any good. I'll go with the spring floods', and he clearly felt this was to be his fate too.
All around Moscow, the snow was indeed beginning to melt, and it had rained all night the day before Chekhov left Melikhovo. At first he was forbidden to talk but was soon besieged by visitors, who came in pairs and fired questions at him while telling him not to say anything. Tolstoy, who lived nearby, saved Chekhov's energy by doing most of the talking when he came to visit, but their prolonged discussion of immortality one evening provoked another haemorrhage at four in the morning. Eventually Chekhov was allowed to start walking about again, and in thundery weather on Maundy Thursday he was permitted to leave the clinic and return home to Melikhovo in time for Easter.1 His father recorded in his diary on that day that they had eaten radishes and lettuces from the greenhouse. He also noted that ten poplar trees were planted in the garden on the day of his son's return, but made no mention of his illness (the gravity of which Chekhov was anxious to
Chekhov now settled down to spend a quiet summer working in his garden, running away from guests, and posing for the portrait commissioned by the Tretyakov Gallery.
Along with the shock of confronting his mortality in this stark way came the awful realization that he would never be able to spend another winter in Moscow. Thus it was with a heavy heart that he set off for the south of France that autumn, dimly hoping that his health would benefit from the warm climate. Intending to stay abroad until the snow finally melted in Russia the following spring, he boarded the train for Paris at the beginning of September 1897, and a week later he was sitting in bright sunshine in fashionable Biarritz, surrounded by Spaniards, poodles, brightly coloured parasols, blind musicians – and lots of well-heeled Russians. The golf course which the British had built a decade earlier (the second oldest on the continent) did not exercise any attraction for Chekhov, but he did go on a couple of trips to the nearby Basque town of Bayonne, one of which was to hear a performance of La Belle Helene at the casino there.3 Offenbach's uproarious operetta was the work that had sparked Chekhov's lifelong interest in the theatre, and seeing it now in France must have taken him back to the tiny theatre in Taganrog, which he had first visited when he
was thirteen years old. After two weeks of sitting on the seafront reading newspapers and eating hearty meals, Chekhov abandoned the blustery Atlantic and its crashing waves for the gentler Mediterranean and moved to Nice, where he ended up staying for the next seven months. It was the longest period he ever spent abroad.
Nice had been officially ceded to France in a mutually advantageous deal struck between Napoleon III and Vittorio Emmanuele II of Savoy in 1860, the year of Chekhov's birth. Since then, with the horrors of the Crimean War quickly receding into the past, Russians had started flocking to Nice in greater numbers. The English had immortalized their presence on the French Riviera in the 1820s by building the famous Promenade des Anglais along the seafront so that they could indulge their penchant for taking bracing constitutionals,4 and this was where Chekhov also took his daily walks. Once Nice was connected to Paris by rail, wealthy Russians threatened British supremacy on the Cote d'Azur. Alexander II and his retinue arrived just three days after the opening of the ornate Louis Xlll-style station in 1865, pre-empting even Napoleon and the Empress Eugenie. Back then the journey took the best part of a day and some Russian aristocrats were known to order the trains to go more slowly so they could get a good night's sleep.5 There were soon over a thousand people arriving each day during the high season.
There was already a sizeable Russian population living in Nice by the time Chekhov arrived in 1897, and the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna felt the little church on the Rue de Longchamps was too small to accommodate the community's burgeoning spiritual needs. After returning home to Petersburg after her winter in Nice that spring, she petitioned her son, Nicholas II, to authorize the construction of a much larger place of worship. The Cathedral of St Nicholas continued to thrive while there were still hundreds of exiled Russian families living in Nice after the Revolution, and nowadays it is the new wave of wealthy visitors from Russia who have helped make the exotic-looking building become one of the most popular tourist attractions on the Riviera. Few visit the old church of Saints Nicholas and Alexandra, but the Russian library housed on the ground floor is open to visitors one day a week. Chekhov did not attend services regularly (if at all) while he was living in Nice, but he came to browse through the books in the library, some of which had been donated by its founder back in 1860. There was also a Russian
Prof. Ostroumov's clinic, Moscow, where Chekhov was a patient in 1897
bookshop nearby, and the editorial offices of the newspaper Le Messager franco-russe, which on 24 November 1897 belatedly reported the arrival of the 'celebrated young novelist' (sic) on the Cote d'Azur.6
It was around this time that Chekhov got to know Mordechai Rozanov, the endearing Jewish proprietor of the bookshop and the paper, and was soon treating his sick wife.7 On the day that Chekhov's name appeared in the Messager franco-russe, he wrote to an old university friend commenting that the newspapers were full of gossip about the Dreyfus case, and the conversations he had with Rozanov and one of the Jewish Russian columnists for the Messager franco-russe undoubtedly fuelled his growing solidarity with those who supported the court-martialled officer against the anti-semitic French establishment. Shortly after Zola's famous letter ]'accuse! was published in L'Aurore on 1 January 1898, at the height of the controversy, Chekhov wrote a long and vehement letter to Suvorin, whose newspaper had taken the side of the Establishment, in which he passionately defended Zola's crusade against the unjust treatment of Dreyfus. The continued anti-semitic bias of New Times appalled Chekhov. He was the only major Russian writer to take an active stand in the affair, and went out of his way to meet with Dreyfus's brother in Paris after leaving Nice the following April.8
Chekhov revelled in being able to walk about outside in a straw hat instead of being wrapped up in fur. He also liked the smell of the sea air, and was clearly reminded of the coastal port he had grown up in when he wrote to tell his cousin that Nice was about the same size as Taganrog.9 Seeing some boys and a priest playing noisily with a ball near a school one day also reminded him of his home town, he told his brother Ivan in another letter. Chekhov was passionately fond of warm weather – he was from the south after all, and felt at home in the sun. But, unlike most other visitors, he had little enthusiasm for the precipitous and dramatic landscape of the Corniche with its umbrella pines, cypresses and olive trees. He told one correspondent that it left him cold, and to another described the local flora as 'decorative, just like an oleograph'. There was also no grass.10 He had probably voiced some of his own sentiments in 'An Anonymous Story', which he had completed after his first visit to the city, in 1892. Above the shoreline, in the lilac mist, the narrator sees 'hills, gardens, towers and villas, all bathed in sunlight', but finds the vista 'alien, uninteresting, a strange kind of jumble'.11
This was the only occasion when Chekhov used Nice as a setting for his fictional writing. If anything, the local scenery appeared to arouse in him an intense nostalgia for the flat steppe landscapes of his childhood. How do we know this? Not from anything he said in the 200 odd letters he wrote during the long months that he spent in Nice, but from the fact that the first two short stories he wrote during his first winter there are set in a steppe landscape at the height of summer. The first of them, usually translated as 'At Home' (although its Russian title actually conveys the idea of being on one's 'home turf or on one's native territory), stands out in particular for its lyrical description of the steppe. It was written in little more than a week and begun soon after Chekhov arrived in Nice in October 1897, when a brief spell of inclement weather had prompted him to go out and buy some paper and quills. The papier ecolier he bought looked so appealing, and the buying of quills was such an enjoyable experience, that it was actually hard to restrain himself from writing, he explained to Vasily Sobolevsky, the editor of the newspaper Russian Gazette, who published the story a few weeks later.12 The story's typically Chekhovian terse first sentence – 'The Don railway.' – locates us very precisely in the landscape directly north of Taganrog. Chekhov had travelled through
it by train the previous summer on his way back to his native town. Twenty-three-year-old Vera is returning to her childhood home for the first time in ten years and we see the steppe through her eyes as she travels from
