role in the transformation of Yalta from a small fishing village, with just a handful of inhabitants, at the beginning of the nineteenth century into the most populated area in the Crimea a century later. But it was Count Vorontsov who championed it first: no Russian considered living on the southern Crimean coast before him. Catherine had handed out parcels of land to her favourites after conquering the Crimea, and among the palaces which sprang up along the coast in ensuing decades, Count Vorontsov's in Alupka and Massandra were by far the grandest. With an English education behind him (his father was appointed ambassador to London when he was three years old), a distinguished record in the Napoleonic wars (after which he was appointed head of the Russian occupying forces in Paris), and an immense fortune, Mikhail Vorontsov was one of the most prominent statesmen of his time. In 1823 he was appointed by Alexander I to be the governor of the new southern province of 'New Russia'. While he was officially based in Odessa, he chose the area around Yalta as the location for his private residence, and it was here that Alexander I came to visit in 1825 with his ailing wife. The Tsar was so taken with nearby Oreanda that he decided to acquire a plot of land and retire there. He managed to plant a vineyard and olive trees round the modest house that he had built, but his retirement plans were thwarted by his unexpected death in Taganrog later in the year.10
When Alexander's successor, Nicholas I, first visited the Crimea in 1837, he stayed in Vorontsov's new palace in Alupka, situated 150 feet above the sea. Its opulence aroused his envy. The enormous Gothic fantasy designed by Edward Blore, the British court architect who completed Buckingham Palace, was constructed by Blore's assistant, William Hunt, using stone hewn from an extinct volcano at the back of the property. Blore never set eyes on his whimsical creation, which mixed the Elizabethan and the Moorish, with a dash of mediaeval castle thrown in for good measure. Nor did he ever see the terraces, marble lions, fountains and rare plants in Vorontsov's immense park, which Winston Churchill was to enjoy during the Yalta Conference in 1945.
When he lived in Yalta, Chekhov made many visits to Alupka to
admire the fine trees and subtropical plants in its sumptuous park (two cypresses had been planted by Potemkin), and on one occasion took a walk through the grounds with Tolstoy, who was staying nearby. He also attended the charity concerts that were held on the terrace in aid of the nearby sanatorium for children with tuberculosis.11 His acquaintance with the Russian-Jewish pianist Semyon Samuelson, who was one of the regular performers, was probably helped along by their having a common friend in Rachmaninov, whom Chekhov had recently got to know in Yalta. Samuelson had graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire with the Gold Medal the year after Rachmaninov and was a frequent visitor to Yalta, not least because his brother owned a pharmacy down the road from Chekhov's house. An upright piano was one of Chekhov's first Yalta acquisitions for his house, and he must have been filled with nostalgic memories of listening to his brother Nikolai at the keyboard when Samuelson came and played Chopin nocturnes to him. Samuelson later related to Olga Knipper that Chekhov particularly liked 'Chopin's Nocturne in ? Major', a probable transcription mistake which has been repeated in all subsequent Chekhov literature: Chopin never actually wrote a Nocturne in ? Major. It is tempting to think that Samuelson was actually talking about Chopin's Nocturne in G Major (op. 37, no. 2),12 whose straightforward simplicity and absence of dramatic effects, when compared to the others, could be described as Chekhovian qualities.
Due to Vorontsov's energetic ministrations, it was during Nicholas I's stay in Alupka in 1837 that Yalta was designated a town for the first time. It was then still a very small settlement, with around thirty households and an overall population of about 200.13 The Austrian cartographer and travel writer Johann Kohl, who visited the Crimea the following year, was not persuaded that the mountains on the south coast were comparable to the Italian Alps or the French Pyrenees when viewed from the sea, but he was more impressed when he disembarked, and he particularly liked Yalta: 'The houses are all new, and the whole town has such a pretty toy-like appearance, that it looks just as if it were to be given for a plaything to a child at Christmas. There are three inns, a custom-house, a post-house, a little church, a little quay, a harbour about two ells long, two little streets and a little apothecary's shop.'14
It was also during Nicholas I's Crimean tour of 1837 that the first
Romanov palace on the coast was planned. Despite its low position close to the shore, overshadowed by trees and tall cliffs, the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna had taken such a liking to Oreanda that her husband decided to give it to her, and the Berlin architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel was commissioned the following year to produce a design for a residence. In the end it was the leading St Petersburg architect Andrei Stakenschneider who took over the project, with William Hunt supervising the stonemasonry. The sumptuous neo-Greek palace and its landscaped English park (filled with specially imported stags and roebucks)15 were completed in 1852 and the imperial family arrived that autumn for an extended stay.16 It was to be Nicholas I's only visit to Oreanda. The Crimean War temporarily put a stop to recreational travel in the area, and after the Tsar himself died in February 1855, his widow felt little desire to return. Alexandra Fyodorovna in fact decided she would rather go to Nice, and the Oreanda palace received its first regular visitors only after her death in 1860 when it was bequeathed to her second son, Grand Duke Konstantin.
Oreanda became a beloved holiday destination for the members of his family and their entourage, but nothing remains today of the palace: it burned down not long after Konstantin's older brother, Alexander II, was assassinated in 1881. What stands in its stead is the small church the devout Grand Duke built in memory of his mother when it became clear that the costs of reconstructing the palace would be prohibitive. Grand Duke Konstantin was a man with refined artistic tastes, and he took the unusual step (for a Russian Orthodox Christian at any rate) of deciding to build his church in the Georgian Byzantine style. He felt this was the most suitable style for all small churches in that part of the world, since they were the first to be built in the southern Crimea since the original Greek churches of the early Byzantine period. For the interiors, Konstantin commissioned exquisite mosaic icons from Antonio Salviati, who was famous for reviving the Venetian glass industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. After sending the first couple of icons to Oreanda, the 74-year-old master even travelled himself to the Crimea in May 1886 to discuss the rest of the church's decoration with the Grand Duke.
Chekhov loved visiting Oreanda when he lived in Yalta. The park was open to the public and was an extremely popular destination with the locals: the Yalta branch of the Crimean Mountain Club organized
twice-weekly trips in its charabancs. Chekhov came here particularly often during his first winter in Yalta, usually in the company of a young lady called Nadezhda Ternovskaya, which set tongues in Yalta wagging. Her father was the priest at the Church of St John Chrysostom, and several people hoped a betrothal would follow. After a short carriage-ride to the church, the two would sit on a bench just below it from where they could look down at the sea and admire the unparalleled view of the bay of Yalta. The 'Chekhov Bench', as it is now known, was, of course, the setting for a famous passage in the celebrated story 'The Lady with the Little Dog', in which Gurov and Anna take a dawn trip up the coast to Oreanda at the beginning of their summer romance:
They sat on a bench not far from the church at Oreanda, looking down at the sea and saying nothing. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist, and white clouds stood motionless on the tops of the mountains. The leaves on the trees did not stir, the cicadas were chattering, and the monotonous, muffled noise of the sea coming up from down below spoke of rest and of the eternal sleep which awaits us. It had made that noise down below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda existed, it was making that noise now and would continue to make that noise in that same hushed and indifferent way when we are no longer here. And in that permanence, in that complete indifference to the life and death of each one of us, is perhaps concealed a guarantee of our eternal salvation, a guarantee of the endless movement of life on earth and endless perfection. Sitting tranquilly next to a young woman who seemed so beautiful in the dawn light, entranced by this magical setting -the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the vast sky, Gurov was thinking that when you really reflect on it, everything is beautiful on this earth, everything that is, except what we think and do, when we forget about the higher purpose of existence and about our human dignity.
