Tag Pskov

Alexander Van der Bellen’s father in 1917

In his memoir, Lighted Windows (1978), Veniamin Kaverin recalls scenes from Pskov in the first days after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd: Kostya von der Bellen was a student from our class. He was very short, important-looking, jug-eared. A line from Chekhov’s notebooks – “A tiny…