Books from a 10-volume collection of Chekhov’s works, published by the St. Petersburg publishing house of Adolf Fedorovich Marks, are laid out under the glass window. On the backbones, the first letters of the name and patronymic, the writer’s surname, as well as the serial number of each volume are displayed in gold paint. The bottom of the cover contains a gold inscription ‘N. V. Vakhtin’s Bookbinding in Yalta’. And on the title page of the first volume of the collection there is a dedication in ink: “To the infinitely beloved author from Fanny Tatarinova.”


Fanny Karlovna Tatarinova (nee Bergman, can also be written as Berman) is a of the Moscow Conservatory’s singing class. Her teachers were Nikolai Dmitrievich Kashkin (music theory), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (rhytm), Ivan Vasilievich Samarin (drama). Despite the bright talent and internship with Pauline Viardot-Garcia herself in France, Fanny Karlovna’s opera career did not work out. The illness of her husband and children forced the Tatarinov family to settle in Yalta, where the singer’s creative activity was expressed with participation in charity concerts and dramatic performances.

Thanks to her, far from the cultural life of St. Petersburg and Moscow, almost all classical performances of Russian opera were performed on the Yalta amateur stage. Mentions of this are contained in Tatarinova’s personal album, which is now one of the exhibits of the Chekhov house-museum. Collections from concerts and theatrical performances, held with the direct participation of Fanny Karlovna in Yalta, Sevastopol and other Crimean cities and towns, became the first contributions to the construction of many socially significant objects. Among them are the sanatorium “Yauzlar”, a tuberculosis hospital at the “Community of the Red Cross”, the People’s House, a fire brigade, gymnasiums and others.

A major charity event organized by Tatarinova in April 1900 was a breakfast in honor of the end of the Moscow Art Theatre’s Yalta tour. In the repositories of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow there are documents from which it is known that Fanny Karlovna kept in touch with many outstanding figures of Russian culture and art. Among them were Konstantin Balmont, Semyon Nadson, Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky and others. In 1905, Tatarinova moved to Moscow and began to supervise the acting courses of the Moscow Art Theater.