Chekhov and the Ukraine

 A headscratcher.

Chekhov begins one of his short stories, “Ariadne,” with a conversation between two train passengers at Odessa, and Odessa, as the flood of news we have been recently getting from the Ukraine has been telling us, is very much Ukrainian. But this is where things get a bit muddled.

One of the passengers, Shamohin, has evidently just come back to Odessa from abroad—that is, from somewhere in Europe. And of Shamohin, this is what the other passenger tells us:

“While Shamohin was talking I noticed that the Russian language and our Russian surroundings gave him great pleasure. This was probably because he had been very homesick abroad. Though he praised the Russians and ascribed to them a rare idealism, he did not disparage foreigners, and that I put down to his credit...”

When Shamohin talks about his “Russian surroundings” he is obviously talking about Odessa. Given what's going on these days, this sounds odd, to say the least. So when the heck has Odessa stopped being Russian—at least in spirit if not geographically?

(It would be easy to quip: when Putin stepped in. That would tell us some of the story, true; but the whole story?)