The itinerary for the 1891 tour took in Vienna, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Nice, Paris and Berlin, and was completed in six weeks. Chekhov's reaction to arriving for the first time in the Austrian capital was one of naive amazement and del ght. 'If only you could know how magnificent Vienna is!' he wrote exc'tedly to his family back in Moscow:
. .. there is no comparison with any other city I've ever seen in my life. The streets are wide and immaculately paved, there are masses of boulevards and squares, all the houses have six or seven storeys, and as for the shops - well, they are not shops so much as an utterly stupefying dream come true! The ties alone in the windows run into billions! And what amazing things they have in bronze, china, leather! The churches are enormous, but their size caresses rather than oppresses the eye because they seem to have been spun from lace. St Stephen's Cathedral and the Votiv-Kirche are particularly beautiful, more like cakes than build igs. The parliament building, the Town Hall, the University, all are magnificent; yesterday I understood for the first time that architecture is truly an art form. And in Vienna this art form is not scattered about randomly as it is with us, but extends in terraces for miles on end . . .41
Two days later, however, Chekhov was in Venice, and he already had to revise his opinion that Vienna was the ne plus ultra:
I must say that for sheer enchantment, brilliance and joie de vivre I have never in all my life seen a more wonderful city than Venice. Where you expect to find streets and lanes there are canals, istead of cabs there are gondolas, the architecture is staggeringly beautiful and every little corner has its histoi cal or artisti- nterest. You drift along in a gondola seeing the palaces of the Doges, Desdemona's house, the homes of famous painters, churches . . . And inside these churches are sculptures and paintings such as one sees only in dreams. In a word, enchantment.. . It's quite easy for a poor, benighted Russian to lose his wits in this world of beauty, riches and freedom. You simply want to stay here for ever, and when you stand in a church and listen ro the organ being played it's enough to make you become Catholic straight away.42
But then it started raining, and Chekhov's spnus immediately plummeted. 'It's raining as hard as you can imagi ne, and Venezia the bella has ceased to be particularly bella/ he lamented to his fam ly; 'there's a feeling of melancholy wafting from the water, and it makes one long to flee to somewhere where the sun is shining.' A week into the tour and the travellers were in Florence. Cheknov was enjoying himself, but he was not really in his element, and he soon tired of visiting museums. 'I saw the Venus dei Medici and thougnt that were she to be dressed in the sort of clothes people wear nowadays she would look most unattractive, especially around the waist,' he said in his next letter home, signing himself Antonio. The skies continued to be overcast and, for Chekhov, Italy without the sun was liice a face behind a mask. The glories of Renaissance art somehow failed to make the'r mark. 'I've seen everything I was supposed to and dragged myself to everywhere I was told go to,' he confided to a friend; 'if someone gave me sometlrng to smell, 1 smelled t. Now I am drained of all feeling except exhaustion and a longing for cabbage soup with buckwheat kasha. Venice put me under her spell and turned my head, but the moment I left, Baedeker and bad weather took over.'
Either Chekhov's Siberian experience had spoiled him for the pleasures of cultural tourism in the old world, or he was by nature unsuited for such pursuits. Either way, the tour did not prove to be as enjoyable as he had expected. Once the :nitial novelty of being in the great cities of European civi'ization had worn off, he quickly got bored, and ;t is telling that by the time the party reached Rome, all Chekhov wanted to do was get out of town and lie on the grass somewhere. This is not to impute an) philisin ;sm to him: he found Italy an enchanting country, and was mystified that Levitan had not taken to it. 'If I were an artist with no ties and plenty-of money I would spend the winters here,' he wrote; 'after all, it's not simply that the natural surroundings and the warmth of Italy are beautiful n themselves, but Itaiy is the only country where art re.'gns over all, and s.'mply to be aware of this is very stimulating.' Part of the problem was simply the opulence of being part of Suvorin's entourage: 'We stayed in the best hotel in Venice, like doges, and here in Rome we're living like cardinals, because our hotel is the former palace of Caid'nal Conti, now the Hotel Minerva: two huge drawing rooms, chandeliers, carpets, fireplaces and all kinds of useless clutter, costing us 40 francs a day.' This was again a far cry from the accommodation in Siberia which had been at best spartan, and maybe he felt he somehow had to do penance. There was an exhilarating horse-ride from Pompci to the bottom of Vesuvius, and then an excruciating ascent by foot:
Dragging oneself up Vesuvius is sheer torture: ash, mounds of lava, molten rock that has congealed in waves, clumps of vegetation and all kinds of rubbish. One step forward, half a step back, the soles of your feet are sore, your chest aches . . . On you plod, but the summit is as far away as ever. Give up and turn back? No, I would be too ashamed, and besides I would expose myself to ridicule. I started the ascent at two- thirty, and got to the top at six. The crater is several score metres across; I stood on its rim and looked down into it as if into a cup. The ground all round about is covered in a deposit of sulphur that gives off clouds of vapour. Evil-smelling white smoke belches forth from the crater itself, molten rock and sparks fly everywhere, and Satan lies snoring beneath the smoke. There is a huge cacophony of sounds: waves breaking against the shore, the heavens thundering, rails clattering, boards crashing down. It is terrifying, and yet one is gripped by a desire to leap straight down into the monster's mouth. I now believe in hell.43
Chekhov visited another kind of hell when they moved on to Nice and stayed in a smart hotel on the seafront. At least the air smelt nice there, he noted, and it was warm and green. But not in the roulette halls of nearby Monte Carlo, where Chekhov tasted the thrills and dangers of gambling, and managed not to succumb to them, unlike so many of his compatriots. In this Chekhov was indeed unusual. Pushkin gambled away his poetry, Tolstoy gambled away his house and Dostoevsky gambled away everything he had, but Chekhov was able to walk away, glad nevertheless to have tried his luck a little. He was certa nly not immune to fine living, but the 'roulette-style luxury' of the French Corniche reminded him of a luxurious WC. 'There is something hanging in the air which you feel offends your sense of decency,' he wrote to his family; it was something which 'vulgarizes nature, the sound of the sea, and the moon'.44
Having been almost continuously on the road for the previous rwelve months, Chekhov felt slightly jaded by the time he arrived on che Cote d'Azur. After the privations of travelling in Siberia the previous summer in the most austere conditions possible, it was something of a shock now to stay in luxury hotels and dine in smart restaurants in the manner to which Suvorin was accustomed. With the memory of the prison colony he had visited on Sakhalin clearly still in his mind, Chekhov was s' ightly nauseated by the amount of time people abroad seemed to spend eating and sleeping, and also by the richness of Frcnch cuisine, where every morsel seemed to be garnished with artichokes, truffles and nightingales' tongues. Writing home to his tam'y, he concluded that it was much better m Siberia in that resoect, since one generally never had any lunch or dinner there, or got any sleep, and he confessed that he had actually felt much better for it.