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…