territory. Despite the fifty-year hiatus in the middle of the eighteenth century when Taganrog returned to Turkish rule, the town celebrated its bicentenary in 1898, and Chekhov took a prominent role in honouring its illustrious founder by liaising with the sculptor Antokolsky who had been commissioned to produce a statue of Peter the Great. He also took especial care in recommending the best location for the statue in Taganrog, bearing in mind that Antokolsky had produced an imposing-looking Peter standing characteristically before the sea, the wind running through his hair.19 His suggestions were ignored. Initially, the twenty-foot-tall statue was placed on a
granite plinth on Taganrog's main street by the entrance to the municipal park, but in 1923, amid revolutionary fervour, it was inevitably replaced by a statue of Lenin. Tsar Peter was hauled with great difficulty off his plinth and left in the vestibule of the first Chekhov museum in Taganrog, housed in the former gymnasium where lie had gone to school. Then, when Russia's tsars were automatically declared enemies of the people in the 1930s, orders were issued to melt the statue down. This was the fate meted out to the town's statue of Alexander I, but the statue of Peter miraculously survived. After being moved to the city museum it was boxed up and left outside in the yard. ? few years later there was a move to restore the statue, and this was achieved in 1943 – by the Nazis occupying Taganrog during the Second World War. It was only after the war that the statue was moved to its final resting place by the fort at the edge of the promontory overlooking the sea – the place Chekhov had originally suggested back in 1898.20
As Russia's main naval base, Taganrog became a centre for shipbuilding under Catherine II, and the first ships of the Don flotilla were launched in 1771. But when Russia acquired first the rest of the Azov shoreline, then the Crimea in 1783, Taganrog immediately lost its strategic importance and Sevastopol was naturally chosen to become the headquarters of the newly formed Black Sea fleet. Taganrog now began instead to build up the international maritime trade for which it became famous in the nineteenth century, as witnessed by the fifteen loreign consulates established in the town. Merchants were ordered by 1 he government to relocate there from other parts of Russia and, after i he repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the amount of wheat exported to England significantly increased. Along with wheat and other grains, as well as ironware produced in the Urals, hemp, canvas and caviar were exported through Taganrog, while ships arrived in its port with cargoes of silk, fruit, nuts, wine and other colonial goods. The town's population inevitably became extremely cosmopolitan after Catherine began to entice large numbers of Greeks to the area; by the nineteenth century there was a population of about 30,000 expatriates, with their own weekly newspaper, The Argonaut.21
Taganrog flourished under Alexander I, with careful town planning influencing the building of rows of spacious streets radiating out in a C.rid along the peninsula from the fort. Churches and civic buildings
appeared, as well as a public park – one of the oldest in Russia – which soon became the centre of the town's social life. The gymnasium founded in 1806, Chekhov's alma mater, was the oldest educational institution in southern Russia (the idea of the gymnasium, a state-controlled secondary school with an emphasis on the classics, had been adopted from Germany). Alexander I and his retinue visited Taganrog during his tour of Russia in 1818, and the Tsar decided to return to the town in 1825 when his sick wife Elizaveta was ordered to undertake an eight-month period of convalescence. The southern coastal climate, the town's peaceful lifestyle, and the freedom from court protocol all played a role in luring the Tsar back. By order from St Petersburg, the town governor was ousted from his unassuming single-storey mansion on Greek Street built in the early nineteenth-century Russian classical style, and 25,000 roubles were spent on redecorating the property. Three days of celebratory illuminations marked Alexander's arrival in September 1825. Within two months, however, he had died in mysterious circumstances, and his widow ordered that the room in which he had passed away should be turned into a chapel. Shortly afterwards, the building (now referred to as a palace despite the manifest inappropriateness of such a title) opened as Russia's first memorial museum, guarded by clean-shaven Cossacks with sabres. After the Revolution the palace chapel was closed and the rooms of the museum turned into communal apartments. Since 1963 the property has housed a children's sanatorium.22
Chekhov was very familiar with 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 arrived in Taganrog penniless in 1847. His mother was then twelve years old, and she later told stories to her children about how the custodian at the palace next door had knocked down part of the stone wall dividing the two gardens and built a gate so that she and her 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 with his ability to raise such delightful, Godfearing children. The boys invariably 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 lie in state at the Greek Monastery (lead for his coffin was so scarce it apparently had to be taken from the nearest available roof), Elizaveta decided 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 illuminations.
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 is 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 Crimean War clearly left a lasting impression on the town's inhabitants. When writing to a colleague about plans for a museum commemorating Taganrog's history in 1897, ? liekhov mentioned as a possible 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 his family
became ineluctably caught up in its repercussions because they lived only a few hundred miles from the main 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 Nightingale arrived to attend to the wounded in the British Military 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 marrying 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 mission in as humane a way as possible.
The Sea of Azov was used as a vital supply route by the Russian army, and Taganrog was the most important
