Meddum on glass plates

Meddum, a small place among lakes on the border of today’s Latvia and Lithuania, was taken up by St. Petersburgers at the end of the nineteenth century: pines, water and no fog. The railway through Dvinsk made the trip from the capital easy, and the quiet corner slowly turned into a summer resort for generals, writers and painters. Chernyshevsky and Chukovsky are among those said to have stayed there.

The Wiesels had a dacha here. In the summer of 1905 Korney Chukovsky stayed at Meddum while lying low after his magazine Signal was shut down; his letters to Emil Wiesel are in the Letters section of this site, and Meddum comes up in them more than once.

A stereoscope in the Kazan archive

In 2011, going through the family archive in Kazan, Mikhail Bakunin and Elizaveta Wiesel found a stereoscope and a box of glass plates. It turned out that Emil Wiesel was also a photographer, and that he shot in stereo: two nearly identical frames that merge into a single three-dimensional image in the viewer. The images are printed directly on glass and, a century later, remain remarkably sharp.

The plates were rephotographed in Kazan by Elizaveta Wiesel, the painter’s great-great-granddaughter, then straightened and adjusted for contrast. They show ordinary summer life at the turn of the century: bathing in the lake, a boat by the jetty, tennis, a picnic under the trees, children, a laid table on the veranda.

What is gone

Heavy fighting went through Meddum during the First World War and almost nothing of the settlement survived. The Wiesel dacha is gone, and the place can only be reconstructed from photographs like these and from a few articles by Latvian local historians.

They visited Meddum in the early 2010s and found nothing there but the lakes and the woods.