'You Have the Chance to Come to Babkino'

Seasoned readers will intuitively understand the notion of collateral learning. Let’s say I’m reading Chekhov again. After decades of familiarity I don’t read his stories, plays or letters in order to “learn” anything except, perhaps, to remind myself how wise such a young man (dead at forty-four) could be, and how sad, funny and true to life his work is. But along the way I encounter, say, a name previously unknown to me, some historical event, Russian folkway or, in Dr. Chekhov’s case, a disease (the cholera he treated, the tuberculosis that killed him). If I’m sufficiently intrigued, I’ll follow up on the allusion, ask a few questions and often learn something of at least modest interest.   

Take Fyodor “Franz” Schechtel (1859-1926). The name meant nothing to me, except I was struck by its Teutonic, non-Russian sound. Born in Saint Petersburg to an ethnic German family, Schechtel (also transliterated as Shekhtel) met Chekhov and his older brother Nikolay when they all were students in Moscow. In 1886, Schechtel designed the title page for Chekhov's first published collection of stories, Motley Tales. In 1910, six years after the writer’s death, he designed and built a library-museum in Chekhov's birthplace, Taganrog.

 

Schechtel worked principally as an architect, a proponent of Russian Art Nouveau – later detested by Bolshevik critics. I know little about architecture and less about its Russian variety. Schechtel designed dozens of churches, offices, homes and public buildings. In 1882, Chekhov dedicated his story “Two Scandals” to Schechtel, who in turn designed Chekhov’s tomb in Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow, in 1904.

 

Most recently I encountered Schechtel in a letter written to him by Chekhov on this date, June 8, in 1886. With his family, the writer was staying for the summer in a rented dacha in Babkino, about forty miles northwest of Moscow. Dr. Chekhov nags his friend for not taking care of himself and urges him to come to Babkino:

 

“[Y]ou shouldn’t take such a cavalier attitude towards exercise, and secondly, you should be ashamed to sit in stuffy old Moscow when you have the chance to come to Babkino . . . Staying in town during the summer is a sin worse than pederasty and sheep-buggering. It is wonderful here: the birds are singing, [Isaac Ilyich] Levitan [the landscape painter] is doing his imitation of a Chechen, you can smell the grass, Nikolay [Chekhov] is drinking.”

 

By reading one letter I learned about Russian modernist architecture, Levitan, Chekhov’s racy sense of humor and the fact that Schechtel unsuccessfully submitted a design for Lenin’s mausoleum. 

 

[You can find the letter to Schechtel in Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (Penguin, 2004), translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips.]