In the 19th century, many educated people in the city of Taganrog dreamed of a public library. Before its establishment, there was a library at the Commercial Assembly Club, which opened in 1812. Later, private organizations and bookstore owners tried to provide similar services by setting up “reading rooms.”
Taganrog Public Library was inaugurated in the building of the Taganrog City Council on May 23, 1876. It received all the books from the collection of the Commercial Assembly Club. Among the first readers were the future writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the actor Aleksandr Leonidovich Vishnevsky, the painters Dmitri Minaevich Sinodi-Popov and Seraphima Iasonovna Blonskaya, the sculptor Leonid Yegorovich Yegorov, and the historian Pavel Petrovich Filevsky.
Anton Chekhov did not lose touch with his hometown after moving to Moscow and contributed greatly to the development of the Taganrog Public Library. The year that Anton Chekhov died, the library was named in his honor. At the same time, the city council decided that the funds left by Chekhov as well as the donations of citizens would be used to construct a new library building.
On January 17, 1914, ten years after the writer’s death, an official ceremony was organized to open a new library building in Taganrog. It was designed by Fyodor Schechtel, a famous academician of architecture from Moscow and a close friend of Anton Chekhov.
Fyodor
Schechtel designed the building free of charge — the municipality paid only for
the work of his assistants who prepared the technical drawings. The architect
wrote,
