ARTicles vol. 2 i.1: Warm Siberia

In March of 1897, two and a half years before he began writing “Lady with a Lapdog,” Chekhov was having lunch in Moscow with his friend and publisher Alexei Suvorin, when he suddenly dropped his fork and reached for the ice bucket. Blood was gushing up from one of his lungs, and there was little he could do to stop the hemorrhaging. Chekhov had lived with tuberculosis since he was twenty-four, but the disease was now debilitating the thirty-seven year old writer. After x-raying his lungs, the doctors ordered rest, ice packs, arsenic, and exile to the south from September to May.

That fall, Chekhov took refuge from the harsh Moscow winter at a resort in Nice. The following spring, he returned his country house at Melikhovo outside Moscow, and began planning his next winter banishment. Too tired to go abroad again, he decided to spend autumn on the Crimean peninsula in Yalta, and then head further south to the Caucasuses.

With a mild climate, steep mountains rising right beside the jagged Black Sea coastline, and a picturesque seaside promenade, Yalta was one of the most magnificent retreats in the Russian Empire. The Czar had a palace there, and Moscow and Petersburg’s elite migrated to Yalta for the summer months. The combination of the crisp mountain air and cool sea breeze also made it a popular heath resort.

After his father died that October, Chekhov decided to stay in Yalta, build a house, and move his mother and sister there from Melikhovo. When his sister Masha laid eyes on the barren land Chekhov had bought on the outskirts of town, she was appalled. “The plot was part of a steep incline descending straight down from the road,” she recalled. “It was bare of any structures or trees. Nothing but a gnarly, untidy vineyard straggled over the dry, hard ground. . . . Beyond the wattle fence was a Tatar cemetery and, naturally, a corpse was being buried while we were watching. It was the most grim impression.” In order to pay for the construction of the new house, Chekhov sold the right to publish all his earlier, present, and future works to Adolf Marx. “I will be getting a fearful mess of money,” Chekhov wrote in a letter after the deal. “I am getting 75,000 for my past. I drove a bargain in favor of myself and my heirs to retain royalties from the plays. But alas! I am still far from being a Vanderbilt.”

When Chekhov and his family moved into their new house in the fall of 1899, he immediately began to beautify the ugly plot, planting roses, hyacinths, willows, birches, palms, and fruit trees with crops of peaches, pears, apricots, cherries, and apples. Olga Knipper, the leading lady of the Moscow Art Theater who stayed at the house in the summer of 1900 and who married Chekhov the following year, remembered: “The place which Anton Pavlovitch had bought for his house was far from the sea, from the pier, from the town, and was in the fullest sense of the word a wilderness, with a few old pear-trees. But through his efforts, through his great love for everything that the earth brings forth, this wilderness was gradually transformed into an exquisite, luxuriant, varied garden.” The same year Chekhov completed his house, he was also busy spearheading efforts to build a new tubercular sanatorium in Yalta. With the exception of occasional trips to Moscow and a last-ditch attempt to recuperate in a German spa, he remained in exile in the Crimea until his death in 1904.

Chekhov had a constant stream of visitors in Yalta. The writer Maxim Gorky, the operatic bass Fyodor Chaliapin, Konstantin Stanislavsky and the actors of the Moscow Art Theater, Sergei Rachmaninov, and the painter Isaak Levitan all came to spend time with him. But Chekhov was restless. He felt trapped in what he was soon calling his “warm Siberia.” “He had to live in Yalta, while his heart was drawn to Moscow,” reflected Olga Knipper. “He wanted to be nearer to life, to watch it and feel it and take part in it; he longed to see people, for, though they sometimes tired him with their conversation, he could not live without them. . . . He was always yearning to be in Moscow, yearning to be nearer the theater, to be among the actors, to be present at the rehearsals, to talk and jest, to look at the performances; he was fond of walking along Petrovka and Kuznitsky, looking at the shops and the crowd. But just at the time of year when life in Moscow is at its height he had to be away from it.” In September of 1899, a month after he and Olga had spent a fortnight together in Yalta and just a few weeks before he sat down to begin “Lady with a Lapdog,” Chekhov wrote to Olga: “There’s a telephone. I am so bored that I ring somebody up every hour. Bored without Moscow, bored without you, dear actress. When shall we meet again?”

In “Lady with a Lapdog”–the first literary product of Chekhov’s Crimean life and the only story he set in Yalta–we can hear Chekhov’s longing for dark, frigid Moscow in his description of Gurov’s return to the city: “At home in Moscow, it was already beginning to feel like winter . . . Gurov was a Muscovite; and when he put on his fur coat and warm gloves, strolled down Petrovka Street, and heard the bells ringing on Saturday evening, his recent trip and the places he had been lost their charm for him.” While Chekhov was cultivating his new garden in the fall of 1899, he was imagining the first frost in Moscow. Yalta had already lost its charm for him. But in his five remaining years of life, Chekhov wrote some of his best-known stories and plays there, including “In the Ravine,” “The Bishop,” Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard.

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg