Population Census.
At the beginning of the year, a rumor spread in St. Petersburg that Nicholas II was seriously ill. The foreign press speculated that the tsar was weak, unable to attend to state affairs, and that they wanted to appoint a regent in his place. Nicholas suffered from severe headaches that drove him almost to madness. The cause was an abscess in the skull, the result of an injury sustained during a round-the-world journey. Fits of apathy alternated with hallucinations—he saw cobwebs everywhere, swept them away, and ordered his entourage to do the same. Surgery was necessary. The abscess was removed.
3 January — Law introducing the gold monetary standard (Witte’s monetary reform). Devaluation of the ruble by a third of its value, establishment of a gold equivalent, and introduction of convertibility of credit notes thanks to the accumulation of sufficient gold reserves.
22 June — Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko met. They talked for eighteen hours straight in a private room of the "Slavyansky Bazar" restaurant in Moscow. As a result, the Moscow Art Theatre was founded.
P.M. Tretyakov commissioned the artist I.E. Brodsky to paint a portrait of A.P. Chekhov. Brodsky first invited A.P. Chekhov to Odessa for this, but the trip did not take place. Brodsky painted the portrait in Melikhovo, but was not satisfied with it and wrote Tretyakov a letter: "...I do not wish to offer you a portrait that did not satisfy me. The conditions under which I had to work at A.P. Chekhov’s estate, taking into account the traces left in him by illness, greatly hindered the successful progress of my work..." This year Chekhov wrote the works "Uncle Vanya" and "Peasants".
After a severe pulmonary hemorrhage in March, A.P. Chekhov was prescribed to spend the winter in the south. He chose Nice, where he would live from late September until mid-April 1898. The St. Petersburg Union of Abstainers published a brochure by Alexander Pavlovich Chekhov, "Alcoholism and the Possible Struggle Against It".
Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov (born 1830) died in a hospital for the poor—an alcoholic artist, an academician of painting, and the author of the painting "The Rooks Have Arrived".