had been shut up in 'Ward No. 6' himself when he finished reading the story. Readers in Taganrog, meanwhile, believed with some justification that Ward No. 6 was based on their own lunatic asylum. A hundred years later it seems that, apart from extending the trolleybus line to the cemetery, Sergei Shilo's main achievement as mayor of Taganrog was the building of a new maternity hospital. It was when he went to talk to Evgenia Konopliova, director of the Chekhov Museum located in the building of Taganrog's former gymnasium, that Andrei Sedov discovered that this matern'ty hospital had been buiii r'ght opposite the asylum, which still stands to this day on the edge of town. Before the new hospital was built, he was told that mothers used to give birth in the asylum itself, so that the whole of Taganrog had actually gone through 'Ward No. 6' before even being born.3