Prof. Ostroumov's clinic, Moscow, where Chekhov was a patient in 1897
bookshop nearby, and the editorial offices of the newspaper Le Message? franco-russe, which on 24 November 1897 belatedly reported the arrival of the 'celebrated young novelist' (sic) on the Cote d'Azur.6
It was around this time that Chekhov got to know Mordechai Rozanov, the endearing Jewish proprietor of the bookshop and the paper, and was soon treating his sick wife.7 On the day that Chekhov's name appeared in the Messager franco-russe, he wrote to an old university friend commenting that the newspapers were full of gossip about the Dreyfus case, and the conversations he had with Rozanov and one of the Jewish Russian columnists for the Messager franco-russe undoubtedly fuelled his growing solidarity with those who supported the court-martialled officer against the anti-semitic French establishment. Shortly after Zola's famous letter J'accuse! was published in LAurore on 1 January 1898, at the height of the controversy, Chekhov wrote a long and vehement letter to Suvorin, whose newspaper had taken the side of the Establishment, in which he passionately defended Zola's crusade against the unjust treatment of Dreyfus. The continued anti-semitic bias of New Times appalled Chekhov. He was the only major Russian writer to take an active stand in the affair, and went out of his way to meet w .th Dreyfus's biother in Paris after leaving Nice the following April.8
Chekhov revelled m being able to walk about outside in a straw hat instead of being wrapped up in fur. He also liked the smell of the sea air, and was clearly reminded of the coastal port he had grown up in when he wrote to tell his cousin that N; :e was about the same size as aganrog Seeing some boys and a priest playmg noisily with a ball near a school one day also reminded him of his home town, he told his brother Ivan in another letter. Chekhov was passionately fond of warm weather - he was from the south after all, and felt at home in the sun. But, unlike most other visitors, he had :ttle enthusiasm for the precipitous and dramatic landscape of the Corniche with its umbrella pines, cypresses and oLve trees. He told one correspondent that it left him cold, and to another described the local flora as 'decorative, just like an oleograph'. There was also no grass.10 He had probably voiced some of his own sentiments n 'An Anonymous Story', which he had completed after his first visit to the city, in 1892. Above the shoreline, in the lilac mist, the narrator sees 'hills, gardens, towers and villas, all bathed in sunlight', but finds the vista 'alien, uninteresting, a strange kind of jumble'.
This was the only occasion when Chekhov used Nice as a setting for his f.ctional writing. If anything, the local scenery appeared to arouse m him an intense nostalgia foi the flat steppe landscapes of his ch^dhood. How do we know this? Not from anything he said in the 200 odd letters he wrote during the long months that he spent in Nice, but from the fact that the first two short stories he wrote during his first winter there are set n a steppe landscape at the he'ght of summer. The first of them, usually translated as 'At Home' (although its Russian title actually conveys the idea of being on. one's 'home turf' or on one's native territory), stands out in particular for its lyrical description of the steppe. It was wr :tten in 1 ctle more than a week and begun soon after Chekhov arrived in Nice in October 1897, when a brief spell of inclement weather had prompted him to go out and buy some paper and quills. The papier ecolier he bought looked so appealing, and the buying of quills was such an enjoyable experience, that it was actually hard to restr; 'n h mself from writing, he explained to Vasily Sobolevsky, the editor of the newspaper Russian Gazette, who published the story a few weeks later.12 The story's typically Chekhovian terse first sentence - 'The Don railway.' - locates us very precisely m the landscape directly north of Taganrog. Chekhov had travelled through it by train the previous summer on his way back to his native town. Twenty-three-year-old Vera is returning to her childhood home for the first time in ten years and we see the steppe through her eyes as she travels from the station in the family troika. She is mesmerized, after the long hours bitting in a stuffy train carriage, by the profusion of green, yellow, lilac and white flowering grasses around her and the smell of the warm earth:
. .. and little by- little before you unfold landscapes endless and fascinating intheir monotony, unlike any around Moscow. The steppe, the steppe and nothing else; an old kurgan or a windmill in the distance; oxen carrying coal... Solitary birds fly low over the plain, and the rhythmical beating of their wings brings on drowsiness. It is hot. Another hour goes by and there is still nothing but the steppe, the steppe and a kurgan in the distance ...
The words 'The steppe, the steppe' are repeated three times in the space of a few paragraphs, as if to echo the call of the lonely birds which fly overhead. At the end of the story, di sillusioned by the people she has come back to live among, Vera resolves that the only way for her to survive is to 'merge with the luxurious steppe and its flowers, kurgans and expanses, boundless and Impartial uke eternity'.13 Cnekhov was looking out on to a lush garden of palms, bloom ng oleanders and orange trees in his hotel as he wrote this.
The third story Chekhov wrote in Nice, 'On the Cart', one of h s most poignant, is also set <n surroundings far removed from the opulent French Riviera. It follows the thoughts of ah mpoverished young village school teacher travelling home by peasant cart one spring day after collecting her wages in town, her loneliness only reinforced by a casual encounter with the local bachelor landowner out in his carriage:
'Hold ught, Vasiiievna!' sam Sem/on.
The cart ti'ted heavily and almost keeled over; something heavy fell on to Marya Vasilievna's feet - it was her shopping. Now there was a steep climb up the hill through mud as thick as clay; noisy streams were running down the winding ditches, and it was as if the water had been eating away at the road - travelling round here was something else! The horses were snorting. Khanov climbed out of his carriage and started walking along the edge of the road. He was hot.
'How do you 'ike the road?' Khanov asked again with a laugn. 'My carriage is going to be wrecked at this rate.'
Glimpsing a woman on a passing train who resembles her deceased mother takes Marya Vasilievna back for a fraction of a second to the joyful surroundings of her family home in Moscow when she was growing up in more prosperous circumstances:
And for no apparent reason she burst into tears. Just at that moment Khanov drove up in his coach-and-four, and when she saw him she imagined the happiness she had never had and smiled at him, nodding her head as if she was a close acquaintance and h equal, and it felt to her as if her happiness, her exultation, was reflected in the sky, in all the windows and in the trees. No, her father and mother had never с led, and she had never been a teacher; that was just a long, terrible, bizarre dream, and she had just woken up . . .14