this as 'malicious falsehood'. Whether or not Count Tolstoy had given an order for his men not to fire on British troops at one point, he continued, it had not been obeyed, and even if it had, Lieutenant Hudson could not reasonably have been expected to be 'prepared for the humane eccentricities of the Governor of Taganrog'. He also remonstrated with the complaint about the Taganrog hospital being hit by pointing out that it was likely to suffer fire because of the earthen rampart pierced with embrasures a hundred yards in its rear, and the entrenchment parapet and guns standing in front of it. 'Humanity would suggest that the sick had better be in a safer spot,' he commented drily.35
The impressively moustachioed Count Tolstoy was governor of Taganrog from 1854 to 1856. A veteran of Russia's wars with Persia and Turkey, he was, according to his contemporary N. Y Sakharov, rather more negligent when it came to dealing with complaints that came to him and was always the last of the governors to submit his annual report. Despite his own personal honesty and strongly held religious views, his lackadaisical attitude to his civic duties led to the flourishing of bribery and corruption among his officials. Egor Petrovich was a distant relative of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, then a young officer currently establishing his literary reputation with his war reportage from Sevastopol and later to become something of a paternal figure to Chekhov – he was three years younger than Chekhov's father. Many years later, the war would be a favourite topic of conversation for Chekhov and Tolstoy when they were both living in the Crimea for health reasons.
On 14 September 1855, a week after the Allies occupied southern Sevastopol, and Lev Nikolaevich had started his last of three outspoken indictments of the appalling conditions in the Russian army there, a jubilant Vice-Admiral Lyons telegraphed the Royal Navy headquarters in London to report that the Russians had burned their steamers in the harbour ('thus the late Russian Black Sea fleet is annihilated'). Meanwhile, Commander Osborn found the fortifications
in the supposedly 'harmless commercial town' of Taganrog to be continually on the increase, despite its governor's protestations to the contrary. A large garrison, and uniforms belonging to nine separate infantry and five cavalry regiments, had been observed by the naval officer delivering letters and clothes to Allied prisoners of war held in the town, and nearly 20,000 troops were noted to have benefited from a stay in the town on their way to the Crimea. The governor could thus hardly be 'astonished at the occasional exchange of shots on the efforts of our gunboats to delay his proceedings'. The abominable conditions endured by rank-and-file soldiers in the Russian army under Nicholas I (mercilessly exposed by Tolstoy in his Sevastopol dispatches) meant that young men dreaded having to join up; being killed on duty was seen as far preferable to surviving. A revealing comment from Commander Osborn shows just how bad the situation really was:
Mr Martin and Count Tolstoy seem to think Her Majesty's naval commanders are lost to all humane feelings. At any rate, the Russian inhabitants of the seaboard seem to think otherwise, for our greatest difficulty is to prevent ourselves being burdened with voluntary prisoners.36
It was understandably with an eye to avoiding conscription that Evgenia Chekhova pressed her husband to raise the money necessary to join the merchant class when the couple returned to Taganrog at the close of the Crimean War together with their baby son: one of the privileges was exemption from military service.37
Chapter 2 TAGANROG AND THE STEPPE
I A Southern Childhood
There is in reality nothing to see at Taganrog beyond the house in which Alexander I died. The town is neat and tidy but the dust is terrific.
Murray's Handbook for Travellers to Russia, 1875
The south is your homeland; the south will always attract you.
Letter from Georgy Chekhov, 1889
Chekhov's last brief visit to his home town of Taganrog took place in the hot summer days of July 1899, and he arrived unannounced. He met with relatives and acquaintances whom he told about the circumstances of his father's death, he discussed plans for the statue of Peter the Great that had been commissioned for Taganrog's bicentenary, he gave advice on how best to cultivate conifers (a rarity in that part of the world), and then he headed back to Yalta. If Taganrog had been in Chekhov's mind a lot at that time, it was not only because his father had died the previous autumn. He had received the news just after he had reluctantly set off to spend his first winter in Yalta. Chekhov's move south to the Crimea had taken him back to his childhood: the memories of the years he spent growing up now came flooding back, and were intensified during his first Yalta spring by the sweet scent of blossoming acacia trees, which were foreign to Moscow but grew in profusion in Taganrog's warm climate. Chekhov's love of trees is well known, and it began early. Large numbers of poplars and lilac trees lined the streets of Taganrog along with the acacias, often planted in two rows to provide shade during the summer months.1 When they were in full leaf, the rows of
Chekhov's birthplace, Taganrog
tiny cottages tended to disappear completely in the foliage, their diminutive size accentuated by the broadness of the streets they stood on. It was in one of those tiny single-storey houses with a low roof and shuttered windows that Chekhov was born in 1860. Located in one of the less well-appointed neighbourhoods of Taganrog, the squat whitewashed building was rented from a local merchant, and was one of hundreds of such buildings which still line the dusty back streets of the town. Like its neighbours, it was constructed with mud bricks and set a long way back from an unpaved road in a yard full of wild steppe grass, and trees with nesting boxes fixed to them. Before it was renamed in honour of its famous former resident, the
street was imaginatively named Politseiskaya – Police Street, because there was a police station located there.2
The twenty-three square metres of the Chekhovs' house certainly did not provide much living space for a family of five. Apart from a minuscule kitchen with an earthen floor, there were just three low-ceilinged rooms. Chekhov's parents slept in one bedroom, and baby Anton joined his elder brothers, four-year-old Alexander and two-year-old Nikolai in the other. His aunt later recalled that he rarely cried as a baby, and learned to walk and talk early.3 The third room, with four large windows, served as dining room, sitting room, and study for Chekhov's father. But the most important function of this room was as a place to pray. Pavel Egorovich took praying very seriously. The icon corner was as traditional a feature of Russian households as the brass samovar, but many families paid scant regard to the holy image that was there to help them pray. Many a family icon became obscured over the years with soot from the oil lamp supposed to burn continually beneath it as a symbol of God's constant grace. This was never the case in the God-fearing Chekhov family home: the main corner of their front room was covered with icons. Beneath the icons and the icon lamp stood a cabinet on which lay a prayer book, the family Bible and a tall brass candlestick. Pavel Egorovich would lead prayers without fail every evening, and before certain feast days would burn incense before the icons. On the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration, celebrated in early August when the first fruits of the harvest were traditionally blessed, the Chekhovs would place honeycomb, apples and poppy seed underneath the icons. The next day they would take them to be blessed in church, and only then could the family break their fast and eat the fruit. Of all the members of his own family, Pavel Egorovich was particularly close to his brother Mitrofan, who was equally devout and served as an elder in one of Taganrog's churches. Whenever Mitrofan Egorovich came to visit, so his relatives liked to recount, he would go straight to the icon corner and start praying, crossing himself and bowing down to the floor. Pavel Egorovich would stand waiting
