“Good Life”
The origins of the town of Yalta are modest and unclear. It may have started as a Greek fishing village or a tiny Genoese post, but it cannot be found on a map until the mid–nineteenth century, when it was incorporated. At that point, Yalta was a sad little affair: in the words of contemporaries, a “village of some forty white houses, forming a single street,” an “abode of poor fishermen,” surrounded by “extensive woods.” Its industry was a handful of boats harvesting oysters. Half a century later, it was an established resort with all the expected “European” amenities, including snow and ice delivered from the mountains by the Tatars.[25]
Romanticism revolutionized this inconspicuous coastal town. Before the age of Byron, when natural beauty was worth nothing, settlements were built where they were built because the location was either secure or profitable, preferably both. People started coming to Yalta because that was what the upper classes were doing in Europe—going to small coastal places to relax in style and meet other people who also relaxed in style. Yalta got incorporated because it had potential for the new resort industry.
A visitor in the 1840s wrote: “Nothing can be more charming than the sight of that white Ialta [sic], seated at the head of a bay like a beautiful sultana bathing her feet in the sea, and sheltering her fair forehead from the sun under rocks festooned with verdure. Elegant buildings, handsome hotels, and a comfortable, cheerful population, indicate that opulence and pleasure have taken the town under their patronage; its prosperity, indeed, depends entirely on the travellers who fill its hotels for several months of the year.” A Western writer called it “one of the most charming places in Europe for the invalid.”[26]
After the Crimean War, not just the tsar but his brothers, uncles, and cousins thought it patriotic to build estates on the Russian Riviera. In 1867, the passengers of the first American cruise ship ever to visit the Black Sea were given a tour of several royal residences and an audience with Emperor Alexander II and his wife. One of the passengers was Mark Twain, who registered the imperial couple’s strong desire to impress the American “innocents” with “handsome” gardens, “grand old groves,” and “Grecian architecture.”[27]
Another visitor observed in 1874: “For twelve miles after leaving Yalta, there is a succession of highly-cultivated estates, and the palaces attached to them glimmer white upon the mountain side. More delightful abodes it would be impossible for the imagination to picture. One would almost believe that neither sorrow nor sickness could enter their doors; and yet, if it were so, how hard it would be to leave them for the grave!” Among the last generation of the Romanovs, almost every member of the royal family had a residence in Crimea, and in 1919, when the survivors were leaving Yalta on the British battleship Marlborough, the separation was hard indeed.[28]
The scenery of the South Shore has been variously compared to Amalfi and the Maritime Alps; one group of visitors agreed that “never, on the coasts of Italy, Spain, or Northern Africa had we seen such a combination of the magnificent and the beautiful, united with such a glow of colour, as on this seaboard.” Another visitor argued that even Switzerland could scarcely compare with the “tremendous granite precipices” of South Shore. To Mark Twain, a “beautiful spot” of “Yalta, Russia” resembled a “vision of the Sierras.”[29]
But now let us listen to another witness: Anton Chekhov, who very unhappily spent the last years of his life in Yalta, exiled there by tuberculosis. Visitors and vacationers admired the South Shore’s looks; Chekhov abhorred its soul. Yalta, he wrote in a letter, “is a cross that not everyone can bear. It abounds in drabness, slanders, intrigue and the most shameless calumny.”[30]
Chekhov’s iconic Yalta story, “The Lady With the Dog,” portrays Yalta as a place of one-night stands, a banal seaside resort where people shed their inhibitions with the full knowledge that this would have no consequences for their real life up north. When Anna Sergeevna tells Gurov that he will stop respecting her now, he finds this so obvious that he just keeps eating a watermelon. There are several shockers in the story, and one is that a trite vacation dalliance inexplicably grows into something more consequential. When this realization hits him, Gurov blurts out to an acquaintance, If you only knew what a remarkable woman I met in Yalta! The acquaintance replies: You were right about the fish they served today—it was not fresh. He knows exactly what kind of encounters occur in Yalta and dismisses Gurov’s exclamation as a bout of sentimentality brought on by excessive drinking (and possibly by the bad fish).[31]
In a less famous story, Chekhov identifies Crimea, and Yalta in particular, as a destination for Russian middle-class female sex tourists, hiring Tatar escorts for the duration of their stay so as to brag about the adventures back home. A contemporary conservative Russian journalist lamented the “loose” morals of women vacationers in Yalta, the town “not a resort, but a school of seduction.”[32]
Chekhov would have been annoyed to learn that for more than a century, Yalta has been his shrine, with a museum, conferences, readings, and theater festivals. Meeting in Yalta in 2009 to negotiate an energy deal amid an atmosphere of bonhomie and flirtation, Vladimir Putin and the then Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced they would be having a tête-à-tête dinner. “We will be discussing Chekhov,” Putin playfully told the reporters.[33]
Sevastopol
To a person not fixed on politics or war, Sevastopol may look like an utterly delightful city. Profoundly maritime, it rides the hills above a calm narrow bay where sharp warships sit at anchor.
The bay is sometimes called a fjord, though specialists insist it is a ria, a drowned river valley, just like another mariners’ haven in the eastern Mediterranean, the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro. In Sevastopol, the river is the Chornaya, nowadays an insignificant affair barely twenty miles long.
Sevastopol means August City. Founded in 1783 on Catherine the Great’s orders, it was meant to be the military springboard of Russian imperial expansion into Ottoman lands. Ironically, it became famous for the 349-day siege it suffered during the Crimean War. Habitually calculating patriotism through loss, Russians still seem proud that 127,500 of their compatriots died there in 1854 and 1855. Another way of looking at it is that the sailors and soldiers had no choice: they were at the mercy of their commanders, who were at the mercy of Nicholas I, the Iron Tsar.[34]
In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy’s later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn’t aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy’s Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans—founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person). Yet the book’s message lives: Sevastopol is the City of Russian Glory. What also likely played a role was that nineteenth-century Russians needed to put an ethnic stamp on the still somewhat alien Crimean shore.[35]
25
Thomas Milner,
26
Xavier Hommaire de Hell,
27
Mark Twain,
28
Katharine Blanche Guthrie,
29
Guthrie,
30
Chekhov’s letter to Ivan Orlov, February 22, 1899: Lillian Hellman, ed.,
32
“Big Mouth” (“
33
“Putin i Timoshenko uzhinali u Rotaru i smeyalis’ nad Yushchenko i galstukami Mikho,” Segodnya.ua, November 20, 2009, www.segodnya.ua/ukraine/putin-i-timoshenko-uzhinali-u-rotaru-i-cmejalic-nad-jushchenko-i-halctukamimikho.html (retrieved May 2, 2015).
35
L. N. Tolstoy, Dnevniki i zapisnye knizhki, 1854–1857: