There was a brief hiatus in Yalta's expansion during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78; not only were there no visitors, but more than half the population left.21 The gravely ill Maria Alexandrovna came back to her beloved Livadia for one last v;sit n 1879, and a little over a month after she died the following year, Alexander II married his mistress Princess Dolgorukaya; they already had three children. Their marriage was brief: Alexander was assassinated the following March, and his son, the new Tsar Alexander III, did not return v^ ith Ins family to Li^ad'a until the autumn of 1884. Esther his distaste in discovering his stepmother and her children l'v'ng in his mother's rooms in the palace or a desire to make his own mark led to his search for another property in the Yalta area. In 1888 he settled on Massandra, which lay on the other side of the bay, about three miles from the town. This was another Vorontsov estate that incorporated extensive vmeyards and beautiful gardens full of statues. Alexander never managed to move into the turreted Louis XlV-style chateau that was built for him, although he did spend a million roubles installing a fine wine-cellar;22 he d;ed unexpectedly while holidaying in Livadia in October 1894 at the age of forty-nine. Chekhov was taken to Massandra by new acquaintances when he made his second visit to Yalta in March 1894. The master of wines was so pleased to meet the famous writer when they v^ited the cellars, that he opened up some old bottles tor them to caste wh ch had been laid down in Vorontsov's time.23
Chekhov stayed at Yalta's largest and smartest hotel when he came for his second visit. Renowned for being 'replete with every comfort', the Rossiya had 150 rooms (many with a sea View), an elevator, a first- ciass restaurant staffed by waiters who spoke all the foreign languages, and a terrace where an orchestra played daily concerts throughout the peak season.24 Chekhov, however, had come in the quieter (and cheaper) winter season, winch was most popular with people convalescing from illness, particularly tuberculosis. Yalta had four distinct seasons - each лд ;th Lts own particular character and clientele - and the winter season, lasting from the middle of October to Easter, was now beginning to vie with the fasnionable 'velvet' season just before t, when people came to take the celebrated grape cure that had been developed by a local doctor. Chekhov had certainly come to Yalta this time for health reasons: he had been suffering from terrible headaches and an arrhythmic heartbeat (winch on one alarming occasion made him think he was about to die), not to mention the haemorrhoids which perennially plagued him. But perhaps the most disquieting symptom was the persistent cough which continued throughout the month wi his vis t.
He spent two days travelling by train from Moscow, then completed the final leg of his journey to the Yalta harbour one foggy Friday evening n early March, with the ship's whistle on the steamer Tsarevna blowing almost continually in the poor visibility. Once installed in his room at the Rossiya, he resolved to stick to his abstention from smoking, and spent a fairly miserable month in continuing poor health, crying to rest but unable to avoid thinking about the need to keep writing, upon which hi; family's livelihood depended. Next door to him was a well-known Petersburg actress who made solicitous enquiries about his heart, and tried to lure him out on excursions, such as to the spectacular waterfall at Uchan-Su (Tatar for 'flying water'), a thousand feet above sea-level.
When he was not working or catching up wich Ins sleep, Cnekhov whiled away the time going for walks along the seafront with his new acquaintances, taking trips out of town, and dining out in the houses of the Yalta intelligentsia. He sold his fox-fur coat which had been moulting, and went along desultorily to rehearsals of Gounod's Faust. The worthy citizens of Yalta were organizing an amateur performance at the town's theatre in aid of the recently founded girls' gymnasium, and Chekhov enjoyed contemplating the different coloured heads of hair of the young ladies bobbing about. Everyone wanted to meet him, and he soon found the constant attention very 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 che 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 wnte 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 che Gospels, and the women's profound emotional reaction to the story, mmediately 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 fr s 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 cri „cs made him out to be. s 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 h 11, 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 h>gh 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 al:en surroundings. Sensitive, as always, to the landscape, the 'cemetery-Lke' 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 i 1 a letter towards the end of his stay, 'Our Russian landscape is more melancholy, more lyrical, more Levitanesaue, but here it's ne her 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 oast two years the two friends had been incommiinicado after Chekhov had sailed a little too close to the wind in bis 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.