Chekhov's Genoa

Chekhov loved to travel, and he travelled a lot. I have to admit that I too love a peripatetic life. In this, I want to be like Chekhov. The view from our window, with the shadow of the church's dome. And last week I finally made it to Genoa, Italy. I hadn't even considered going to Italy, really, until I started writing about Chekhov and cemeteries. (Gratuitous promo: my piece on cemeteries in Chekhov's fiction comes out this spring in The Antioch Review.) In Genoa, we stayed in an apartment next to a 12th century bell tower, and when the bells tolled out, I felt transported to another time. Or no, that's not quite right. Even though the bells were marking the time, they connected me to all times, to a timelessness that reached back to Chekhov and beyond. The sound connects the listener not only to ages long past, but to the city itself, and the natural surroundings. In one recording I made the birds sing out as if in answer to the bells: nature and the built environment talking with each other in time and across time. In Chekhov's play The Seagull, the teacher Medvedenko asks Dr. Dorn to talk about his travels. "May I ask you, doctor, which city abroad you liked best?" "Genoa," answers the good doctor. "Why Genoa?" -- the follow-up question almost asks itself. He replies: "The street crowds there are superb. When you leave the hotel in the evening, the entire street is jammed with people. Then you move in the crowd with no particular goal, here and there, along a broken line, you live together with the crowd, merge your psyche with it, and you begin to believe that a world soul--like the one Nina Zarechnaya played in [Kostya's] play--is actually possible." Okay, that's my rough translation, but it works. Those little tiny streets in old Genoa, sometimes no wider than the breadth of your outstretched arms, really do make a "broken line," and you can lose yourself in them very easily. The buildings crowd in, but then there are respites--little squares or piazze, unexpected cloisters with enclosed gardens. And the streets spread out not only horizontally, but vertically. I was charmed by a word that doesn't exist in English--not only are there staircases spread throughout the city leading from one level to another, but there are also salite, "climbs," narrow pedestrian lanes leading you higher and deeper into the neighborhoods. In Russian, that designation would be "spuski," descents -- and in that, perhaps, we see the difference between the sunny Italian riviera and Chekhov's homeland. But we'll leave that thought for another time. For now, I want to return to Chekhov's cemeteries. In a famous letter to Natalia Lintvareva in 1894, Chekhov describes the Staglieno Monumental Cemetery:  Now I am in Genoa. Here there is a multitude of ships and the famous cemetery, rich in statues. In fact there really are very many statues. Not only the deceased are portrayed life-sized and with their real height,but even their inconsolable widows, mothers-in-law and children. There is a statue of one old woman, a landowner, who is holding in her hand two Ukrainian bagels (khokhlatskie bubliki). Caterina Campodonico (A Paisanna) Actually, Chekhov got it wrong. (I am of course not the first to have noticed this.) This monument, created in 1881 by Lorenzo Orengo, a Genoese sculptor known for his descriptive detailed style of "bourgeois realism," was no pomeshchitsa, no landowner. The whole pathos of the monument lies in her lower class origins. Caterina Campodonico put away money when she was alive from her earnings as a peddler in order that she could be portrayed with her wares, the strings of hazelnuts and the bread rings which earn Chekhov's admiration as typical of Ukraine. The inscription on the monument is also famously in the Genoese dialect--so inscrutable to modern Italians that a translation is posted nearby. Caterina was a local and described as a "peasant," la paesana in Italian or a Paisanna in Genoese. (Indeed, according to A.S. Petrov, she ordered the statue and the inscription--composed by a local poet--in advance of her death. Now that is forethought.) Hers is one of the most famous monuments in Staglieno. Campodonico's industry, her ambition, and her thrift have given her eternal memory--the kind of memory Chekhov generally mourns as unattainable. Jaded about the realities of fame, Chekhov once told Bunin that when he died, he would be read for seven years. "Why seven?" asked Bunin. "Well, seven and a half," Chekhov replied. Here too, of course, Chekhov was wrong. His works stand as a monument to him. But as I wandered through the Staglieno cemetery on a beautiful, sunny spring day, I was reminded of just how fleeting memory can be. Our final stop in our strolling was in an open area of the cemetery, where to our shock we found a dumpster filled with cemetery detritus.  Note the little lamp and the headstones with inscriptions! When you wander around a cemetery, you can't help but think of your own dead. There are monuments to my relatives scattered around Illinois which I rarely managed to get to, and countless other burial sites in unknown spots, perhaps no longer visited by anyone at all. But that dumpster filled with shards of gravestones, some with lettering still visible, brought the loneliness of an abandoned gravesite into sharp relief. "Did they really need to remind us that a cemetery is just a dumping ground?" my companion asked me. Memory in Chekhov's world is transient, and maybe even personal. He perceived Caterina Campodonico in his own way, turning her into a Ukrainian landowner, when her monument might have spoken to him instead about his own past--after all, it was through effort, hard work, and talent that Chekhov achieved a degree of comfort in life and fame after death, both far greater than his origins would have predicted. One of Chekhov's characters--in a story entitled "In the Cemetery," pronounced: "God grant us temporary memory, but eternal – ha!” I know what my father would say. Sic transit gloria mundi.