Reading Chekhov

Although the passage functions (as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out) as an illustration of Gurov's attractive wit, it also expresses the truth that had just been revealed to me, and that Chekhov's Yalta exile revealed to him-that our homes are Granada. They are where the action is; they are where the riches of experience are distributed. On our travels, we stand before paintings and look at scenery, and sometimes we are moved, but rarely are we as engaged with life as we are in the course of any ordinary day in our usual surroundings. Only when faced with one of the inevitable minor hardships of travel do we break out of the trance of tourism and once again feel the sharp savor of the real. ("I have never met anyone who was less a tourist," Maxim Ko-valevsky, a professor of sociology whom Chekhov met in Nice in 1897, wrote of his compatriot, and went on to say, "Visiting museums, art galleries, and ruins exhausted rather than delighted him… In Rome I found myself obliged to assume the role of guide, showing him the Forum, the ruins of the palace of the Caesars, the Capitol. To all of this he remained more or less indifferent.") Chekhov was deeply bored in Yalta before he built his house and put in his garden, and even afterward he felt as if he had been banished and that life was elsewhere. When he wrote of the three sisters' yearning for Moscow, he was expressing his own sense of exile: "One does not know what to do with oneself." Chekhov's villa in Autka-Nina took me there on our first day together-is a two-story stucco house of distinguished, unornamented, faintly Moorish architecture, with an extensive, well-ordered garden and spacious rooms that look out over Yalta to the sea. Maria Chekhova, who lived until 1957, preserved the house and garden, fending off Nazi occupiers during the war and enduring the insults of the Stalin and Khrushchev periods. It remains furnished as in Chekhov's time: handsomely, simply, elegantly. As Chekhov cared about women's dress (it does not go unnoted in the work, and is always significant), he cared about the furnishings of his houses. Perhaps his love of order and elegance was innate, but more likely it was a reaction against the disorder and harshness of his early family life. His father, Pavel Yegorovich, was the son of a serf who had managed to buy his freedom and that of his wife and children. Pavel rose in the world and became the owner of a grocery store in Taganrog, a town with a large foreign (mostly Greek) population, on the sea of Azov, in southern Russia. The store, as Chekhov's best biographer, Ernest J. Simmons, characterizes it in Chekhov (1962), resembled a New England general store-selling things like kerosene, tobacco, yarn, nails, and home remedies-though, unlike a New England store, it also sold vodka, which was consumed on the premises in a separate room. In Simmons's description, the place had "filthy debris on the floor, torn soiled oilcloth on the counters, and in summer, swarms of flies settled everywhere. An unpleasant melange of odors emanated from the exposed goods: the sugar smelled of kerosene, the coffee of herring. Brazen rats prowled about the stock."