Reading Chekhov

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 eieht feet bv 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 roue that he is-only deepens the mystery and heightens the poignancy of his later transformation into a man capable of serious love.