People started calling for you after the first act, and when Nemirovich announced that you weren't there, everyone, particularly people in the stalls, started shouting out: 'We should send him a telegram then.' After the third act there was a lot of noise and ovations for the actors and calls for the author again. So Nemirovich said: 'I hope in that case that you will permit me to send the author a telegram.' The audience said: 'We do, we do.'
The three performances of the play were a complete sell-out.
Chekhov was alone at New Year. A family tradition from Taganrog days had been to bake pies and put a ten kopeck piece in each of them: Masha wrote to tell him that their brother Alexander had been given the slice with the 'treasure' n it on New Year's Eve, while on New Year's Day she had been the lucky one for the first time. Chekhov was also alone for his birthday on 17 January. Masha told him there had been so many guests at the party they held for him in Moscow that they had run out of cutlery and plates.61 No wonder he grew homesick.
Chekhov spent the first winter in his 'warm Siberia' mostly reading newspapers and writing letters - so many that the joint on the middle finger of his right hand started aching. He would write even more letters as his health began to deteriorate and was closeted indoors for longer and longer periods. Of the twelve volumes of letters in the Academy of Sciences edition of his collected works, half cover the last seven years of his life. Finally the warm weather returned, and he could stop playing cards and go out for carriage rides and walks again every day - to Oreanda and Massandra and into the hills. New people began appearing on the seafront, and soon the days were filled again with telephone calls and meel ings. The great joy of spring was the profusion of white cherry blossom, pink almond blossom, and then peach blossom, which appeared everywhere. Once construction commenced again, his house also began taking shape, but Chekhov derived the greatest pleasure from being able to begin planting trees in his new garden. It was pure bliss, he told his sister, after he had planted twelve cherry trees, two almond trees and four pyramidal mulberry trees (planting 'pyram'dal' trees that would grow vertically rather than
The Hotel Marino, Yalta, where Chekhov stayed in 1899
horizontally meant he would be aole to plant more of them). A few days later an order wenc off to a horticultural establishment in Odessa, which included eignt different kinds of bamboo, giant reeds, yuccas and cwo kinds of amaryllis. But all the tree planting could not mask the fact chat he was not living in the full sense of the word, but merely passing the time in order to improve his health, and as he went for his walks along the seafront he said he felt like a spare priest.62
Chekhov was glad finally to escape to Moscow in April, where he would remain for most of the summer. He returned to Yalta for a
v
couple of-weeks'in July, however, in the company of Olga Knipper. This was her first visit to Yalta, and she stayed at the home of Leonid Sredin, a family friend and, like Chekhov, another consumptive doctor. Chekhov, meanwhile, took a room nearby in an elegant hotel, the Marino, whose rooms stretched along the seafront, their balustraded balconies protected from the oppressive summer sun by long awmngs, Showi lg Olga round Yalta in July 1899 may have given him the final stimulus to sit down and write 'The Lady with the Little Dog', which he finally completed tnat autumn after long rumination: Gurov and
The town park, where Gurov makes the acquaintance of Anna Sergey tuna
Anna begin their Yalta romance in high summer. Chekhov and Olga went for walks in the town garden, where Gurov and Anna have their first conversation at Vernet's patisserie, and they went to Oreanda and Massandra. They also went to see how building work on the house in Autka was progressing. On their way to catch the train back north, they took a romantic trip to Bakhchiserai. This was a whole day's journey in a horse ana carriage, following winding mountain roads through the pine woods and up past the waterfall at Uchan-su to the peak at Ai- Petri - 4,000 feet above sea level with a spectacular view of the sea far below - and then down into the green valley, past the graves of thousands of Russian soldiers who had fought in the Crimean War, and past apricot orchards, sheep and goats. Nestled in a narrow gorge, the bustling old Tatar capital with its forest of minarets (Bakhchiserai once boasted over thirty mosques) provided a striking contrast to the new cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol on the plain, not least because no Russians lived there: Catherine II had magnanimously decreed that the Tatars should retain control of their former capital.
As Adele and Ignace Xavier Hommaire de Hell found in the 1840s, Bakhchiserai was an atmospheric place:
"You would fancy yourself in the heart of the East, in walking through the narrow streets of the town, the mosques, shops and cemeteries which so much resemble those of the old quarters of Constantinople. But it is espe^ ally n th e courts, gardens and kiosks of the harem of the old palace that the traveller may well bei.eve nimself transported into some delicious abode of Aleppo or Bagdad.63
The Khan's Palace had been sacked and then restored by Potemkin in preparation for the triumphant arrival of Catherine the Great in 1787, and Alexander I had also carried out renovation work. The intricate carvings and soft carpets of the palace's former harem, surrounded by quiet gardens and tinkling fountains (one of which famously inspired a poem by Pushkin), still exuded an Oriental mystique. Chekhov and Olga were certainly enraptured when they made their visit. When the train carryi ng him back down to Sevastopol at the end of August passed chrough BaKhchiserai, he thought wistfully about Olga and their recent trip.
The house at Autka was more or less ready for Chekhov to move
The harbour in Yalta, where Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna come to watch people disembarking from the steamer
into when he fina'ly returned to Yalta at the end of August. When it was first built, it protruded so prominently from the naked hillside that sailors on ships out in the bay claimed to be able to see through their binoculars the green light on in his study on the first floor. And often he had his binoculars trained on them.64 The first-floor balcony gave him a breathtaking panorama of the sea - a view that is now completely obscured by the trees he planted in his garden, in particular cedars, which are now very tall. Before the trees had a chance to cover the house's newly plastered walls, the local cabbies and the Tatar villagers christened it the 'White Dacha' and the name stuck. It was arranged that Chekhov's mother would move permanently to Yalta now that the house was ready. Masha would come down from Moscow during the school vacations when she was not teaching.
In the days before Masha and Evgenia Yakovlevna arrived for the first time that September, Chekhov busied himself with supervising the last work on the house, installing a telephone, writing to his cousin in aganrog requesting him to send several hundred flowerpots for the seedlings he wished to grow, and instruct ng Mustafa how to collect his mail from the post office. But he had already started missing Olga, saying in his first letter to her that autumn that he hardly went down to the cown garden any more, but had been mostly staying at home, thinking about her: