But meanwhile up above, clouds are clustering together over where the sun is rising; one cloud is like a triumphal arch, another like a lion and a third like scissors … A broad green strip of light emerges from behind the clouds and stretches out to the middle of the sky; a little later a violet one joins it, then a gold one, and a pink one .. . The sky turns a delicate lilac colour. The ocean frowns at first as it looks at this magnificent, mesmerizing sky, but then itself takes on those tender, radiant, passionate colours which are difficult to describe in human terms.40
II Europe
I'm in Venice. Put me in a madhouse.
Letter to Maria Kiselyova, 25 March 1891
Abbazia and the Adriatic are wonderful, but Luka and the Psyol are better.
Letter to Natalya Lintvaryova, 21 September 1894
After travelling as far east as he could almost possibly go, where else could Chekhov visit next but Western Europe? He had done privation; now it was time for decadence. It was a relatively quick turnaround. He arrived back in Moscow in early December 1890. After the open spaces of Siberia, he felt very cramped resuming his city life in the small flat that his family had rented while he was away, and he was soon itching to travel again. By March he was on his way to St Petersburg to meet up with Suvorin and catch the express train to Vienna. And it was not just any old train – Suvorin's sybaritic tastes dictated that they travel in style, and so their carriage boasted comfortable beds, carpets, mirrors and enormous windows. A far cry from the tarantas of the previous year. Chekhov travelled to Western Europe on five occasions in his life. There were two visits undertaken with Suvorin in 1891 and 1894, both whistlestop tours of the great cities, and then there were two much longer sojourns he spent on the French Riviera for health reasons. He had longed to take off from the south of France and visit Africa, but by this time he was tragically unfit for the rugged adventures that had been the stuff of his boyhood dreams. The last time Chekhov travelled to Western Europe was to die.
The itinerary for the 1891 tour took in Vienna, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Nice, Paris and Berlin, and was completed in six weeks. Chekhov's reaction to arriving for the first time in the Austrian capital was one of naive amazement and delight. 'If only you could know how magnificent Vienna is!' he wrote excitedly to his family back in Moscow:
… there is no comparison with any other city I've ever seen in my life. The streets are wide and immaculately paved, there are masses of boulevards and squares, all the houses have six or seven storeys, and as for the shops – well, they are not shops so much as an utterly stupefying dream come true! The ties alone in the windows run into billions! And what amazing things they have in bronze, china, leather! The churches are enormous, but their size caresses rather than oppresses the eye because they seem to have been spun from lace. St Stephen's Cathedral and the Votiv-Kirche are particularly beautiful, more like cakes than buildings. The parliament building, the Town Hall, the University, all are magnificent; yesterday I understood for the first time that architecture is truly an art form. And in Vienna this art
form is not scattered about randomly as it is with us, but extends in terraces for miles on end . . .41
Two days later, however, Chekhov was in Venice, and he already had to revise his opinion that Vienna was the ne plus ultra:
I must say that for sheer enchantment, brilliance and joie de vivre I have never in all my life seen a more wonderful city than Venice. Where you expect to find streets and lanes there are canals, instead of cabs there are gondolas, the architecture is staggeringly beautiful and every little corner has its historical or artistic interest. You drift along in a gondola seeing the palaces of the Doges, Desdemona's house, the homes of famous painters, churches .. . And inside these churches are sculptures and paintings such as one sees only in dreams. In a word, enchantment. . . It's quite easy for a poor, benighted Russian to lose his wits in this world of beauty, riches and freedom. You simply want to stay here for ever, and when you stand in a church and listen to the organ being played it's enough to make you become Catholic straight away.42
But then it started raining, and Chekhov's spirits immediately plummeted. 'It's raining as hard as you can imagine, and Venezia the bella has ceased to be particularly bella,' he lamented to his family; 'there's a feeling of melancholy wafting from the water, and it makes one long to flee to somewhere where the sun is shining.' A week into the tour and the travellers were in Florence. Chekhov was enjoying himself, but he was not really in his element, and he soon tired of visiting museums. 'I saw the Venus dei Medici and thought that were she to be dressed in the sort of clothes people wear nowadays she would look most unattractive, especially around the waist,' he said in his next letter home, signing himself Antonio. The skies continued to be overcast and, for Chekhov, Italy without the sun was like a face behind a mask. The glories of Renaissance art somehow failed to make their mark. 'I've seen everything I was supposed to and dragged myself to everywhere I was told go to,' he confided to a friend; 'if someone gave me something to smell, I smelled it. Now I am drained of all feeling except exhaustion and a longing for cabbage soup with buckwheat kasha. Venice put me under her spell and turned my head, but the moment I left, Baedeker and bad weather took over.'
Either Chekhov's Siberian experience had spoiled him for the pleasures of cultural tourism in the old world, or he was by nature unsuited for such pursuits. Either way, the tour did not prove to be as enjoyable as he had expected. Once the initial novelty of being in the great cities of European civilization had worn off, he quickly got bored, and it is telling that by the time the party reached Rome, all Chekhov wanted to do was get out of town and lie on the grass somewhere. This is not to impute any philistinism to him: he found Italy an enchanting country, and was mystified that Levitan had not taken to it. 'If I were an artist with no ties and plenty of money I would spend the winters here,' he wrote; 'after all, it's not simply that the natural surroundings and the warmth of Italy are beautiful in themselves, but Italy is the only country where art reigns over all, and simply to be aware of this is very stimulating.' Part of the problem was simply the opulence of being part of Suvorin's entourage: 'We stayed in the best hotel in Venice, like doges, and here in Rome we're living like cardinals, because our hotel is the former palace of Cardinal Conti, now the Hotel Minerva: two huge drawing rooms, chandeliers, carpets, fireplaces and all kinds of useless clutter, costing us 40 francs a day.' This was again a far cry from the accommodation in Siberia which had been at best spartan, and maybe he felt he somehow had to do penance. There was an exhilarating horse-ride from Pompeii to the bottom of Vesuvius, and then an excruciating ascent by foot:
Dragging oneself up Vesuvius is sheer torture: ash, mounds of lava, molten rock that has congealed in waves, clumps of vegetation and all kinds of rubbish. One step forward, half a step back, the soles of your feet are sore, your chest aches … On you plod, but the summit is as far away as ever. Give up and turn back? No, I would be too ashamed, and besides I would expose myself to ridicule. I started the ascent at two-thirty, and got to the top at six. The crater is several score metres across; I stood on its rim and looked down into it as if into a cup. The ground all round about is covered in a deposit of sulphur that gives off clouds of vapour. Evil-smelling white smoke belches forth from the crater itself, molten rock and sparks fly everywhere, and Satan lies snoring beneath the smoke. There is a huge cacophony of sounds: waves breaking against the shore, the heavens thundering, rails clattering, boards crashing down. It is terrifying, and yet one is gripped by a desire to leap straight down into the monster's mouth. I now believe in hell.43
Chekhov visited another kind of hell when they moved on to Nice and stayed in a smart hotel on the seafront. At least the air smelt nice there, he noted, and it was warm and green. But not in the roulette halls of nearby Monte
