Reading Chekhov

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."

I continued climbing the hill, in the inflexible grip of un-happiness over my lost clothes. And then the realization came: the recognition that when my suitcase was taken something else had been restored to me-feeling itself. Until the mishap at the airport, I had not felt anything very much. Without knowing exactly why, I have always found travel writing a little boring, and now the reason seemed clear: travel itself is a low-key emotional experience, a pallid affair in comparison to ordinary life. When Gurov picks up Anna at an outdoor restaurant (approaching her through her dog) they converse thus: "Have you been long in Yalta?" [he says.] "Five days."

"And I have already dragged out a fortnight here." There was a brief silence.

"Time goes fast, and yet it is so dull here!" she said, not looking at him.

"That's only the fashion to say it is dull here. A provincial will live in Belyov or Zhidra and not be dull, and when he comes here it's 'Oh the dullness! Oh, the dust!' One would think he came from Granada."