key to a room on the fourth floor, and, after walking down an almost satirically long empty corridor, I opened the door to a cubicle about eieht feet bv twelve, pleasingly furnished in the blond-wood Scandinavian Modern style of the fifties and sixties, and affording just enough room for a double bed, a small round table with two chairs, an armchair, and a minuscule refrigerator. My little balcony-like its myriad replicas-offered a glimpse of the sea and a view of large swimming pools, tennis courts, various outbuildings, and an auditorium. No one was in the pools or on the courts, but American popular music blared out of a loudspeaker. I shut the glass door to muffle the sound and hopefully opened the refrigerator. It was empty. In the bathroom I found serviceable fixtures and a soap dish of plastic made to resemble brown marble.
On my arrival, an unsmiling young man named Igor, who spoke fluent English, had approached me in the lobby and led me to his office, where he enumerated the activities that had been arranged for the next two days with Nina and Yevgeny. These had been prepaid, and he wanted me to understand that anything more would cost extra. (The trip to Oreanda would be one such addition.) When I mentioned my lost luggage and asked if there was somewhere I could buy a nightgown and a change of clothes, he looked at his watch and said that if I walked down to the town-a twenty- or thirty-minute walk-I might still find some clothing stores open.
As I walked to the town in the late-afternoon sunlight, down a winding road fragrant with the smells of the trees and shrubs and wildflowers that lined it, and left the horrible hotel behind, I felt a stir of happiness. Though it was May, St. Petersburg had been icily wintry and Moscow only a few degrees warmer. But here it was true spring; the air was fresh and soft. In a few months-I knew from 'The Lady with the Dog'-Yalta would be hot and dusty. On the day Gurov and Anna became lovers 'it was sultry indoors, while in the street the wind whirled the dust round and round and blew people's hats off. It was a thirsty day, and Gurov often went into the pavilion, and pressed Anna Sergeyevna to have syrup and water or an ice. One did not know what to do with oneself.' In the evening, after mingling with a crowd at the harbor that has gathered to meet a ship coming in, Gurov kisses Anna and they go to her hotel. After they have made love, Anna sits dejected 'like 'the woman who was a sinner' in an old fashioned picture,' and Gurov callously cuts himself a slice of watermelon and eats it 'without haste.' Gurov's unforgettable gesture-the mark of the cold roue that he is-only deepens the mystery and heightens the poignancy of his later transformation into a man capable of serious love.
As I walked on, small village houses of a familiar old sort began to appear. Yalta seemed untouched by the hands that had heaved my monstrous hotel into the hillside above it. Along the seafront, some changes had of course taken place since Gurov and Anna strolled there. In the square opposite the harbor stood a huge statue of Lenin gesturing toward the sea; and the harbor itself had become the site of a kiddie park, outfitted with garishly colored cartoon figures. The shops along the tree-lined promenade-selling film and sun-tan lotion and mermaid dolls and souvenir china-had a neglected, unvisited air; perhaps business would pick up in the hot, dusty season. Many were closed for the day, including the clothing stores. When Chekhov visited Yalta for the first time, in July 1888, he disparaged it thus to his sister Maria: 'Yalta is a mixture of something European that reminds one of the views of Nice, with something cheap and shoddy. The box-like hotels in which unhappy consumptives are pining, the impudent Tatar faces, the ladies' bustles with their very undisguised expression of something very abominable, the faces of the idle rich longing for cheap adventures, the smell of perfumery instead of the scent of the cedars and the sea, the miserable dirty pier, the melancholy lights far out at sea, the prattle of young ladies and gentlemen who have crowded here in order to admire nature of which they have no idea-all this taken together produces such a depressing effect and is so overwhelming that one begins to blame oneself for being biased and unfair.'
I began my ascent up the hill. The sun was nearing the horizon, and there was a chill in the air. The weight of being thousands of miles from home with nothing to wear but the clothes on my back fell on me. I tried to pull myself together, to rise above my petty obsession with the loss of a few garments, and to that end invoked Chekhov and the heightened sense of what is important in life that gleams out of his work. The shadow of mortality hovers over his texts; his characters repeatedly remind one another, 'We all have to die' and 'Life is not given twice.' Chekhov himself needed no such reminders: the last decade of his life was a daily struggle with increasingly virulent pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis. And yet when he was dying, in the spa of Badenweiler, where he had stupidly been sent by a specialist, he wrote letters to Maria in which he repeatedly complained not about his fate but about how badly German women dressed. 'Nowhere do women dress so abominably… I have not seen one beautiful woman, nor one who was not trimmed with some kind of absurd braid,' he wrote on June 8, 1904, and then, on June 28-in his last letter to anyone and his last comment on anything-'There is not a single decently dressed German woman. The lack of taste makes one depressed.'
I continued climbing the hill, in the inflexible grip of un-happiness over my lost clothes. And then the realization came: the recognition that when my suitcase was taken something else had been restored to me-feeling itself. Until the mishap at the airport, I had not felt anything very much. Without knowing exactly why, I have always found travel writing a little boring, and now the reason seemed clear: travel itself is a low-key emotional experience, a pallid affair in comparison to ordinary life. When Gurov picks up Anna at an outdoor restaurant (approaching her through her dog) they converse thus: 'Have you been long in Yalta?' [he says.] 'Five days.'
'And I have already dragged out a fortnight here.' There was a brief silence.
'Time goes fast, and yet it is so dull here!' she said, not looking at him.
'That's only the fashion to say it is dull here. A provincial will live in Belyov or Zhidra and not be dull, and when he comes here it's 'Oh the dullness! Oh, the dust!' One would think he came from Granada.'
Although the passage functions (as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out) as an illustration of Gurov's attractive wit, it also expresses the truth that had just been revealed to me, and that Chekhov's Yalta exile revealed to him-that our homes are Granada. They are where the action is; they are where the riches of experience are distributed. On our travels, we stand before paintings and look at scenery, and sometimes we are moved, but rarely are we as engaged with life as we are in the course of any ordinary day in our usual surroundings. Only when faced with one of the inevitable minor hardships of travel do we break out of the trance of tourism and once again feel the sharp savor of the real. ('I have never met anyone who was less a tourist,' Maxim Ko-valevsky, a professor of sociology whom Chekhov met in Nice in 1897, wrote of his compatriot, and went on to say, 'Visiting museums, art galleries, and ruins exhausted rather than delighted him… In Rome I found myself obliged to assume the role of guide, showing him the Forum, the ruins of the palace of the Caesars, the Capitol. To all of this he remained more or less indifferent.') Chekhov was deeply bored in Yalta before he built his house and put in his garden, and even afterward he felt as if he had been banished and that life was elsewhere. When he wrote of the three sisters' yearning for Moscow, he was expressing his own sense of exile: 'One does not know what to do with oneself.' Chekhov's villa in Autka-Nina took me there on our first day together-is a two-story stucco house of distinguished, unornamented, faintly Moorish architecture, with an extensive, well-ordered garden and spacious rooms that look out over Yalta to the sea. Maria Chekhova, who lived until 1957, preserved the house and garden, fending off Nazi occupiers during the war and enduring the insults of the Stalin and Khrushchev periods. It remains furnished as in Chekhov's time: handsomely, simply, elegantly. As Chekhov cared about women's dress (it does not go unnoted in the work, and is always significant), he cared about the furnishings of his houses. Perhaps his love of order and elegance was innate, but more likely it was a reaction against the disorder and harshness of his early family life. His father, Pavel Yegorovich, was the son of a serf who had managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife and children. Pavel rose in the world and became the owner of a grocery store in Taganrog, a town with a large foreign (mostly Greek) population, on the sea of Azov, in southern Russia. The store, as Chekhov's best biographer, Ernest J. Simmons, characterizes it in Chekhov (1962), resembled a New England general store-selling things like kerosene, tobacco, yarn, nails, and home remedies-though, unlike a New England store, it also sold vodka, which was consumed on the premises in a separate room. In Simmons's description, the place had 'filthy debris on the floor, torn soiled oilcloth on the counters, and in summer, swarms of flies settled everywhere. An unpleasant melange of odors emanated from the exposed goods: the sugar smelled of kerosene, the coffee of herring. Brazen rats prowled about the stock.'
Chekhov's oldest brother, Alexander, in a memoir of Anton, wrote of a freezing winter night on which 'the future writer,' then a nine-year-old schoolboy, was dragged by his father from the warm room where he was doing his homework and made to mind the unheated store. The account lays stress on the cruelty of the father and the misery of the boy, and is crudely written, in a sort of penny-dreadful style. The reticent Anton himself left no memoir of his childhood sorrows, though there are passages in his stories that are assumed to refer to them. In the long story 'Three Years' (1895), for example, the hero, Laptev, says to his wife, 'I can remember my father correcting me-or, to speak plainly, beating me-before I was five years old. He used to thrash me with a birch, pull my ears, hit me on the head, and every morning when I woke up my first thought was whether he would beat me
