At the Simferopol airport, as I stood in line at the immigration counter waiting to have my passport and visa stamped, I saw, as if in a dream’s slow motion, a man in the baggage area on the other side of a glass panel walk out of the building with my suitcase in his hand. The hallucination proved to be real. In a daze, I filled out a lost luggage form and followed an English-speaking woman who worked for the Hotel Yalta to a car in the parking lot. She said she would trace my luggage and disappeared. The driver—the same Yevgeny who now sits in the car in Oreanda—drove me to the hotel in silence, his English and my Russian in exact equilibrium.
As we neared the Black Sea coast, the Ukrainian farm country gave way to a terrain resembling—and, in the variety and beauty of its vegetation, surpassing—that of the Riviera corniches. The winding road offered views of mountains and glimpses of the sea below. But when the Hotel Yalta came into view I caught my breath at its spectacular ugliness. It is a monstrous building—erected in 1975, with a capacity of twenty-five hundred people—that is like a brute’s blow in the face of the countryside. Its scale would be problematic anywhere, and on the hillside above Yalta it is catastrophic. Hundreds of—possibly a thousand—identical balconies jut out from a glass and concrete facade. The approach is an American supermarket-style parking lot. The vast, low-ceilinged lobby, with black marble floors and metallic walls, looks as if a failing bank had been crossed with a seedy nightclub. In one corner there is a bar and along one wall stands a row of slot machines. A great expanse of empty black marble floor lies between the slot machines and the hotel’s front desk. When I entered the lobby it was almost completely empty: two or three men were playing the slot machines and a couple sat at the bar. At the reception desk, I was given a key to a room on the fourth floor, and, after walking down an almost satirically long empty corridor, I opened the door to a cubicle about eight feet by twelve, pleasingly furnished in the blond-wood Scandinavian Modern style of the fifties and sixties, and affording just enough room for a double bed, a small round table with two chairs, an armchair, and a minuscule refrigerator. My little balcony—like its myriad replicas—offered a glimpse of the sea and a view of large swimming pools, tennis courts, various outbuildings, and an auditorium. No one was in the pools or on the courts, but American popular music blared out of a loudspeaker. I shut the glass door to muffle the sound and hopefully opened the refrigerator. It was empty. In the bathroom I found serviceable fixtures and a soap dish of plastic made to resemble brown marble.
On my arrival, an unsmiling young man named Igor, who spoke fluent English, had approached me in the lobby and led me to his office, where he enumerated the activities that had been arranged for the next two days with Nina and Yevgeny. These had been prepaid, and he wanted me to understand that anything more would cost extra. (The trip to Oreanda would be one such addition.) When I mentioned my lost luggage and asked if there was somewhere I could buy a nightgown and a change of clothes, he looked at his watch and said that if I walked down to the town—a twenty- or thirty-minute walk—I might still find some clothing stores open.
As I walked to the town in the late-afternoon sunlight, down a winding road fragrant with the smells of the trees and shrubs and wildflowers that lined it, and left the horrible hotel behind, I felt a stir of happiness. Though it was May, St. Petersburg had been icily wintry and Moscow only a few degrees warmer. But here it was true spring; the air was fresh and soft. In a few months—I knew from “The Lady with the Dog”—Yalta would be hot and dusty. On the day Gurov and Anna became lovers “it was sultry indoors, while in the street the wind whirled the dust round and round and blew people’s hats off. It was a thirsty day, and Gurov often went into the pavilion, and pressed Anna Sergeyevna to have syrup and water or an ice. One did not know what to do with oneself.” In the evening, after mingling with a crowd at the harbor that has gathered to meet a ship coming in, Gurov kisses Anna and they go to her hotel. After they have made love, Anna sits dejected “like ‘the woman who was a sinner’ in an old fashioned picture,” and Gurov callously cuts himself a slice of watermelon and eats it “without haste.” Gurov’s unforgettable gesture—the mark of the cold roué that he is—only deepens the mystery and heightens the poignancy of his later transformation into a man capable of serious love.
As I walked on, small village houses of a familiar old sort began to appear. Yalta seemed untouched by the hands that had heaved my monstrous hotel into the hillside above it. Along the seafront, some changes had of course taken place since Gurov and Anna strolled there. In the square opposite the harbor stood a huge statue of Lenin gesturing toward the sea; and the harbor itself had become the site of a kiddie park, outfitted with garishly colored cartoon figures. The shops along the tree-lined promenade—selling film and sun-tan lotion and mermaid dolls and souvenir china—had a neglected, unvisited air; perhaps business would pick up in the hot, dusty season. Many were closed for the day, including the clothing stores. When Chekhov visited Yalta for the first time, in July 1888, he disparaged it thus to his sister Maria: “Yalta is a mixture of something European that reminds one of the views of Nice, with something cheap and shoddy. The box-like hotels in which unhappy consumptives are pining, the impudent Tatar faces, the ladies’ bustles with their very undisguised expression of something very abominable, the faces of the idle rich longing for cheap adventures, the smell of perfumery instead of the scent of the cedars and the sea, the miserable dirty pier, the melancholy lights far out at sea, the prattle of young ladies and gentlemen who have crowded here in order to admire nature of which they have no idea—all this taken together produces such a depressing effect and is so overwhelming that one begins to blame oneself for being biased and unfair.”
I began my ascent up the hill. The sun was nearing the horizon, and there was a chill in the air. The weight of being thousands of miles from home with nothing to wear but the clothes on my back fell on me. I tried to pull myself together, to rise above my petty obsession with the loss of a few garments, and to that end invoked Chekhov and the heightened sense of what is important in life that gleams out of his work. The shadow of mortality hovers over his texts; his characters repeatedly remind one another, “We all have to die” and “Life is not given twice.” Chekhov himself needed no such reminders: the last decade of his life was a daily struggle with increasingly virulent pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis. And yet when he was dying, in the spa of Badenweiler, where he had stupidly been sent by a specialist, he wrote letters to Maria in which he repeatedly complained not about his fate but about how badly German women dressed. “Nowhere do women dress so abominably. . . . I have not seen one beautiful woman, nor one who was not trimmed with some kind of absurd braid,” he wrote on June 8, 1904, and then, on June 28—in his last letter to anyone and his last comment on anything—“There is not a single decently dressed German woman. The lack of taste makes one depressed.”