Author: Carol Apollonio, Ph.D. (Page 4 of 4)

It was too good to be true: a whole “kupe” in the train to myself: three empty bunks and me: 11 hours–Ekaterinburg to Tobolsk. Open the nice fresh packet with crisp sheets and pillowcase, shake them out, make your bed, read a few pages of Daniel Beers’ The House of the Dead, and ahhhh, sink into blessed silence. It is 1:00 am after all. The rocking of the train, the clicking of the wheels, reverie, blissful sleep….

…. suddenly thuds, clanks, growls, and slams. It is 4:00 a.m. I keep my eyes closed–not hard to do, really, at that hour–and anyway, it’s better not to see. Gruff, booming male voices, something about the window, a crank  (the one directly over my head) is not working, and for some mysterious reason, it is an emergency and must be fixed now, at 4:00 a.m.  A tool has to be borrowed immediately from the provodnitsa. Tromping footsteps to her booth at the other end of the train car, and then back.  Clangs and hammering noises. Blurts of commentary, grunts.  This problematic window latch is the one right over my head, did I already say that?

Why do you need to fix your train-car window at 4:00 am?  It’s not your train, you are here for one day, and then you will be gone forever. The temperature in the train is nice, actually, quite tolerable. Soon the sun will rise and people will be awake and you will be able to see your surroundings, and to fix anything that you feel needs fixing. And just curious, do you notice that someone is “sleeping” in this bunk over here? Just curious. More bangs and grunts. Finally, one last click followed by contented murmurs.

Now begins an incessant and raucous shuffling of plastic grocery bags; things seem to be being taken out and put back in. The bags have to be rolled and crumpled up noisily by a minimum of three different people. I guess they have to get it just right. There is some discussion of jam (varenie), and some jar noises. Something is being drunk and slurped. Hello people, it’s a sleeping car on a train, and it’s 4:00, no wait, wait, 4:30 a.m. and there IS someone sleeping here. What card to play: feeble old lady? Mommy’s mad? Be a foreigner?  Oh wait, hey, how about the long-suffering model of Russian womanhood? She just takes it in with grace and forgiveness. That one is the least effort. Just lie there.  Grace and forgiveness.

I am beginning to understand Russia.

There’s some additional shuffling and tossing of things, and eventually, silence.

You wake up  nervously at 7 and consider your surroundings. The entire four-person kupe is the size of one queen-size bed; you are lying on one side of it, and on the other side, separated by a small table, lies an extremely large 40-something male in a blue-and-white wife-beater (yes, that is the correct term) that doesn’t completely cover his belly. When he sits up, grunting, I see, first and foremost, a very deep, fresh scar over his right eye. Disheveled hair, stubble. There’s a sort of low rumble of breathing, something like what you imagine a bear to sound like. This is the guy I can see–two others are large mounds in the upper bunks making sleep noises.

OK fine.  I’m not a morning person but what is to be done (chto delat’)?  Good morning (dobroe utro). Good morning back at me.  He gestures around the kupe, sort of fixing on my bunk. “Nichego!” he rasps.

Forty years I’ve studied this language. I think, uh, is he saying it’s a nice kupe or a bad one? I’ve been in worse ones, but I sure have seen better. The last one I was in had a plug where you could charge your device, and it was cleaner (kind of like this picture, which I stole off the internet). There was a nice, quiet girl in the bunk above, and she had an adorable fluffy cat in a cat case. And the other two bunks were empty. And the curtain rod stayed up in that kupe. And they provided a toothbrush! Anyway, I say, vaguely, “da, nichego” and give a brave, friendly grin.

And I will never know what we actually said to each other.

You are not in danger on a Russian sleeping train (I tell myself). They don’t even let people drink alcohol on them any more! But if you bring your American notions of personal space, you are doomed. Ponder the thought: what’s so great about privacy, anyway?  And when you think about it, big scary guys are nothing more than ordinary little boys who, with the flow of time, got big. It won’t last long; they will start shrinking soon, and sagging downwards. And in this moment you have a choice: you can huddle up and mope; you can scream and yell. You can kind of be like the mommy, or, as may be becoming the case in my case, the grandma. But in any case, you can’t change anything so why not just let everything wash over you and see where you fit in?

When the train finally reaches Tobolsk, my sleeping companion lurches up off his bunk, grabs one of my suitcases, and rolls it to the exit for me.

I do not know his name. I am grateful for his help.  I will never see him again.

On the platform, a sea of eighty or so rough-looking guys who have stepped off the train stand around smoking. I see a total of three women: one young lady in a short dress and extremely high heels and another one with her, less put together, who gives the feel of a minion or loyal attendant or the orphan girl who was taken in by distant relatives. And there’s one middle-aged woman with a family.

I am the fourth female. Looking around, it occurs to me that what I am doing is actually pretty strange. Who gets on trains in Moscow with the goal of tracing the steps of Russian classical writers across Siberia? But then in life, if you think about it, some of what everyone does is strange. Some people spend their whole lives staring into a small, flat box. They even stare into it when walking down the street. They talk to it, waving their arms in the air and grimacing. They stand with their backs to a cliff and hold the little box out in front of them and grin into it, while backing up. They do not look up, or back. And their whole life runs through that little box.

So I thought, I’ll just barrel through Kazan and be on my way; Chekhov actually didn’t visit the city, and rumor has it, when his boat passed by on the Volga, he was asleep. So like him, I figured, why stop?

Oh-ho-ho…

The view of the Kazan Kremlin from the river is breathtaking.  It’s not the sort of scene Chekhov ever described, of course; his tastes for landscape shunned the spectacular and just distilled everything down to a single glinting detail. And of course my bratty phone (Huawei, I repeat, H-U-A-W-E-I) can’t handle this image (not to mention the other things it can’t handle. Is it too much to ask that it should actually ring when people call me, or not go randomly into “safe” mode to shield me from my own data?). I’m posting this photo just to prove that on occasion I can click on that little circle on the screen. Any flaws in the photo are the phone’s fault.

My digital assistant and involuntary travel companion is starting to remind me of Oblomov’s slatternly servant Zakhar. Let us review.

Oblomov lies prone, observes things and thinks, and Zakhar’s job is to take care of his master’s bodily needs (like put on his boots, feed him, wipe his nose, neaten up the bed linen–the hardest task, because Oblomov never gets up–shake the dust off things, remove, empty, and replace the little pot thing under the bed that Russian writers never mention ).

As models of codependency go (thunder and lightning, Bert and Ernie, the Bunkers, “interdisciplinarity” and deans, T—p and P—n, ), no one comes close to Oblomov and Zakharov.

“Zakhar!” shouts Oblomov from the divan.

A loud grumbling, a thud.  “Zakhar reentered but Oblomov straightaway sank into a reverie.  Zakhar stood there a couple minutes, eying his master from one side with covert resentment, then made for the door.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ asked Oblomov suddenly.

‘You aren’t saying anything, so what is the point of standing here?’ rasped Zakhar, for lack of a different voice, which, he claimed, he had lost when the old master had taken him out hunting with the hounds in a strong headwind.

He stood in the middle of the room, half turned, looking sideways at Oblomov.

‘What, your legs have withered off, you can’t stand a few minutes? Can’t you see I’m busy here worrying–just wait a bit! Been lazing around in there, haven’t you? Find the letter I got yesterday from the elder. Where did you put it?’

‘What letter? I haven’t seen any letter,’ said Zakhar.

‘You’re the one who got it from the mailman: it was all dirty!’

‘How am I supposed to know where it is?’ said Zakhar, batting at the papers and sundry items lying on the table.

‘You never know anything. Look over there, in the basket! Or maybe it fell behind the divan? The back  is still not repaired; what would it take for you to call the carpenter and get it fixed? You’re the one who broke it after all; you can’t think of anything!’

‘I didn’t break it,’ answered Zakhar. ‘It broke on its own; it can’t last forever; it was bound to break sometime.’

Off he set for his room, but the moment he braced his hand on his pallet so as to hop up onto it, again there came an urgent shout, ‘Zakhar, Zakhar!'”

The best vocabulary here (“reentered, straightaway, reverie, covert resentment, pallet”...), I have taken from C.J. Hogarth’s translation. http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/iag/oblomov.htm]; the rest is my fault.

Now it’s time for deep thoughts about how Oblomov is the mind, and Zakhar is the body, of a divided Russian people during the waning days of serfdom. We could move on from there to how I, too, am Oblomov needing someone like Zakharov to take care of basic things, my thoughts bouncing along like a helium balloon (Why do human beings hurt one another? Why was I even born? Is justice possible?), my body down here wishing that I could get the bathroom door in the hostel to lock and hoping not to accidentally toss my passport in the trash. Of course, no small function of your minion is to take the blame when things go wrong. This is why my photo of the Kazan Kremlin falls so far short of the original.

As all photos, btw, must.

Now you need to know that even if Chekhov had been awake he would not have seen those towers there, to the left of that tall brick spire. That is the mosque, built in 2005 to celebrate the city’s 1000th anniversary (a date, I understand, that is fuzzy–which actually is fine with me).

But still: if someone had thought to wake Chekhov up, he would have gone buggy eyed, and possibly would have renounced his restrained poetics for something exuberant and decided to stay here. I admit, during my manic four days here in Kazan, the thought occurred to me. But the catch is, they don’t need a Chekhov scholar in this town. They already have one, and one of the best, Professor Lia Bushkanets of Kazan Federal University.

Lia is a dynamo, a department chair, a prolific scholar and educator with publications and a teaching portfolio in a whole range of fields, including second- language acquisition, Russian literature, education, social media and communication. During her free time this August she dashed off four articles….Kazan already has a me squared, so I will have to settle for a short, but action-packed visit.

This visit includes (of the things I remember):

the Aksyonov museum, churches, mosques, belltowers, and monasteries, museums in the university itself, the art museum and the Tatarstan history museum in the Kremlin, the original gateway to Siberia, the place where prisoners were sent on their way into   Siberian exile, old wooden houses, the old Tatar settlement,

an Irish pub, the Temple of All Religions, a concert of gifted child musicians, a street concert of Tatar folk music, the “wedding chashka,” a dragon-fronted monstrosity on the other side of the Kazanka,

a drive (with the kind and patient Leonid, of Lia) to a luminous, quiet convent at dusk, bubble tea; Raifskii Monastery (where a man–a monk, I think–and a cat come out together to ring the bells…

You can see the string leading from his hand upward to the bell. The cat stayed with him until he finished, and then they walked quietly away.

…Speaking of animals, it’s been Animal Day in Kazan:

…an entire Island called Sviazhsk, with a restored 17-th century village and more churches and monasteries, and did I mention the Museum of Soviet Style? The closest I’ve ever seen to this extraordinary collection of items from the late Soviet period is the Banjo Museum in Oklahoma City, but there it was just banjos, and they were presented in neat, precise rows…

Why use an ordinary “WC” sign when these will do?

No, sorry, actually it’s not like the Banjo Museum at all. There’s nothing like this anywhere on earth. Ask Rustem Valiakhmetov, the mastermind, about it…And you will agree with everything he says.

Where was I?

Oh, the manuscript division of the Kazan library…wait, we have to take a break here, because my head is exploding.

If I look a little shell-shocked here between, on the left, the person in charge of the manuscripts in the library, and on the right, Lia,  it’s because I’ve just seen a 15-th  century Torah manuscript, written on parchment made from almost three dozen, was it, goatskins, thirty-three meters long and rolled up, next to its ark, one of only two of this vintage that are intact sets, just kind of casually lying in a glass-topped drawer, next to, one of the first printed Korans ever, bound proofs of books by suchlike as Radishchev, with the authors’ corrections, one of the world’s first atlases–a thrilling monster that opens out onto, page after page, a most whimsical vision of the entire planet. We take a minute to locate the place that would now be identified as North Carolina.  It features a cute deer illustration, though the geography will not look familiar.

But onward! Onward into the actual book part of the Kazan library, one of Russia’s biggest and most important libraries, and one with an extraordinary history. Many of its treasures were taken to off to St. Petersburg or Moscow, where you cannot see them as they are locked away. But in Kazan I saw, just casually sitting on a shelf, book number 1 in the library’s original catalogue. The 1 was written right there on the spine, and under this book lay number 2, and then number 3. All the other books in the library come after that. This number 1 book is a monstrous thing that could have been an encyclopedia.  I learned, with unseemly joy, that the first books were catalogued by their SIZE (biggest first) not such trivia as author name or title.

Kazan University is filled with the spirit of Nikolai Lobachevsky, YES, YES, THE Lobachevsky of non-Euclidian geometry, and I knew, just knew, Dostoevsky would get a shout-out here.  A great genius (both of them), but we cannot stop!

The university classrooms….

If you’re wishing you could catch a glimpse of these treasures, blame my little tormentor, who shut down completely at this moment.

Tolstoy and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin, on the left) were two of the most famous dropouts in world history. And it happened in Kazan.  Tolstoy “studied” Oriental languages here, then law, then off he went–but not after being incarcerated in the kartser for non-attendance of lectures. This grim place (though not as grim as where Dostoevsky would be heading in a few years) was on the second story of the hall where the university chapel was located. From outside it is down a ways, then up. Another key location in the university is what was formerly the clinic, where Tolstoy was treated for, uh…

Where were we?  Now Chekhov–still asleep on that passing boat–cherished a dream through much of his life of becoming a professor. If you’re one in the US, you will probably snicker–why the world’s greatest prose writer and playwright want that? Тhen Lia takes you into a small classroom that has been kept in its original configuration from the 19th century. Rows of benches and desks. A raised lectern in front, facing them. I learn that all the students must enter (in their student uniforms) from a door in the back and sit at the desks before the professor enters–from a different door so as not to be soiled.  When he enters, in his professor uniform, they leap to their feet in unison and stand in cowed respect. The professor then sits regally at the lectern and reads to them from his notes. If the students don’t attend class, they are basically imprisoned on bread and water (see Tolstoy above) for a period of time in the university’s main building. The students write down, word for word, what the professor says. We don’t have this stuff in US universities, but it might be worth trying.

As I was saying, word on the street is that Chekhov did hope to get a PhD and be an academic, which may have been one reason he went on this trip that I’m on. He doesn’t seem to be the type to want students to leap to their feet at the very sight of him, but a smidge of this has to be irresistible.

Another Chekhov glimpse came to me like a gift in the Kazar Khanate history exhibit in one of the Kremlin museums. I had so wanted to go to see Valentina and Sergei in Ufa, and maybe go for the Bashkir kumys cure (fermented mare’s milk), as Chekhov had on his “honeymoon,” but just couldn’t manage the logistics, an 11-hour bus trip off the tran-Siberian. So no kumys for me, and serves me right, I thought. But at the end of a excursion devoted to the lifestyle of the khans, they brought out a little tray for the guests, though, it felt, just for me. It tasted like sharp, thin yogurt. And I’m pretty sure it will have some good health effects in the arduous days to come. In short, one of my wishes for this trip came true.  Though I still want to go to Ufa.

In or near Kazan lived at various times, take a breath, I’m going to try to be alphabetical, Aksakov, Aksyonov, Baratynsky, Derzhavin, Gorky, Herzen,  Pasternak (what’s 100 kilometers when you’re in Siberia?), Pushkin, the singer Shalyapin, the painter Shishkin, Tolstoy of course, young Ulyanov, and many many many many many many more.

These Tolstoy statues are everywhere, they’re like flies. Over the past few days I’ve realized that if you see a bust or statue of a man with a big beard and a fierce look, chances are over 90% that this is Tolstoy. But never a young one! Hey, Kazan…?

Tolstoy came to Kazan at the age of nine with his brothers and sister after his father died, orphaning them. They moved in with an aunt, who also died.  On my first day in town, I sleuthed out the address of the house where they lived and went for a visit. If you look closely, you will see that both doors–the little one, for people, and the big one, for horse carts, are tightly shut,

despite a sign on the door saying the house was open on weekends (which, indeed, this was). Clearly, with Tolstoy, I needed help.

Now here’s where Lia comes in, big time. Off we went the next day on a Tolstoy walk. First, the house where he lived when a student (this being the third one he lived in in Kazan, with his brother). Not a museum, just a house that is still standing. A plaque:

My slave takes a couple of pictures with no sign of rebellion. And a man comes out, wondering what we’re doing, and Lia works her magic, and we’re in! The house now serves as an event space. But Tolstoy left some molecules here (invisible ones).

Then it’s off to that house that I had tried the day before.  More magic: all doors open to Lia:

It is sort of a museum, and sort of not, and belongs to the school next door. Anyway, basically,  and again, we have the place to ourselves. The house where the orphaned, traumatized five Tolstoy children were taken in by their aunt, Tolstoy’s first house in Kazan, where he grew and studied, and had experiences, and thought, and began brewing those amazing books to come.

First, though, he had to enroll in Kazan University, and learn that he was not a man to be taught, but one to learn himself, and eventually, to teach.

Oh, did I mention that when I asked about Tolstoy addresses, Lia just basically handed me a book her father (a Kazan University professor himself) wrote, and she edited, entitled: “Юность Льва Толстого. Казанские годы.” Lev Tolstoy’s Youth: The Kazan years.  It’s all in there, everything I want to know. Is this fairyland? Are ALL my wishes going to come true?

Read on…

We walk to another Tolstoy house, where he lived in between these two. And did I mention Aksyonov’s house? Meaning, Vasily Aksyonov’s aunt’s house, which is where the boy (later one of the most famous emigre writers) was raised after his parents were arrested (his father, and his mother, Eugenia Ginzburg,  who wrote the greatest Gulag memoir of all, Journey Into the Whirlwind (Крутой маршрют)–go read it NOW. Yes, we met the strong, kind, brilliant, selfless people who care for this museum.

There are other houses too, and there are places where spirits hover, where houses used to be. The physical spaces are lovingly cared for by human beings, our beloved muzeishchiki. These places, which seem on the outside to be just physical buildings, are vessels for the human spirit. Tolstoy needed a roof over his head, and walls. And we’re glad he did.

Oh, and I was on TV too.  Lia’s program, “Who’s Come to Visit?” on “Univer” TV (If you say it out loud, it’s a cool sort of pun).

Fortunately Lia took good care of me and prevented any meltdowns (at least any that I’d  be aware of).

What I have loved most of all in this, and in all my conversations with colleagues here, is the intensity of their respect for their literature, and their realization that what they do matters, their dedication to the mission of education, as the most important way culture and history are passed on.  They get craft, and tradition, and pedagogy, and culture, and they get that this is work.

Now is time for you to reread Chekhov’s story “In the Cart.”  Don’t worry, it’s short. I will wait.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Journey_By_Cart

***

As you can see, a lot can happen in four days, and more, too.

Who did we forget? Tons of people. Dostoevsky, for example, came through Kazan on his way back to European Russia after prison and exile. He spent ten days here reading books. And where is Chekhov in this one? Slept through it all.

There was so much excitement in the Chekhov Post office that I didn’t feel I could go on. How seductive it would have been to sink down on that bench under the old post box inside and spend the afternoon there brewing thoughts. Mostly about how all writing is really just a subset of letters to friends.

Not all writing, not the stuff you have to send to your lawyer or boss, or applications, reports, recommendations, tax returns,  appeals,  parking ticket appeals [ahem, Duke], and the like. The hell of it all is that now these kinds of things have to be done on some sadistic corporation’s “easy to use” online platform.  Some people around here (and by now, “here” is a dingy hostel in Kazan, Tatarstan) would prefer to write their blog in pen in one of those wonderful vinyl Russian notebooks with graph-paper grids, embellishing it with little drawings and smiley faces, with tickets, postcards, and other riffraff scotch-taped in.

Once we’ve taken care of all the unpleasant and practical writing that we have to do to ensure we stay employed, or don’t get thrown into jail or put out to debt collectors, that kind of stuff, then it’s time to do the good kind of writing, fiction, say, or letters to friends. And it turns out that there is some joy in embracing the fact that you are writing to friends–even if you don’t know them.

Now if I had followed my instincts to stay on that bench there in the Chekhov Letters Museum, I would maybe have had some deep thoughts, even sublime ones, but at the same time I would have been turning myself over to organic forces of inertia, gravity and decay. These forces are more than real; they are in fact Russian literature’s great master plot (and possibly the source of its inspiration).  Oblomov lies in the grass, doing what he does best, which is nothing, and watches ants rushing to and from the anthill. “What a lot of rushing around!” he thinks, “On the outside everything is so quiet and peaceful.” And the invisible microbes in his body bustle about their work, bloating him, digesting him, sending him downward, down, down into the earth.

Gogol and Goncharov and Chekhov and the rest of them are fully aware of the appeal of letting yourself go to seed. It’s not all dark and depressing–something in that inertial state allows you to appreciate the fullness of life (though of course there’s always going to be an asterisk for Gogol). And  vodka fits in here somewhere.  But they are also aware that unless we get up off our butt and go out and build shelter, plow the fields and cook food, we’re not going to have anything to eat, and we will die.  So our activeness represents a struggle against the inertial forces of nature, or, dare I say,  Thanatos.

Chekhov was a contemplator (he spent a lot of time fishing, for example).

And many of his stories depict people who can’t get anything done. But he was also a doer, and for now let us just mention that he was one of the great gardeners in world literature.

For reverberations, paste this link into your browser:

http://antonchekhovfoundation.org/garden.html

So when the van pulls up to the Letters Museum, I get up off the bench and we (a small delegation from Duke)

head to Chekhov’s house in Melikhovo.

Кonstantin Bobkov, the director of the museum, treats us and Zhenia Bovshik (of the letters museum) to tea, and then we stroll the grounds. “What a lot of rushing around!” we think. During his few years at Melikhovo (1892-98 basically), Chekhov expanded the estate’s pond and stocked it with fish, treated sick peasants, built schools, cultivated medicinal plants, volunteered for the census, wrote great works of literature…

   

.

Having asked about farm animals, with much excitement I learn that there is a stable on the grounds, where people can ride.

This beautiful horse is named Lolita. There are ponies too.

A high point is a visit to the tiny house where Chekhov wrote The Seagull.

If you look up, you will see that an image of this very special place heads up our blog.   Let’s call it the Seagull Fleagull (fligel’ being the Russian word for this kind of building). The sign says “My house, where The Seagull was written.  Chekhov.” At this point my hand was shaking so much that the photo came out jiggly.

The Fleagull was closed to the public on the day of our visit, but Zhenia had worked her magic and we headed toward the door. On the way we threaded through a bustling family from an unnamed foreign country: mother, father, three small boys, and a grandmother-like person. The family had just learned the building was closed, and was expressing deep anguish, an emotion that spilled over into righteous indignation when they realized our little group was being admitted. Kindness prevailed and we all piled in, filling the little hallway between the house’s two rooms completely. At this point the youngest boy, an adorable (up to that moment) little blond, flopped to the floor and began flailing his arms and legs and shrieking. Recall Pussy Riot in the Christ the Savior Cathedral.  A struggle ensued (with the parents) and the sobbing child was escorted out in disgrace. The museum workers remained calm and even smiled indulgently.

And Chekhov’s room  filled with silence.

Here in Moscow I find myself in what we can only call a blog jam.  Lots of exciting experiences have been piling up, and just when you think it’s time to clean house and shlep everything over here into “Chekhov’s Footprints,” something else exciting happens and what, you’re going to ignore it? And so things just get even more clogged up.

I guess this is kind of what real writers grapple with, I mean actual writers like Chekhov and Dostoevsky, not feeble, blocked imitators with a P card. On 18 (30) September 1863, Dostoevsky writes from Italy to  his colleague back in Russia, Nikolai Strakhov.  As usual he’s asking for money and sort of promising a novel (which, at this point, exists only in his mind):

“I even was about to start writing, but it’s impossible here. It’s hot, and 2nd-ly, I have come to a place like Rome for one week; how can one write during this week, in Rome? Plus I get really tired from all the walking.”

Truly, are you going to crawl into a basement in ROME and write that novel during your one week there? Or are you going to give up and look around some more? Anyway: when in Moscow…

Speaking of blocks, I read a great Vanity Fair article a couple of years ago about an American writer (you know his name but I’m a bit fuzzy on it at the moment) who had a terrible block, couldn’t get down to writing up a huge, months-long journalism project whose deadline was careening his way.  The magazine had given him an advance, and was paying for all his travel and hotels. The night before the deadline, nothing. So the writer makes a contrite call to his editor, thinking it’s over–the article, the career, and plus, how’s he going to pay back all those hotel and bar bills? The editor tells him just to write it all down in a personal letter to him, and to forget it’s an article on deadline. And the writer sits down and writes the whole huge thing overnight like a letter, and meets his deadline, and becomes super famous.

(Sidebar: editors deserve way more credit than they ever get.)

But of course the point here is letters. Maybe we should look at everything we write basically as letters. If you’re not trying to communicate with someone, after all, why are you writing? Think of who your reader might be, and ideally it’s more than just that one scary and distant person who might decide whether to publish it. And yes of course, this applies to tweets too, and all that other stuff people are doing out there, that you have to be cool to know about.

Now as for Chekhov, his letters are masterpieces like his fiction and drama. And though we usually don’t give this fact much thought, much of what he wrote went through the postal service–not just letters. When Chekhov was looking for a place to live outside Moscow in 1891, one of his criteria was that there be a post office.  He bought Melikhovo (bear with me a couple of minutes here) near the town of Lopasnya, and though it did have rudimentary mail delivery, there wasn’t really an actual post office.  So one of Chekhov’s countless “service” activities–cholera and famine relief, providing free medical care to peasants, volunteering in the 1897 census, donating to libraries, giving scholarships and schoolbooks to students, mentoring beginning writers, and many many more–as I was saying, one of his service activities was to establish a post office in Lopasnya. And this came to pass.

The post office–the actual building–has become a charming museum in the town of,

wait for it, ….

…the town of Chekhov, Russia.

If you’re a sports fan, you should know that the town of Chekhov (formerly Lopasnya) breeds fearsome, Olympic-caliber handball players. In fact, many know Chekhov

(the town, that is, not the metro station, the street, the theater, the statue, the mini-hotel, the bar, the cafe, or the writer)

better as the Handball Capital of Russia, and the home of the fighting “Chekhov Bears.” Take one short minute to watch this informative little masterpiece:

Тhe  A.P. Chekhov Letters Museum is in the energetic and capable hands of Evgenia Evgenievna Bovshik,  who can tell you all kinds of fascinating things about the history of the Russian postal service (from pre-literate town criers to peasant yamshchiki carrying birchbark documents, to the relay service resembling our US Pony Express, to the system of post offices that extended all across Russia.

One of these people is not real, but extremely convincing, and the other runs the museum. I was particularly struck by the photo behind them of Lopasnya during Chekhov’s time. The town square was in fact a very busy place, as you can see even from where you are at this moment, though you would not suspect that from reading Chekhov’s letters and stories.

The postal service gets many shout-outs in Chekhov’s letters; clearly it was efficient and reliable, and he often received money through the post. Now by the time the Lopasnya post office opened, Chekhov had had to leave Melikhovo for climates more hospitable to his health. But his efforts were instrumental in bringing it into being. There’s the postman’s desk and supplies, the counter where he would serve customers, and a multitude of intriguing objects, documents, and photos from Chekhov’s time.

Not only does the museum give a tangible feeling of what the post office was like at the end of the 19th century, when it came into being; it is actually a functioning post office.  One member of the two-person editorial team that produced the book Chekhov’s Letters was able, during this visit, to write a postcard, stamp it, actually cancel the stamp with an official Russian stamp, and deposit it in a real, official Russian blue post box outside.

The Post Office is just a short walk from the town’s train station. After visiting it, you can hop in a van and make your way along smooth paved streets to Chekhov’s estate of Melikhovo, 12 kilometers away. During the ride you recall that during Chekhov’s time there, the street you’re on now was a crude tract; it snowed over in the winter, and was a muddy mess for much of the spring and fall; getting from the station to Melikhovo was an arduous and unpleasant ordeal. But, as visitors inevitably reported, and as I will report at some time, it was worth it.

You think you’ve come to Uglich on the Volga to see the site where the poor little Prince Dmitry was savagely murdered on May 15, 1591, provoking Pushkin to write a tragedy about it (Boris Godunov), eventually.

And indeed you see the site, the porch of the building where he lived his short life:

That’s him there. The fatal steps are on the right. Dmitry is a saint now, and after a few years here, his body was taken to Moscow, where it is buried in the, uh, Archangel Cathedral in the Kremlin. Go see it.

Right here on these steps stood the doomed little 8-year-old prince with his nanny and mom, when….(…but no, I can’t, it’s too horrible….google it)…but you can see the whole story on the frescoes in the 17-th-century church dedicated to his memory, the Church of St. Dmitry on the Blood here in Uglich. Naturally the locals’ version differs considerably from that of the murderers, who, according to our guide Galina, claimed that he accidentally stabbed himself to death during an epileptic fit. Um…

But no, you are actually here in Uglich to figure out what’s going on with your brand-new Russian mobile phone. You put it on your windowsill on the ship and suddenly a church tower rises up out of the Volga:

That kind of weird Russian stuff. Plus it won’t text or access the internet, or send photos or anything (And don’t even ask where THIS photo came from).

I’d like the miraculous church-tower pictures PLUS the usual phone services, please

Across from the extremely tempting watch and linen stores (the Chaika factory is in Uglich!!) and a bit up the street is the Beeline cell-phone store. Inside, Olga and Venera (yes, that’s on her name tag) helpfully show you how to turn on the network button (ahem), and the phone makes delightful little dings. And they show me how to check how much data I have used. Despite the threatening messages I’ve been receiving about how I’m out of my original zone and there might be extra charges, I have used absolutely none of my allotted data. Life is good. Oh…

Ah…

It is so pleasant in here. But something is twitching quietly in my memory, a Chekhov thing. Do my newest friends know whether Anton Pavlovich Chekhov might have visited this little town? Well yes, now that you ask, his brother Mikhail lived right here in Uglich. Holy @#$%&*. There is a nice old full-on babushka in the store, complete with the scarf and cloth bag. Is the house standing? Why yes it is! 7 minute-walk from …. (I’m thinking, why did I spend all that time fingering Chaika watches and linen tablecloths? The boat leaves in 40 minutes)…

But Mikhail Chekhov’s house!?!?!?!  Just down Spasskaya Street?!?!?  A mad dash for the shop door.

But what is this story without Olga and Venera and the babushka?  I turn back, rush in the store…..The babushka is gone.

Off in a Beeline (“билайн”, хи, хи, хи, xи, хи)…

oh…

…down Spasskaya Street! The boat is at the pier BEHIND ME.  In my brain: how much would it cost for me to pay an Uglichian to drive me to Moscow later?

30 minutes to departure.

But what is all this when you’re hot on a Chekhov’s trail? Run, run, run. There’s a monastery at the end of Spasskaya Street:

Oh, and oh, and oh! and OH!

Bingo. Here at, uh, 15, actually, I think sort of,….17, Spasskaya St., lived Mikhail Pavlovich Chekhov, the youngest brother of Anton, when he worked in Uglich as a, um, tax (податный) inspector between 1894 and 1898. And married Olga Vladykina, and worked to establish a free public library. He lived over the arch, says the plaque.

Well, Anton must have visited here. I’ll check later. For now I’ll just breathe some of this air.

 

This is what Mikhail’s courtyard sort of looked like (though 130 years have passed, it feels like the real thing).

OK: this inevitably is turning into a Dostoevsky thing. How could it not? St. Petersburg is Dostoevsky’s city. Here he lived in a series rented apartments, including, once in the 1840s and again at the end of his life, between 1878 and 1881 here at Kuznetsky Pereulok 5, 2. You enter by going down a few stairs, then up. This is a paradigm you can apply for reading all of his works, by the way.

Here, after decades of studying Dostoevsky, and if you are lucky, you will spend some time with Boris Tikhomirov, Deputy Director of the Museum.  Listen and learn. Boris knows more about Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg than any other human being. He knows the city’s 19th-century residence records, weather reports, public and private places, utilities, colors, sounds….He walks me through the apartment.  His knowledge pours out in an exhilarating torrent of facts, dates, names, and addresses, delivered in the fastest Russian I have ever heard.  I wish I had bigger ears. We thread through clumps of museum visitors, who drop their earphones in wonder. Your brain explodes. Dostoevsky’s hat!  The doorbell! Anna Grigorevna’s stenography!

Let us stop here. A single page under glass, filled with a mystifying cluster of letters and symbols. Turns out, there were stenography systems, but within them stenographers developed their own idiosyncratic methods. This takes me back to my own stenography days. When I was beginning my work as a contract interpreter for the State Department in the early 1990s, Joe Mozur, friend, colleague, mentor, and fellow interpreter, gave me a quaint stenography manual for secreteries, probably from the 1950s or 60s. For the work we did, which was mostly consecutive, we needed to listen, take notes, and then produce the interpretation from the notes. From the manual Joe gave me I learned tricks for abbreviating letters into squiggles. Skip the vowels! A wavy line will do for “tion”! Mix in Minyar-Beloruchev’s manual for Russian consecutive interpreters, add in some smiley faces, arrows and exclamation points, convenient Japanese hiragana and kanji, and presto–your own system. MInyar-Beloruchev is insistent about spacing your notes across the page to reflect not only the words, but also the logic of the text, its syntax. So my notes looked kind of like an outline for something, lots of white space with wavy lines connecting clusters of symbols. Anna Grigorevna’s page is neat and square: the symbols flow linearly, left to right, then left to right again. Nice straight margins. Stenography in your own language aims to capture and retain every word so that you can transcribe it later to obtain a precise record of what was said.  Before “dictophones” this was the only way to do it. For taking dictation in one language, stenography was based in phonetics. From the abbreviation of the sound, the word emerges naturally. But for interpreters between languages, the  more you move away from phonetics into symbols, the more effectively and quickly you will be able to move into the target language.

I’m down memory lane. But really, I could spend hours just gazing at one page of Anna Grigorevna’s notes.  Think what emerged from them: the world’s greatest novels… Boris explains how, after careful work comparing documents, a scholar was able to decipher her system. Think Rosetta Stone (the real one).  Panning back into the apartment, and into Dostoevsky’s whole life, we take a moment, yet again, to ask–what would have become of Dostoevsky if he had not met Anna?

Here Anna Grigorevna created a nest for their family and brought their affairs into order. Here the children, Liuba and Fedya, played. Fedya liked horses and when he grew up had his own horse farm…

Liuba grew up and wrote a fanciful memoir of her father in bad French, which was translated into German, and from there in to many languages, seeding the world with sloppy information about Dostoevsky. Among Boris’s extraordinary body of books and articles is a set of commentaries for a new edition of Liuba’s memoir: https://www.labirint.ru/now/dostoevskiy/.

Hello and listen, publishing world! When are you going to translate into English and publish the amazing work that our Russian colleagues are doing?!  Boris’s detailed commentaries on Crime and Punishment will blow your mind: https://www.fedordostoevsky.ru/research/creation/052/

And this book is just out in a new edition.

Really now….

Stay tuned. In a separate post I will provide a list of links to Dostoevsky-related scholarship.

Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov during these years. Here, on January 28 (old style) or February 9 (new style), he died. What time exactly? Boris will list the various versions: was it 8:36? 8:40? 8:38? The clock in the room was set to 8:38, where it stood so for years. Then research zeroes in on 8:36. When they try to move the clock to reflect this reality, it springs back to 8:38.  And that is what you will see when you visit the museum.

Аnd visit the museum you must:

https://www.md.spb.ru/;

and, in English:

http://eng.md.spb.ru/

After our strenuous walk through Dostoevsky’s apartment, under the watchful (and probably disapproving) gaze of The Man himself, Boris and I will, after some effort, figure out how to work the photo feature on my confusing new cell phone.

The thoughtful among you will ask how these pictures got taken; after all we are holding the phone.

In all the excitement, I have forgotten Chekhov. But, unsurprisingly, Boris gives me some valuable information for further explorations. It happens that Alexei Suvorin, Chekhov’s friend and publisher, knew and visited Dostoevsky. Indeed, Suvorin’s photo hangs on the museum wall.

Here is a, if not the, photo. This one is from the mid-1860s….

And since it is time to towel off, we will postpone my stroll to the Suvorin addresses that Boris provided me, and my miraculous new phone helped guide me to.

Quests begin with people (Chekhov for example, and Chekhov people). Fortunately some of the best people are Chekhov people; take, for example, Anatoly Sobennikov, scholar, author, traveler, Siberian, and now St. Petersburg resident. Anatoly will give many valuable tips about tracking Chekhov’s footsteps to the most distant places. I learn from him that one can simply buy a plane ticket from Moscow to Sakhalin Island, and skip all the land in between (7 time zones worth). But what would be the fun in that?  So Anatoly also gives me extremely valuable advice about stops to make on an overland Chekhov trip across Russia. Journeys start somewhere, and we are in St. Petersburg–the Westernmost of Chekhov’s Russian stopping places.  So let us begin here. Anatoly leads me to Italyanskaya Street, whose cobblestones are among many Chekhov must have trod on his visits to St. Petersburg beginning in the late 1880s.

Chekhov did not live in St. Petersburg; he was a Moscovite and a Melikhovian, but  the major players in the Imperial Russian publishing world were based here. Of these the most important was Alexei Suvorin, influential publisher of New Time newspaper and owner of a network of bookstands at railway stations all across Russia.  Suvorin knew everyone (including Dostoevsky, btw), and was detested by the liberal establishment for his conservative politics and the increasingly anti-Semitic slant of his newspaper. But he was Chekhov’s publisher and friend, and it was to him that Chekhov wrote some of his most fascinating and thoughtful letters.

 My attempts to plunge into deep literary thoughts at this important starting point in my journey are thwarted by a light, chilly drizzle. My brand-new umbrella, carefully purchased and packed for just this eventuality, flails impotently, broken on its first unfurling. Blog readers will not get their dose of profundity, at least here. Just a bit of damp whining.

Speaking of whining (the Russian word, a thing of beauty, is “nytyo” [нытьё: ныть, ною, ноешь, ныл, ныла, будем ныть…]): we are reminded of Chekhov’s elder brother Alexander, who, to judge from the epistolary evidence, spent as much time whining and complaining as he did  at his job at New Time, where (if I may be catty), probably by sinecure, he “worked.”  Alexander, too, trod these stones on his way to and from Suvorin’s editorial offices, which were located at

42 Nevsky Prospect, just around the corner.

He wrote his share of stories and other pieces, but his greatest service to humanity was to live far away from his younger brother, the genius Anton. The distance between sparked a lively correspondence that went on for years, importantly, generating some of Chekhov’s most expressive and colorful letters.

A quick stroll down Italyanskaya Street leads past the famous Stray Dog cafe:

It’s literary (google it), but not OUR literary, so let us move on. Down the street we encounter, deliciously for the Chekhov afficianado, something called the “Museum of Emotions” (????), or an ad for it, or something:

Would stop in, but I doubt anything could live up to that name, especially for those of us who’ve traveled into “Ward No. 6” and back. Plus,  Anatoly has told me about a cool exhibit at the Manezh, “Predictions and Revelations” (Предсказания и откровения). Has a Dostoevskian ring to it….must go for a chaser.

Along the way, forgive me:

There must be a story here, something Chekhovian.

Anatoly is one of the very best Chekhov scholars. Stay tuned for his book on gender and sexuality in Chekhov’s writing. I for one can’t wait.

Where to start. One must get a visa.