Talk:Greek Church and Greek School (Taganrog)

Fallout
It looks like Chekhov's wan experience at the school left sardonic literary marks on him: 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. Dymba’s uniform reply to questions as to whether Greece has whales, lobsters and particular kinds of mushrooms led to the phrase “Greece has everything” permanently entering the Russian language, especially after a Soviet film was made of the play in the 1940s. The phrase was used with increasing cynicism by Soviet citizens as shops became emptier and queues outside them became longer in a parody of Communist propaganda. Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 16:26, 18 February 2020 (UTC)