Exactly a month after arriving in Badenweiler, Chekhov was buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, next to his father's grave.
II The Russian Aftermath
The obituary in the Times Literary Supplement, published a week after his death, characterized Chekhov as the most Russian of contemporary Russian writers, and drew the equivocal conclusion that he 'may or may not have been a man of genius'.16 Back in Russia there was no such doubt. The Crimean Courier in Yalta had followed Chekhov's every move from the time he went to live there, first recording his arrival in September 1898, and noting what proved to be his final departure for Moscow in May 1904. On 25 June the paper reported that Chekhov had arrived in Badenweiler. From 3 July 1904, the day after his death, there began a deluge in the Russian press as the nation began to grieve. Friends and relatives wrote memoirs, which were published next to poems inspired by the sad event, articles about the productions of his plays and information about the foundation of Chekhov societies and museums. Like every other newspaper, the Crimean Courier published a heartfelt obituary that day. It then reported a few days later that a huge congregation had gathered in the Greek Orthodox parish church in Upper Autka to attend the first requiem service to be held in Chekhov's memory the same evening. This was the church down the road from his house, which his mother attended. The family had got to know Father Vasily well since moving in, and he had visited them on occasion. The requiem service was attended by Chekhov's mother, with his sister and two younger brothers, who were in Yalta on holiday. A week later a requiem was held in Yalta's cathedral church as in the Autka church, and it was packed on each successive occasion when requiems were held, as per Orthodox tradition. When the cycle of requiem services ended, lectures and literary evenings were organized.17
Chekhov's body arrived in Moscow on 9 July, and thousands took part in the funeral procession as it wended its way slowly from the station in the north of the city, through the centre, past the Moscow Art Theatre building, where there was a temporary halt for prayers to be said, and then westwards to the cemetery at the Novodevichy Convent. In such volatile times, the police were extremely apprehensive that the crowds following the coffin might stage a demonstration, and stipulated that there should be no speeches at the funeral. But after the clergy and the grieving family had departed, and over 120 wreaths had been placed on his grave (did someone really count?), many mourners refused to leave. There were some impromptu speeches to which the police could no longer call a halt, and then it started to rain heavily.18 The next day somebody placed a bunch of wild flowers on Chekhov's grave, with a slip of paper on which was scribbled a note in pencil which spoke of the great writer's ability to express the sad poverty of Russian life.19 Telegrams arrived for weeks at the editorial offices of Russian Thought and Russian Gazette.
It is certain that Chekhov would have loathed all the eulogies. He once confessed to having 'autobiographobia', and had always preferred to deflect attention away from himself, finding it boring to comment on his own work. 'I'm afraid of speeches,' he had said in 1899. 'As soon as someone starts giving a speech at a celebratory dinner, I become unhappy and want to crawl under the table.'20 He could not even bear high-flown sentiment from his wife. When, in a rush of emotion, Olga had addressed him in November 1903 as her 'superman', he had immediately written back, signing himself as her 'superman who frequently has to run to the WC'.21 He would have probably found the posthumous wrangles which appeared in the press about his deal with Adolf Marx as distasteful as the eulogies. They started the day after his death, when the writer Vlas Doroshevich devoted a whole section of his memorial article about Chekhov to deploring the unfairness of the contract. The following day, Suvorin produced an article along the same lines for New Times, which was then reprinted in numerous other Russian papers. It did not take long for the mud-slinging to start. One journalist pointed out that it was in very poor taste to argue over commercial matters when Chekhov had only just been buried, but no one appeared to take heed and eventually Marx was goaded into defending himself.22 Chekhov might indeed have laughed had he
known his body would be brought back to Russia in a refrigerated train carriage marked 'for oysters', but he would surely have despaired at this tawdry quarrel. He had once declared that seeing his name in the press made him feel as if he had eaten a woodlouse.23
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 revelation to the thousands of his fans across Russia who had no conception either 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 all chopped down under Stalin, and it is nowadays difficult to imagine the vehicle- infested concrete jungle being the peaceful thoroughfare it was in 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 sister 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 apple 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 literary landmark in Taganrog, along with museums set up at Chekhov's former school and in the building 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 writer's honour. One wonders what Chekhov would make of Taganrog in its post-Soviet incarnation. When Andrei Sedov, a reporter for the daily newspaper Komsomolskaya pravda, was sent from Moscow to investigate the murder of the city's mayor in November 2002, he decided that Chekhov's celebrated story 'Ward No. 6' was not only a devastating indictment of insanity and injustice in late imperial Russia, but prophetic of conditions in early twenty-first-century Taganrog. An Izvestiya journalist on the same beat noted that Mayor Shilo, 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 opinion polls, but support from Moscow via a
presidential aide, a native of Taganrog serving in the State Duma, had clearly been very helpful.
