little wooden house in the town of Alexandrovsk on Sakhalin, which serves as the museum commemorating his stay on the island. But a trip to the Crimea is more inviting, especially in the spring when the air is fragrant with the scent of lilac and acacia blossom. The preservation of the White Dacha in the twentieth century was due to the tireless dedication of Chekhov's sister Masha. She had been used to showing the house to curious admirers even before Chekhov's death, and it became such a famous landmark that it was featured on Yalta postcards.
Chekhov had bequeathed the White Dacha to his sister in his will, and it was she who ensured the interior of the house was left precisely as it was when her brother left it in May 1904, still hoping to return. She could not bear to change anything, and moved permanently with her elderly mother to Yalta after the Revolution. Evgenia Yakovlevna died in 1919 and was buried in Yalta. Maria Pavlovna became the first director of the memorial museum established in the White Dacha in 1921, and undertook a hazardous trip to Moscow that year in order to secure the Chekhov archive, which she had left in a safe. The train journey took her three weeks. Only by noticing a little boy reading 'Vanka' in the cramped compartment she was travelling in, and by explaining who she was, did she save herself from being thrown off the train as a bourgeois.5 But these were difficult times. The house was searched many times during the Civil War, and at one point an order was even put out for Maria Pavlovna's arrest. Her younger brother Misha later moved down to Yalta in order to help in preparing a catalogue for the museum, and when he died in 1936 he was buried next to their mother, as Masha herself would be in 1957, having lived to the age of ninety-four. By the time of her death, the White Dacha had survived an earthquake, two and a half years of Nazi occupation, and damage caused by the final bomb raid which was the Luftwaffe's parting gift in 1944. Faithful to the cause, Masha had refused to be evacuated during the war; she put up pictures of the German dramatist Hauptmann on the wall but refused point-blank to let a German officer take up residence in her brother's rooms. As a result, nothing went missing.6
Before the beginning of the Second World War, the museum had received some 40,000 visitors, and was one of the first cultural
institutions in the Crimea to start functioning again when the Nazi occupation ended. It was attracting up to 2,000 visitors a day up until the early 1990s, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, attendance was down to 25,000 a year. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine, the fate of museums in the region which celebrated Russian cultural achievements was suddenly put in doubt. They had previously been the recipients of generous funding by the Soviet government, but who would be responsible now for their upkeep, and where would the money come from? The Chekhov Museum in Yalta now falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture of the Crimean Autonomous Republic, whose budget is extremely limited. The seriousness of the problem may be gauged from the fact that in 1999 there simply were no longer any funds to pay for professional security services. The director of the museum, Gennadi Shalyugin, was forced at one point to invite the television cameras to film him patrolling the museum himself with his dog (a dachshund, of course).7 This prompted the Moscow News reporter wittily to suggest a title for a new story: 'The Gentleman with the Little Dog'.8 These were indeed black days for the White Dacha, as another journalist remarked.
When President Putin visited the White Dacha with Leonid Kuchma, the Ukrainian president, and their respective wives, during his state visit on 4 May 2003, it seemed that perhaps help was nigh: no Russian head of state had ever visited the museum before. Gorbachev, it is true, had thought about it once when he was holidaying down the road on the Crimean coast (which is where he was when power was wrested from him in August 1991). The museum's staff were instructed to make preparations and awaited his arrival all day, but in the end Mikhail Sergeyevich decided to take Raisa to Alupka instead.9 Preparations for the presidential visit in 2003 involved the inevitable heightening of security measures in the area – a costly exercise – but the irony of this was clearly lost on Putin and Kuchma, who were presented with a personally addressed letter of appeal:
Tolstoy called Chekhov, in whose veins flowed Ukrainian blood (his grandmother Efrosinia Shimko was Ukrainian), 'the most Russian writer'. Chekhov's work is the national property of both the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. Concern for the preservation of Chekhov's house in
Yalta is the cultural duty of both governments, but it is a duty that is not being fully carried out. Chekhov's 'White Dacha' is subject to various damaging processes. This is leading to the deterioration of the building, which is a hundred years old, to constant hydrological problems, and damage caused by leaks when it rains. During the winter period, the temperature in Chekhov's house does not rise above 10°, which in view of the high humidity is detrimental to the preservation of the exhibits. The building which houses the literary exhibition is in a state of collapse. For five months there has been no money to pay for security and the burglar alarm has had to be switched off because of debts. The museum's collection, which includes valuable canvases by Levitan worth tens of thousands of dollars, is being abandoned to the whim of fate . . .
Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich and Leonid Danilovich! 2004 will mark the centenary of the death of Russia and Ukraine's great son Chekhov. Resolving the urgent problems of the Chekhov Museum, albeit a hundred years after the writer's death, would be the best proof that your meetings in Yalta were truly of major significance.10
The presidents left fulsome thanks in the visitors' book – Putin even thoughtfully presented the museum with a book about national handicrafts and left his visiting card – but no money.11
In his will, Chekhov left the Gurzuf dacha to Olga, who continued to make annual summer visits until 1953. Maria Pavlovna was a regular guest, and she liked to sit and play patience on the veranda as her brother used to do. Olga had wanted to leave the dacha to the Moscow Art Theatre after her death,12 but it was sold to a painter in 1956, and when he died ten years later the property was acquired by the Union of Artists for use as holiday accommodation by its members. Only in 1987 did it finally become a branch of the Chekhov Museum in Yalta, and was opened to the public for the first time in 1995. The exhibits include materials relating to the historic Moscow Art Theatre production of Three Sisters staged by Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1940, which remained in the repertoire for half a century.
Chekhov's houses are in a better state than the 450-seat Yalta Theatre, which once hosted the Moscow Art Theatre when it came on tour but was closed at the end of the 1990s due to its dangerous condition. Reconstruction was begun, but work was abandoned after partial demolition of its interior, and the theatre now stands in ruins behind a
scruffy hoarding. To the Moscow News journalist who visited in June 2003, it looked as if it was a theatre in the bombed-out Chechen capital of Grozny, rather than in Yalta.13 Alexander Kalyagin, an important figure in Russian theatre and a member of President Putin's Council for Culture, came on a tour of inspection in May 2003, just before Putin's visit, and declared that the ruined theatre was a source of pain for all of Russia. With his eye on UNESCO's proclamation of 2004 as the Year of Chekhov, he decided that it was time to revive the tradition of 'Chekhov Seasons' at the theatre. Meetings with the Ukrainian minister of culture and the mayor of Yalta resulted in the signing of a deal with a local firm: in return for paying for the restoration of the theatre, it would be given -this being the brave new world of post-Soviet Ukraine – premium land in Yalta to build a hotel.14
Chekhov once made a note about the Muslim custom of digging wells to save one's soul, adding: 'It would be good if each of us left a school or a well or something similar, so that our lives did not go by and disappear into eternity without trace.'15 He took this custom to heart and built not one but three schools during his lifetime, and through his posthumous fame saved as many churches. The Autka church of St Theodore Tyron, where his mother worshipped, suffered an ignominious fate in the Soviet period, but nevertheless survived demolition thanks to the Chekhov connection. Clementine Churchill added her vociferous support when she met with the 82-year-old Maria Pavlovna during her visit to the Soviet Union in 1945, a few months after the famous Yalta conference. For most of the latter part of the twentieth century it was used as a gymnasium, but was returned to the Orthodox Church in
