CRIMEAN SPRING
By PETER STUCLEY
I TRAVELLED south from Moscow to Sebastopol with three workers from Northern Siberia. We played dominoes, ate slices of sugared toast, and in between our many glasses of tea my companions talked cheerfully of the month's holiday they were going to spend on the shores of the Black Sea. It was early spring. When the train halted at Alma I saw that I had left the rain and the mud and the grim evidence of industrial endeavour behind me in the north: here there were blossoming fruit-trees and clear sunny streams. • Sebastopol on that sunny spring morning glittered with the gaiety and elegance of a Dufy. A gateway, flanked by white Ionic pillars, gave entrance to a broad flight of steps leading down to the blue waters, and up and down this stairway, beneath the white acacia-trees, moved the sailors of the Red Fleet in their white uniforms. Naval detachments—ribbons fluttering behind their caps—marched through the streets ; a band was playing on board one of the men-of-war lying in the harbour. Thyme grew thickly on the limestone hills surround- ing the town and filled the air with its scent. As we passed through the village of Balaclava, o' the way from Sebastopol to Yalta, I looked in vain for the nook in the hills once known as " Miss Nightingale's Seat." I could not place it ; but I was able to identify a narrow opening in the hills leading to the sea as the Valley of Death. It was blocked by a smoking factory, whose function, I was told, was to tin fish. The road climbed all the time across a barren countryside until it passed through a tunnel—the Baidar Gate—blasted in the rock, and there, on the other.. side, sheer below, lay the green surface of the Black Sea, and the Crimean coast, sudden and unexpected in its luxuriance. Once through the Baidar Gate the coast road night almost have been the Corniche, without the Savon Cadum and the sophisticated villeggiatura. To one side lay a high and austere range of mountains, and on the other the Sea, while between the two were pine-forests. vineyards and the large estates, once the property of the Imperial family.
Yalta was the Cannes of Russia. It was expensive and exclusive. It had a season (August r5th—November 1st), a Kursaal and orchestra, a German excursion-office (saddle- horses provided for ladies), and a grape-cure ; the district to the south of the Livadia bridge was considered most suitable for invalids ; at the hotel Rossiya 25 kopeks a day were charged for electric light in your bedroom. The little shops along the sea-front still hang out their striped awnings, though they are tattered and a little faded. In place of icing and confiserie there are rock-buns and biscuits: instead of Faberge cigarette- cases and lengths of the best Scots tweed there are highly tinted views of Yalta Bay, encrusted with shells, or a pair of hearts entwined bearing the inscription " A Souvenir of Days at Yalta." And up and down the front stroll the workers of the Soviet Union, linking arms with their girls, wearing comic round caps, bathing, boating in the harbour, posing for their snapshot before the Soviet adaptation of the German Leica camera. (But perhaps the present tense should already be the past.) Through the oak-tree groves and the beech-woods I drove out to visit the summer-villas of the neighbourhood, which, in the words of Mark Twain, " bud out here and there like flowers through the mass of green foliage." I went first to Livadia. It was to Livadia that Mark Twain himself and the other Innocents came when they landed at Yalta from " the very beautiful and substantial side-wheel steamship ' Quaker City ' " on the Great Pleasure Excursion of 1867 to be received by the Emperor Alexander II. The Emperor, who wore a cap, frock-coat and pantaloons, and, Twain remarks, " had none of that cunning in his eye that one of us noticed in Louis Napoleon's," must have received his visitors at the Moorish villa which stands close to the villa of the last Tsar. Nicholas II built it in 1911, in the Edwardian-Italianate taste. It is now used as a holiday-home for transport workers. Ten iron bedsteads stand in the Tsarina's boudoir, and a lesson in the fox-trot was in progress in the front hall. The scent of wistaria with the sun on it came in through the windows looking south over the sea.
More remarkable in its appearance was Alupka, the former residence of the Vorontzov family. It was built in 1837 from the design of the English architect, Edward Blore, who chose to combine the more romantic taste of this period with the Moorish style. Thus, while the north façade resembles Abbots- ford, the south is reminiscent of the Alhambra, and the interior is decorated alternately with panels of pitch-pine and texts from the Koran. Alupka, complete with its early Victorian pictures and furnishings, has been preserved intact by the Soviet Government and is much enjoyed by the holiday visitors.
Not so many callers are to be found at a small whitewashed villa which stands a mile or so outside Yalta on the road to the mountains. It is, indeed, inconspicuous enough: I only chanced to notice that the name engraved on the brass door- plate was that of " A. Chekhov." The Russians, with their peculiar talent for this type of embalmment—inspired perhaps by their sense of the theatre—have preserved the house exactly as it was in Chekhov's day. Empty medicine-bottles were in their place in his bedroom ; unopened letters lay on his writing- table ; an icon and a calendar for 1904 hung in the corner. Sprays of bamboo were clumped on the faded wallpaper of his sitting-room, and between and beneath hung the photographs of his world, actors, actresses, producers; " St. Petersburg " was written on them, and often, scrawled across in the manner of the day, there were some words of homage in French.
Here one might imagine voices rising and falling ; a phrase would be noticed, considered, and brought alive again for the audiences of Moscow. There would be time, unorganised time, on the long summer evenings, with music coming up from the harbour, to reflect on the queer unspoken murmurs of the soul, time to catch and translate them. Below the windows of the house was a small, walled garden, delicious with wall- flowers and white lilac, and close against the house stood a tall thick cypress, planted by Chekhov's sister the year he died. But most remarkable of all was that on the side of the opposite hill, across a narrow valley and visible from every window of the house, was an orchard of cherry-trees abundant with white blossom.
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