Lutsino, named after Lucina, daughter of Jupiter and goddess of childbirth, had been associated with the biological and medical sciences since the late nineteenth century. Anton Chekhov spent the wet summer, after his graduation from Moscow University in 1884, working as a doctor in a country hospital in the nearby monastery town of Zvenigorod, whose name means ‘town of ringing bells’. His friend the painter Isaac Levitan was also working in Zvenigorod that year, rendering in paint the infinite greens of the local landscape, mixing white and gold for the meadow grass, and a shade for the opushka so dark it is almost black. The artist Maria Yakunchikova, daughter of the entrepreneurial Moscow merchant and philanthropist Vasili Yakunchikov (who financed the building of the Moscow Conservatoire), also spent summers painting near Zvenigorod. At Vvedenskoe, the noble estate that her father had acquired in the mid-1860s, Maria Yakunchikova hosted Levitan, Chekhov and the composer Tchaikovsky. In 1884, Vvedenskoe was bought by Count Sergei Sheremetev, as a dowry for his daughter Maria.
In the early 1900s, three of Chekhov’s classmates from the Faculty of Medicine acquired plots on the wooded hill above the river, where the colony now stands, and built dachas on its sandy soil. They shared the humane culture of the late-nineteenth-century Moscow intelligentsia, in which the natural sciences, liberal politics and the arts were closely integrated. This culture, which flourished in leisured conversation on small country estates, found its lasting expression in Chekhov’s life and writing. The estate of S. S. Goloushev, a well-known physician, lay furthest upriver of the three. Under his pseudonym Glagol, he published theatre and fine arts criticism in Moscow journals, and was among the first to identify Levitan’s talent, devoting two articles to the painter’s ‘Zvenigorod period’. Grigory Rossolimo’s estate occupied the highest position above the river. A pioneering child psychologist and neuropathologist, Rossolimo published articles on the ‘individuality of the child’, ‘musical talent in children’ and ‘children of the near future’. In 1922, he was summoned to Lenin’s country estate at Gorki to treat the ailing Party leader. Russia’s greatest writers, painters and musicians were among Rossolimo’s close friends; Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Konstantin Balmont, Tchaikovsky and the painter Valentin Serov were guests at his home. Chekhov, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Teffi read their work at his soirées.
Rossolimo’s stepson and heir Sergei Skadovsky, a hydrobiologist and founder of the ‘new science’ of physico-chemical biology, married the daughter of N. S. Speransky, a professor of dermatology, the third of Chekhov’s contemporaries, the original Lutsino dachniki. Skadovsky was known for his acting skills. Once, when he read one of Chekhov’s short stories aloud, the writer Mikhail Bulgakov told him to drop biology and head for the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1910 Skadovsky purchased a large piece of the remaining land and founded a private hydrobiological station, with several laboratories dedicated to the study of freshwater organisms. The Biostation, as it is now known, later became part of Moscow University, and a centre for Russian genetic science. Of the buildings that burned down in the winter months of 1941, when the Red Army faced the Germans on the opposite bank of the river, some were later rebuilt, including Rossolimo’s dacha, No. 37 in the present colony, where his descendents still live. Only the lime trees, the tennis courts, the gateposts and a woodland stream named after Chekhov remain of the original estate. Skadovsky is buried in the cemetery on the hill behind Nina’s dacha.
Within months of the war’s end, Stalin decreed that, as reward for their contribution to the victory over Hitler, Russia’s most eminent professors and academicians should be given summer homes designed by Alexei Schusev (architect of the Lenin Mausoleum and many other Moscow landmarks) with rights of ownership, in the loveliest parts of the Moscow region. To the lasting pride of their owners, the dachas, all alike, were made up in Finland, placed at irregular angles on the contoured land among the trees by German prisoners of war, and fitted with East German sanitary ware. A few years later, more dachas were built for scientists who had contributed to the development of the Soviet atomic bomb. There was once a sculpture in the colony of Lenin seated on a bench, his head turned towards the standing figure of Stalin. Stalin’s greatcoat lay along the back of the bench. Mariana Rebinder has kept the letter to her father of July 1950 announcing the order by Sergei Vavilov, President of the Academy of Sciences, instructing the dachniki to deposit five hundred roubles in the colony kassa or the Zvenigorod branch of Gosbank within a week to pay for the sculpture of their leaders. After Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the XXth Party Congress in 1956, Stalin was removed, leaving Lenin with the greatcoat and the mysterious trace of a single jackboot. Thirty years later, the sculpture disappeared altogether, unlamented.
The Biostation, a more charming and enduring relic of another time, is carelessly preserved, but still loved by the dachniki. I skied to it one cold day in late February. The sky was deep unbroken blue. The snow had become heavy on the groined branches of the firs, which had lost their mournful aspect in the brilliance of the sunshine. Bare white birch trunks gleamed among them. Occasionally, a gentle wind picked up the snow from the trees and blew it, sparkling, into the air. At the water tower, which stands tall above the treetops on rusted iron legs, two of the colony dogs came out, exhilarated by the frost, to lead me along the road with their tails aloft. Where the snow was deep they would canter into it, playfighting, the sandy mongrel biting the neck of the stud-collared Alsatian until he was barked into submission. I stopped at the colony’s roadside notice-board to catch up on the latest turns in the great dispute between factions in the Academy of Sciences about the property rights of the dachniki. (Mariana Rebinder was deeply involved in the intricate politics of the colony, which reflected the wider politics of the nation, in which issues of property seethe unresolved.) A public meeting had been announced for Saturday evening in the garden of one of the dachas. A tough-looking old woman in an astrakhan coat was clearing the snow from her driveway; a few elderly dachniki in Soviet winter coats with beaver collars and felt boots were out walking in the thrilling silence of the morning. The dachas showed their colours in the purity of the winter light: palest yellow green, turquoise, golden ochre and ash pink. Further along were some new brick houses, but the wooden dachas were more unkempt, unpainted, with broken fences and woodsheds in rot and disarray. Combs of icicles hung from their corrugated iron roofs, crooked fangs, five feet long. Smoke came from the chimney of Skadovsky’s dacha, the last property before the Biostation. A sign on its iron gates – bearing its emblem, a woodpecker on a pine trunk – forbade unauthorised entry, but there was no one about, so I skied in and down the steep hill in the deepening snow, among the green-painted dormitory buildings. Their windows were dark, hung with torn nylon curtains; some had panes of glass missing. The WC huts leaned awkwardly in the snow, their doors swinging open, almost off their hinges. I followed the narrow winding path down to the river, uneasy on my skis in the deep drifts among the trees. The Lower Dachas of the Biostation occupy a secluded bend in the river. The dilapidated buildings, half buried in snow, told of summers past and the companionable pleasures of biological research. A Lada van lay rusting behind a half-collapsed shed with a ladder leading up to a hayloft. There was a row of iron huts, different sizes, in corroding shades of blue and green, and tanks mounted on platforms with pipes and taps. In the centre of this seemingly haphazard ensemble was a large wooden building with tables and benches in front of it, facing a smaller three-sided structure housing a mangal grill.