The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

I asked the captain’s assistant how much time we had. He did not give me a clear answer. Two or three hours, he said, depending on the time it takes to unload and load. I’m off down the embankment hoping by some miracle to see Chekhov or at least his house. It would be unconscionable to disturb him at such an early hour. I ask a policeman for Chekhov’s house but, alas, this name, so precious to us, is unfamiliar to the corpulent policeman. He knows neither house, nor Chekhov. I asked several passersby and one of them ventured a guess that the house was three or four kilometers away in Autka. I was in a quandary. Would I find the house? Would the ship leave without me? And then I shamefully surrendered: had tea in a restaurant built on pilings overlooking the sea. The tea was very good, and the sweet rolls even better. I tried to console myself with the fancy that perhaps Chekhov frequented this place, sat in this very chair and looked at the sea just as I was doing.

Sevastopol. What a celebrated name. The bay, the surrounding mountains, and even the earthen mounds and the old fortress. Where and how did they fight here? The question brings the recognition that my knowledge of the defense of Sevastopol is pitiful. I’ll have to read Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Stories. I hasten on to Kiev. The frequent changing of trains is quite tiring. At Tatiana Pavlovna’s, a family friend, I rested up for two days while she spoiled me with all kinds of tasty dishes. The rooms smelled of mothballs, but even this smell seemed cozy and cool to me.

And Lida. I couldn’t admire her enough. She was already in the upper classes of the gimnazium. She read a lot, daydreamed, and surely went out with her girlfriends. She was mother’s favorite and I wrote home about her, Tatiana Pavlovna, and their farmstead.

I continued west to the border where I met a veterinary student who was a distant relative of one of my Tbilisi cadet friends. He convinced me to buy a ticket not to Freiberg, but to Zurich where he himself was going to university. In my father’s absence it seemed best to follow his wishes and forget about the mining institute in the Schwarzwald and save my parents the money which would have gone for my tuition. As it turned out later, father had changed his mind and sent me a cordial and supportive letter to Freiberg in which he praised my persistence and promised to send tuition money. I never did get that letter, and found out about it only upon returning to Tbilisi.

In Vienna the veterinary student and I stayed in a splendid hotel not far from the Cathedral of St. Stephen. In the evening we went to the famous Prater where everything was very decorous except for the roller coaster which was the source of great screeching, especially when the cars would plunge into water. It also struck me that the fashionable women along the vaunted Ringstrasse were not as stylishly dressed as we at home imagined. “Viennese chic” was not evident. There was a strange combination of colors—bright

Oleg Pantiukhov, A Student’s Summer

49

yellow and violet. But expensive shops, especially flower shops, drew one’s attention. The museums were overwhelming. Palaces, royal carriages, thousands of military men in strange, semi-civilian uniforms. Newspapers sold briskly on the streets. A nervousness was felt in the air, but perhaps it was Viennese everyday life.