Hommaire de Hell, 1847
Chekhov first saw Yalta from the deck of the steamer that was carrying him from Sevastopol to Feodosia in July 1888. It was his first visit to the celebrated Crimean peninsula which Catherine the Great had regarded as the most precious jewel in her crown, and he had been looking forward with eager anticipation to seeing its exotic vistas with his own eyes. He was not impressed. The train carrying him from the heart of the lush Ukrainian countryside, where he was spending the summer with his family, first had to cross the steppe, and he was immediately overcome with disappointment as he sat looking out of the window. Chekhov was something of a connoisseur of the steppe, as we know, and he found the flat landscape on the way to Simferopol utterly dispiriting in its colourlessness and monotony. It was as bleak as the Siberian tundra and had none of the charm and loveliness of the steppe around Taganrog, in his opinion. After Simferopol the scenery became more attractive: hills covered with vineyards alternated with groves filled with poplars. But it was only when the train finally pulled into Sevastopol station late in the evening and he caught his first sight of the Black Sea that Chekhov's spirits soared: the water's extraordinary, indescribable colour reminded him somewhat of copper sulphate, he
wrote in a letter, and he would pillage his memories of the moonlit bay four years later when he came to write the last pages of his story 'The Black Monk'. Like Chekhov and thousands of other travellers, Kovrin, the central character, spends the night in a hotel by the harbour in Sevastopol prior to catching a steamer the next day:
Kovrin went out on to the balcony; the weather was calm and mild and you could smell the sea. The glorious bay reflected the moon and the lights and had a colour that was difficult to pin down. It was a soft, gentle mixture of blue and green; in some parts the colour of the water was like copper sulphate, while in others it seemed that the moonlight had condensed and filled the bay instead of water; but what a harmony of colours in general; what a peaceful, calm and sublime mood!1
The famous stone steps leading to the water's edge from the white-columned pavilion of the 'Count's Landing Stage' afforded a fine view of the sea, particularly on moonlit nights. As one English guidebook commented at the time,'… the view is, if possible, even more splendid on a dark and still night when the waters of the bay become beautifully phosphorescent, and when every stroke of an oar produces a shower of phosphoric sparks'.2 The heat and the dust the following morning, however, combined with the noise of the port, the brick-coloured, sunburnt skin of the locals, and the putrid smell of old ropes produced in Chekhov a feeling of deathly boredom.3 And his mood did not really change once they had weighed anchor. Perhaps he had impossibly high expectations of the dramatic landscape of the Crimea's southern coast, with its towering cliffs, cedars and cypresses, over which so many had swooned. The numerous travel writers who helped to slake the sudden British thirst for books on the Crimea in the 1850s (because of the war) had certainly found plenty to praise, even taking into account the national tendency towards understatement. 'Following the coast-line to Yalta, one beautiful estate succeeds another, generally under high cultivation,' one wrote, 'while thickly-wooded mountain declivities, groups of fantastic rocks, fine views of the sea, attractive dwellings, hedges of cypress and olive, pomegranate and myrtle, claim the admiration of the traveller.'4 When Levitan had made his first trip to the region in 1886, he had burst out sobbing from the beauty of it all,5 and the dozens of sketches he had shown his friend on his return must
have played a role in fuelling Chekhov's imagination.6 Seeing the Crimean shoreline from the ship, however, convinced Chekhov that its beauty had been exaggerated and made him understand why it had not inspired his fellow writers. He thought that the countryside surrounding the River Psyol where his dacha was located was far more varied and colourful. As for Yalta, where the ship made a stop before continuing east along the coast to Feodosia, it was a town with a European flavour which looked a bit like Nice, but he thought there was also something a bit common about it:
Box-like hotels in which unfortunate consumptives are fading away, brazen Tatar mugs . . . the ugly mugs of the idle rich in search of cheap adventures, the smell of a perfumery instead of cedars and the ocean, a wretched grubby landing stage, sad lights in the sea far away, the chatter of ladies and their escorts who have flocked here to enjoy nature without understanding anything about it – all this in general produces such a thoroughly despondent impression that you start accusing yourself of bigotry and prejudice.7
It was not exactly an auspicious beginning to Chekhov's relationship with the town which would become his home for the last six years of his life. In an ironic twist of fate, a decade later he would himself, of course, join the ranks of unfortunate consumptives fading away in Yalta. The circumstances of Chekhov's first proper visit to Yalta the following July were also far from propitious. His brother Nikolai had died his agonizing death from consumption in the middle of the family's summer holiday at the dacha, and Chekhov had simply fled in a haze of grief and guilt. He had intended to go abroad, but in his confusion and uncertainty he had ended up in Yalta instead, where he spent three weeks renting a room in a dacha near the seafront. Having made his debut in a literary journal that spring, Chekhov was now a Famous Writer and so was immediately besieged by pretentious young poets and budding writers wanting him to appraise their weighty manuscripts. He found this very tedious. There were a great many people earnestly writing away in Yalta, it seemed, but none of them had any talent as far as he could see. Chekhov may have grumbled about not getting much writing done himself while he was in Yalta, but in truth he was probably glad to make new acquaintances who could
distract him with picnics in the nearby imperial parks at Massandra, Livadia and Oreanda. There were also invitations to take excursions further afield – along the coast to the village of Balaklava, scene of the famous Crimean War battle thirty years earlier, and over the forest-covered mountains inland to Bakhchiserai, the former Tatar capital. Chekhov was still unimpressed with the flora, which he condemned as pitiful, and he pointed out to his sister that the much lauded cypresses were in fact dark and dusty, and no taller than the poplar growing by the porch of the Lintvaryovs' house in Luka. He was also unimpressed with the fauna: women outnumbered the men twenty to one, but none of them were attractive in his opinion, and they smelt of ice-cream. Recent events had inevitably cast a pall over the summer, and his low spirits clearly only exacerbated his natural misanthropic tendencies. He enjoyed swimming in the sea every morning and going on sedate horse-rides, but told his sister that he spent much of the time sitting for hours on the seafront, listening to the waves breaking against the shore and imagining he was back with their friends at Luka. He certainly felt guilty at having abandoned his family in a state of despair and fear.8
Although one of Chekhov's friends nicknamed him Antoine Potemkin', this is not an indication that he had any interest in the Crimea's recent past. He actually had little in common with Catherine the Great's favourite, Grigory Potemkin, who in 1783 was put in charge of the newly conquered province of the Crimea, or Tauris as it was known in ancient times. It had been Potemkin, anointed Prince of the new province of Taurida, who organized Catherine's triumphant tour of the 'New Russian' realm four years later, erecting film-set villages along the way, according to the legend, and a spectacular show of fireworks in Sevastopol. It was the British who built the military harbour for Russia's Black Sea fleet and, ironically, it was the British who were responsible for its total decimation in the Crimean War some seventy years later when Sevastopol was almost 'wiped from the face of the earth', as an early Russian guide book put it.9 The town was still recovering when Chekhov first visited it in the late 1880s, and then had a population of about 2,500. Yalta, on the other hand, universally regarded as the most attractive point on the coast, was already entering its most fashionable phase as a watering place, and its permanent population of 5,000 was swelled annually during the season by hordes of well-heeled holidaymakers thronging to take advantage of its gentle
climate and picturesque situation. By the time Chekhov settled in Yalta in 1898 it was the top resort in Russia.
Like the British royal family's development of Brighton, the Russian imperial family played the most important
