Paradise for Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin
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Paradise for Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin

“I was in paradise ... Such butterflies, insects, such flies, cockroaches!” That’s how the great humourist, already famous writer Anton Chekhov, described his ultimate travel experience to the island of Ceylon, which has been called Sri Lanka since 1972.

During the time of Chekhov and Bunin, the island of Ceylon was ruled by the British Governor General. Ceylon gained its independence from the colonizer, the Great Britain, in 1948. Until 1972, it remained the Dominion of the United Kingdom. In 1972, Ceylon became a republic and changed its name to Sri Lanka.
Over the past one hundred and thirty years, much has changed there. Only the left-hand traffic brought by the British remained unchanged, the Ceylon tea brought here by Her Majesty's subjects from India, and the volume of beer sales - exclusively in pints, 675 grams each pint. And of course, the crystal clear air remained unchanged, despite the fact that horses, donkeys and elephants on the streets of the island after Chekhov’s visit were replaced by buses, cars and ‘tuk-tuks’ - scooters with cabins attached to them for two or three passengers; as well as the dense tropical forests with thickets of coconut palm trees, bananas, papayas, pineapples, guava and other exotic trees. And, of course, the ocean that is warm and nice all year round. In a word, that earthly paradise that our dear Anton Pavlovich Chekhov saw and called it remained the same as it was then.

Chekhov brought two mongooses, souvenirs, amazing photos and unforgettable - and piquant - experiences from there.

“When India was in your past - a long voyage - then you have something to recollect in case of the loss of sleep,” Chekhov wrote to Gorky. He knew what he was talking about! During the writer's exotic journey - from Sakhalin to Odessa - Chekhov was 30 years old.

In November 1890, he spent three days and two nights in Ceylon. Chekhov went ashore from the ‘Petersburg’ ship he traveled by and explored the then capital and port of Colombo. “If the sun sets in the kingdom of heaven as nicely as in the Bay of Bengal, then, I dare to assure you, the kingdom of heaven is very good,” he writes.

And now see how Bunin perceives this island - he followed Chekhov’s recommendations and also came there, only much later, in 1911. “A hot white city, naked black rickshaws, gemstone shops, hotels full of tourists from all over the world, there are American and Japanese ships in the warm green water harbors; there are coconut forests behind the harbor, on the low coasts... "

Coconut forests! Chekhov also mentions them in his letters, combining the exoticism of these words with a playful connotation. In his letter to Suvorin, he writes “Ceylon is the place where paradise was. Here, in paradise, I made over a hundred miles by railway and was fed up with palm forests and bronze women ... in a coconut forest in a moonlit night.” In fact, whether Anton Pavlovich had an intimate connection with the ‘black-eyed Indian girl’ (mentioned in this excerpt so that the Soviet Chekov studies preferred to put dots in it), or this is a literary fantasy – it remains unclear. But later on, already in Moscow, he spoke about it ‘in secret to the whole world’, so every barber knew that. And the coconut forests, in other words, palm trees with coconuts, still grow everywhere on the island. At the same time, as researchers found out later, on that exciting night, tropical rain broke out on the island! But it did not stop the writer.

In Colombo, Chekhov saw ‘Indian spectacled cobras, famous Indian magicians’, swam in the ocean in one of the calm bays near the Gall Face Hotel. Not far from the port, there is another luxury continental style hotel - Grand Orient Hotel. Now, there is a portrait sculpture of a writer – a gift by Russia (the bronze Chekhov is 20 years older than that 30-year-old lady-killer, the ‘conqueror’ of the bronze Indian girls), and a small museum was opened. Room 304 is furnished with the original furniture of that time and there is a memorial plaque; however, it is not known for certain, whether Chekhov stayed overnight at this hotel.

Канди

On the second day, the future author of ‘The Seagull’ went with midshipman M. Glinka to the city of Kandy. He devoted one day to the ancient spiritual capital of the island with its Buddhist and Hindu temples, about which he wrote in his letters to his publisher Alexei Suvorin. Chekhov got there by railway, it is 120 km from Colombo.

It is there that the famous temple of Sri Dalada Maligawa, or the Tooth of the Buddha Temple, is located.

Храм Зуба Будды

Deft guides help foreigners escape the line to the Tooth of the Buddha, they can guide you through the halls and floors of the Temple for relatively little money, hewing a passage through the crowd, like a snake between stones. None of those praying people immersed in their thoughts and prayers, stunned by drums, pay attention or react to strangers. It is worth remembering that you, like all believing Buddhists, should remove your shoes and leave them in the checkingroom. But the floors in the temple and in the squares around it are surprisingly clean.
According to a legend, after the cremation of the Saint in India in 371 AD, the daughter of the ruler of the island of Kalinga found the Tooth of the Buddha in the remains of the funeral pyre and brought it to Ceylon, hiding it in her hair. The beautiful Temple of Dalada Maligawa was built For the Tooth of the Buddha, to which folk rumor attribute the magical power. The tooth is hidden in seven boxes put one in another. It is placed in a golden room. Huge queues of men and women line up to bow to it, bring gifts, lotus and jasmine flowers to it. They are necessarily in white clothes, with babies in their arms. They are ready to stand in queues for hours, and then sit on the cold marble floor, meditating and praying to the statues of their Saint. Such a continuous and huge flow of people ... This phantasmagoric picture is aggravated by continuous drumbeat - blow by blow, the sound of which spreads throughout the temple and even in the park surrounding it.

There are no Chekhov’s impressions of his visit to the Temple of the Tooth of Buddha. However, according to the memoirs of those accompanying him on this trip to Kandy, he visited it.

But we can read about this temple in the travel notes by Ivan Bunin. “The people humbly and quickly brought rice, flowers, small coins to the altar and, bowing and whispering, offered prayers to Sadhu, the Good and the Incomparable, joined their palms at their foreheads, quickly and silently falling on them."

He was completely captivated by the pristine nature of the island. "Having left the temple, I watched the motionless lake turning mirror-pink in late afternoon sunlight, then it was covered with a golden shine, and I stood listening to the piping of thousands of tree frogs, resembling countless tin bells ..." However, Bunin was more interested in old people, beggars, children, whose countless portraits he left in his notes - than in the exotics.

Chekhov wrote about the procession of the Salvation Army of Sri Lanka he saw in Kandy. “Girls in Indian dresses and glasses, a drum, harmonics, guitars, a banner, a crowd of black butt-naked boys, a black man in a red jacket behind them... the virgins sing something wild, and the drum - boo! boo! And all this is in the dark, on the shore of the lake. ... The impression is original, but getting on my nerves. I do not like this".
 

мангуст
When it was time to sail forth, the writer appeared on the ship with two mongooses. Then Chekhov ran to the shore, to the market, and returned with a third one: he wanted to buy a female mongoose. In fact, they played a trick on him in the market and sold a palm cat and not a jenny-mongoose, which became clear much later.

пальмовая куница


“One mongoose was named ‘Bastard’ - so, affectionately, the sailors called it; the other one having very cunning, cheating eyes was named ‘Viktor Krylov’ (a playwright whom Chekhov did not like); the third one, a female, timid, discontented and always sitting under the wash-hand-stand, is’ Omutova’ (actress at the Korsh Russian Drama Theater).”

The ironic Chekhov wrote few lines about Ceylon. Buddhism was alien to him, exoticism both admired and amused him. And the mongooses shocked his Moscow guests for a long time. A few years later, they were sent to the zoo because of their bad behavior.

Ivan Bunin was impressed by this island much more. In his poem “Ceylon”, he says about the “Outskirts of the earth, uninhabited deserted coasts, ocean open to the very pole ...”

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