Chekhov at Greek School

From Neos Kosmos, Dean Kalimniou

"Chekhov was born in Taganrog, a city that was once the ancient Greek colony of Taiganion on the sea of Azov, and was re-colonised by Greek refugees fleeing the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century".

"Chekhov later sent-up his teachers’ naïve idealisation of all that Greece stood for in his one-act farce The Wedding, in which the father of the bride, a retired college registrar, asks increasingly ridiculous questions of his guest, Kharalamby Dymba, a Greek confectioner possessed of poor Russian:

Zhigalov: Have you got tigers in Greece?
Dymba: We have.
Zhigalov: And lions?
Dymba: Lions too. It’s Russia which has nothing, but Greece has everything. I have there father, uncle, brothers, but here I don’t have nothing".

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