the station in the family troika. She is mesmerized, after the long hours sitting in a stuffy train carriage, by the profusion of green, yellow, lilac and white flowering grasses around her and the smell of the warm earth:
. . . and little by little before you unfold landscapes endless and fascinating in their monotony, unlike any around Moscow. The steppe, the steppe and nothing else; an old kurgan or a windmill in the distance; oxen carrying coal. . . Solitary birds fly low over the plain, and the rhythmical beating of their wings brings on drowsiness. It is hot. Another hour goes by and there is still nothing but the steppe, the steppe and a kurgan in the distance .. .
The words 'The steppe, the steppe' are repeated three times in the space of a few paragraphs, as if to echo the call of the lonely birds which fly overhead. At the end of the story, disillusioned by the people she has come back to live among, Vera resolves that the only way for her to survive is to 'merge with the luxurious steppe and its flowers, kurgans and expanses, boundless and impartial like eternity'.13 Chekhov was looking out on to a lush garden of palms, blooming oleanders and orange trees in his hotel as he wrote this.
The third story Chekhov wrote in Nice, 'On the Cart', one of his most poignant, is also set in surroundings far removed from the opulent French Riviera. It follows the thoughts of an impoverished young village school teacher travelling home by peasant cart one spring day after collecting her wages in town, her loneliness only reinforced by a casual encounter with the local bachelor landowner out in his carriage:
'Hold tight, Vasilievna!' said Semyon.
The cart tilted heavily and almost keeled over; something heavy fell on to Marya Vasilievna's feet – it was her shopping. Now there was a steep climb up the hill through mud as thick as clay; noisy streams were running down the winding ditches, and it was as if the water had been eating away at the road – travelling round here was something else! The
horses were snorting. Khanov climbed out of his carriage and started walking along the edge of the road. He was hot.
'How do you like the road?' Khanov asked again with a laugh. 'My carriage is going to be wrecked at this rate.'
Glimpsing a woman on a passing train who resembles her deceased mother takes Marya Vasilievna back for a fraction of a second to the joyful surroundings of her family home in Moscow when she was growing up in more prosperous circumstances:
And for no apparent reason she burst into tears. Just at that moment Khanov drove up in his coach-and-four, and when she saw him she imagined the happiness she had never had and smiled at him, nodding her head as if she was a close acquaintance and his equal, and it felt to her as if her happiness, her exultation, was reflected in the sky, in all the windows and in the trees. No, her father and mother had never died, and she had never been a teacher; that was just a long, terrible, bizarre dream, and she had just woken up . . .14
But the train speeds off into the distance, taking with it her brief illusion of happiness. Marya Vasilievna is forced once again to confront the reality of her 'dull, difficult' existence, 'lacking in kindness, caring friends and interesting acquaintances', and reflected even in her dreams, which only ever seem to be about exams, peasants and snowdrifts. Chekhov found it easier to write from memory. In response to a commission from an international journal in St Petersburg for a suitably 'international' story set on the Cote d'Azur, he replied that he would only be able to write about his current surroundings when he was back in Russia. It was necessary for his memory to filter the subject first, he explained, so that only what was important or typical was left behind.15 After breakfast each day, Chekhov liked to walk down to the Promenade des Anglais and sit reading the newspapers or just gaze out to the soft blue sea in the curving Baie des Anges. Like the city's eucalyptus trees brought from Australia, the palm trees in whose shade he sat had actually been imported in the 1860s when Nice was first developed as a resort. Chekhov was something of a Russian newspaper fanatic, and confessed to being bored without them when he first arrived.16 Soon he was receiving copies of Russian Gazette from the
editor in Moscow, as well as Russian Word, The Courier and New Times from Petersburg, which he would then forward to his friend the Russian Vice-Consul. His father, meanwhile, started sending him regular bundles of issues of other newspapers, including the local Taganrog paper. When his French improved and the Dreyfus scandal was at its height, Chekhov also started devouring he Figaro, L'Aurore, La Parole libre and other French newspapers. His other obsession was correspondence, and the friends who came to visit him could not help noticing that he received a lot of letters. Chekhov may have been a private and guarded person who kept people at arm's length, but he nevertheless needed to be able to keep them within reach. A week into his stay in Nice, a month after leaving Moscow, he was pining for letters from home, and said as much to Suvorin. In letter after letter written in his first weeks away, he carefully spelled out 'France, Nice, Pension Russe, a Monsieur Antoine Tchekhoff' to ensure that people knew his address and that envelopes addressed to him by his correspondents did not go astray. 'I'm going to be here a long time,' he wrote in one of his first letters, to his cousin Georgi in Taganrog; 'it's boring without letters, and if you keep your promise i.e. write and tell me what is going on in Taganrog, I'll be very grateful.'17
Eventually Chekhov began to receive replies to the many letters he was sending, and wrote back in ebullient form about his first impressions of Nice, the people he had met and his day trips by train up the coast: to Beaulieu to visit Maxim Kovalevsky, to Villefranche where there was an interesting Russian zoological station, and to Monte Carlo where there was the famous casino. And he had not coughed up blood once, he told his sister exultantly on 15 October, three weeks after his arrival; his friends were coughing much more than he was, and medical advice was that he could do anything but go to Paris in November when it was damp and snowy. He had seen the King of Siam, there was greenery all around, the chambermaid smiled at him all the time, he had discovered mosquito repellent so was sleeping better, the sky was always blue, and he had even started writing a new story.18
It is unlikely Chekhov would have wanted to go to the races or attend black tie dinners even if he had felt completely well (one senses that his excuse for refusing one such invitation on the grounds that he did not have a dinner jacket was a convenient one). The nearest he
came to the world of high society was catching sight of Queen Victoria one spring day while out on his daily walk.19 The doughty British sovereign had been enjoying visits to the French Riviera since 1882, and between 1895 and 1899 she made annual winter visits to Nice, which served to bring even more visitors to the area. In March 1897 she and her retinue of a hundred staff arrived to take over the entire west wing of the brand new Excelsior Hotel Regina, which had been specially built for her (the enormous belle epoque edifice, up on the hill above the city in Cimiez, was where Matisse settled after the war). The Queen liked to go for afternoon drives in her carriage, and each year she was brought down to the Promenade des Anglais to view a parade of French soldiers. Perhaps Chekhov got hit by a carnation during the so-called 'Battle of the Flowers', which ensued when the Queen amused herself by throwing flowers at the young army officers.20
II The Pension Russe
Yesterday I had blini at our Vice-Consul Yurasov's house.
Letter to Olga Knipper, Nice, 2 January 1901
Chekhov's residence in Nice was a spacious south-facing room with shutters, a grand Cleopatra-style bed and an en suite bathroom, on the top floor of the Pension Russe, a modest three-storey hotel set deep in a courtyard on the Rue Gounod and surrounded by a lush garden. There was a carpet and a fireplace in his room, but it was usually
