Anton Chekhov statue, Moscow

Click on photos to enlarge.

This is one of the most maligned statues in Moscow, for all of the wrong reasons to my mind. I hate to begin with this, but everybody else talks about it first of all. I could ignore that, you say, and you’d be right. And maybe I should. But I also want to have my say about it because I’ve never agreed with the complaints.
To the point: It seems to really irritate people that there used to be two public restrooms right where this statue of Anton Chekhov was unveiled in 1998 during the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Moscow Art Theater. It doesn’t bother anybody that the prestigious Chistiye Prudy, or Clean Ponds, region of Moscow is built on an old dumping grounds for the reeking remains of butchered animals. And rightly so. Things change. Big deal. So there were restrooms here? I remember my beloved mentor Alma Law going off about this and I could never understand it. I remember the restrooms. They kinda stunk when you walked by. I never went down in there – didn’t quite have the nerve, even if I had the need a time or two. So, for me, it was a great thing to close those things up and put them in the slot where all those things from the past go that we are able to forget. But no! Seventeen years later people are still making snide comments about the restrooms that used to be here, are long gone, and will never again rise to stink! What is the deal? I say it because I saw a comment on the net yesterday about my post about Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky – somebody just had to bring up the old restrooms back in the corner of one of my photos. With all the things to talk about in Russia and the world!…
For the record, this statue was sculpted by Mikhail Anikushin, who died a year before it was unveiled. There is information, repeated in Russian Wikipedia, that then-Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov is the one who decided that the monument would stand in this corner in place of – yes, the former restrooms! – and before one of the walls of the once-famous Hotel Chevalier, which sheltered many great Russian writers and personages in the 19th century. I’ll get to that some day on this blog.

I love Anikushin’s work. It is precisely what I look for in sculptural art – it is a rendition, an interpretation. Sure he gets the general likeness, for which we are grateful. But that exaggerated lean, almost gaunt look is an interpretation, a suggestion. It makes us think about Chekhov, his life, his beliefs , his art. It is also true of the face, which I really love. There is something of the Pieta in this, isn’t there? A kind of mix between the expressions both Mary and Christ that are given by various artists working with that subject. And that suits Chekhov. This is a face that knows so much, almost too much for the individual to bear. As with any good work of sculpture, the expression changes as you move around it. Look at the two close-up shots above, taken almost, but not quite, from the same angle. I see something approaching stoicism in the first, an attempt to be strong against suffering, while in the second I see suffering beginning to take precedence. Actually, go up to the top photo and you see still another aspect – here there’s a kind of resignation and sorrow that predominates the image. All of these suit well the man who wrote “The Steppe,” “The Black Monk,” “Three Sisters,” “The Cherry Orchard” and much, much more.
I wrote in yesterday’s post about how the new monument to Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky now marginalizes this Chekhov monument. You can see that in the last photo below. Chekhov really looks stuck in a corner now, dwarfed and diminished. Before the appearance of the new statue, one’s attention when arriving on Kamergersky Lane was drawn immediately to Chekhov. No more. He is now an afterthought. Ever since he appeared and ever since that silly restroom debate unfurled, there has been talk about moving the monument. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were to happen now. To my tastes, anyway, this is too good a work to be shunted off into the shadows.