tedious, even if there were some individuals he found interesting to talk to. Not only did everyone soon know that he was in town, but they were sometimes able to work out in advance exactly what his movements would be. The enthusiastic reception given by the capacity audience to a rather indifferent recital, given in late March at the Rossiya by a bass singer from Moscow who Chekhov had got to know, was attributed to the fact
that most of the people there had actually bought a ticket in order to catch a glimpse of the debonair writer. And there was one young lady who knocked at the door of his hotel room one day, who finally overcame her nervousness to blurt out that she had just wanted to look at him, because she had never seen a writer before.25
Chekhov did not write much while he was in Yalta, but what he did produce more than made up in quality what it lacked in quantity. 'The Student', one of his slightest but most accomplished and lyrical stories, was published soon after his return to Moscow. It concerns a seminary student who has suffered a temporary lapse in faith on Good Friday, the bleakest day in the Russian Orthodox year, and compounds his sin by going woodcock shooting. He regains his sense of connection with the world by telling, as a form of confession, the story of Peter's betrayal of Jesus to two peasant women he meets on his way home. In doing so, he unconsciously uses a mixture of his own words with phrases from the Gospels, and the women's profound emotional reaction to the story, immediately comprehensible to them when not couched in the archaic biblical language of old Church Slavonic, translates to the student himself, so that he leaves them with a spring in his step, feeling reinvigorated and inspired.
According to his brother Ivan, Chekhov regarded this story (which is also a parable about the power of art) as his most polished work. It was also known to be his favourite story, its ending proving definitively, in his opinion, that he was not the cold-blooded, gloomy pessimist his critics made him out to be.26 The last paragraph of the story is indeed one deliberately long sentence of exaltation:
And when he was crossing the river on the ferry, and then when he was walking up the hill, as he looked at his own village and to the west, where there was a narrow band of cold crimson sunset glowing, he realized that truth and beauty, which had guided human life there, in the garden and at the high priest's, had continued to do so without a break until the present day, and had clearly always constituted the most important elements in human life, and on earth in general; and a feeling of youth, health and strength – he was only twenty-two years old – and an inexpressibly sweet expectation of happiness, of unfathomable, mysterious happiness, gradually overcame him, and life seemed entrancing and miraculous to him, and full of sublime meaning.27
As with the stories he would write a few years later in Nice, Chekhov's imagination was sometimes fired by alien surroundings. Sensitive, as always, to the landscape, the 'cemetery-like' foliage of the Crimean riviera produced in him a deep nostalgia for the Russian north, which he considered infinitely superior to the south in spring time, despite the pleasant climate of the latter. As he wrote in a letter towards the end of his stay, 'Our Russian landscape is more melancholy, more lyrical, more Levitanesque, but here it's neither one thing nor the other – it's just like well-written, sonorous, but cold poetry.'28 The reference to Levitan is telling – and touching. For the past two years the two friends had been incommunicado after Chekhov had sailed a little too close to the wind in his satirical portrait of an artist in the story 'The Grasshopper'. Perhaps he was thinking guiltily of Levitan when he wrote the opening of 'The Student', for if there was anyone Chekhov associated with shooting woodcock, it was Levitan, who was a passionate huntsman.
Chekhov had accompanied Levitan on his hunting trips when they were at Babkino (and even looked after his gun-dog at one point), but he was much keener on fishing, having by then lost the taste for shooting he had when he was younger. Nevertheless, soon after moving to Melikhovo, he had gone out several times into the fields with Levitan just after Easter in 1892, when the artist came down from Moscow for his first visit. The warm April weather had also suddenly given way to snow again that week, just as in the story. Levitan shot a woodcock in the wing, and after Chekhov picked it up from the puddle where it had landed, they both looked at its long thin beak, its beautiful plumage and the startled expression in its large black eyes. Levitan lacked the courage to kill the bird outright, and Chekhov was forced to overcome his distate and do the job for him. As he commented the next day in a letter to Suvorin, 'One beautiful loving creature was no longer alive; meanwhile two idiots went home and sat down to supper.'29 The word 'Levitanesque' must have aroused mixed emotions in Chekhov's mind as he thought about the beauties of the Russian spring and conjured up that unseasonably cold Good Friday evening in 'The Student'. The incident later was also famously reflected in The Seagull.
Before his untimely death in 1894, Alexander III had made a serious contribution to the development of Yalta as a sophisticated world-class resort, although it cannot be said that he was motivated by altruistic considerations. Until 1891, travel to Yalta by steamship involved
transferring to a small launch in the bay and being ferried to the landing stage. When the imperial family arrived for their annual visit in 1886 the sea was so rough that they had to stay overnight in their ship. Alexander promptly ordered the construction of a proper harbour so that vessels could dock right in the town. The increased access provided by the harbour made it possible to supply households in Yalta with running water and a proper sanitation system, and to equip the town's main streets with gas, and then electric, lighting. It was precisely these amenities that made Chekhov decide to live there when he became seriously ill.30 New hotels, sanatoriums and shops began to spring up in profusion in Yalta, as well as churches, a theatre, a library and several schools.
It was not until 1898, the year that Chekhov moved down to Yalta permanently, that the new Tsar Nicholas II resumed imperial visits to the Crimea. He and the Empress Alexandra came to regard Massandra as a kind of dacha they could drive over to for brief sojourns while staying at their official residence at Livadia. Yalta was at the height of its popularity at this time, and Nicholas was scathing about the hordes of 'dull people' who crowded the streets whenever the imperial motorcade drove through the town. 'You'd think you were in some big foreign resort,' he complained to his mother in October 1900.31 But that, of course, was exactly the idea. When he first developed Yalta in the 1830s, it seems that the ambitious Count Vorontsov had hoped that his resort would become 'the Cowes of the Crimea, as a station for the yachts of the nobles, and a fashionable bathing-place', as reported by the Rev. Thomas Milner in 1855. This was perhaps not surprising, bearing in mind Vorontsov's upper-class British upbringing, but at that point Milner was forced to conclude that 'the design has not prospered'.32
By the 1870s, however, Yalta had certainly taken off, although perhaps not in the direction which Vorontsov had intended. To the author of Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Russia, it seemed that the increasing number of Russian families going to Yalta to bathe 'bids fair to make Yalta the Russian Brighton'. The town's charming situation, excellent port, and proximity to fine scenery also made it seem like a miniature version of Naples.33 But the most frequent comparisons were inevitably made with Nice.34 Yalta's famous seafront promenade may have been a miniature version and pale imitation of the Promenade des Anglais, its clientele less international and its population far smaller, but
with its elegant hotels, flowers blossoming in profusion through the winter, and the 'velvet' season drawing scores of princes and princesses, opera singers and actresses every autumn, everyone looked upon it as the Russian Nice. As we have seen, Chekhov also immediately thought of Nice when he first saw Yalta. After having spent protracted periods in both places, he formed the opinion that Yalta was more expensive and not as interesting, but he liked it more than the French Riviera,35 not least because it was cleaner.36
Chekhov would never have been found in the crowds lining the streets to catch a glimpse of the imperial family during their visits to Yalta (his feelings for them were generally of contempt), but his mother was thrilled to see the Tsar at the consecration of the new Cathedral of St Alexander Nevsky in December 1902, which she attended by special ticket. Like the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood in St Petersburg, also built in the
