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Stage giants fight to save Chekhov villa
Stoppard, Frayn and Branagh in campaign to stop the great writer's house falling into disrepair
By Matthew Bell
Leading British playwrights and actors are mounting a campaign to
save the Crimean villa where Anton Chekhov wrote some of his most
important works, including Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The
building is being allowed to fall into ruin because of tension between
the Russian and Ukrainian governments, it is claimed.
The White Dacha, perched on a hill in the Black Sea resort of Yalta, was
built for Chekhov after he moved south from Moscow in 1898, seeking a
warmer climate in the hope that it might ease his tuberculosis. Although
unhappy for most of his five and a half years in the Crimea – pining,
like many of his characters, to get back to Moscow – it was here that he
wrote his two last plays, considered among his greatest.
The house is of particular interest, because it has been preserved in
exactly the same condition in which Chekhov left it, two months before
his death in 1904. But after years of neglect, subsidence and rising
damp are taking their toll: cracks have appeared in the walls, portions
of ceiling have collapsed and mould is spreading. Water has begun to
pour into the attic, causing damage to Chekhov's study and drawing room.
Sir Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Kenneth Branagh and Ralph Fiennes are
among supporters of the campaign to save the White Dacha, launched at
the Pushkin House Anglo-Russian society in London last week by the the
Chekhov scholar and biographer Rosamund Bartlett.
After the playwright's death, his sister Masha scrupulously looked after
the house. She refused to be evacuated during the Second World War, and
forebade Nazi soldiers to occupy her brother's rooms. Since her death in
1957 it has been run as a museum. Vladimir Putin visited in 2003,
leaving his visiting card but no donation.
The dacha began to deteriorate after Crimea became a part of Ukraine,
following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Russian
government stopped providing the grants that had kept the house open to
the public. The cash-strapped Ministry of Culture and Arts of the
Autonomous Crimean Republic, under whose jurisdiction it now falls, says
it has no duty to provide funds because Chekhov was Russian, not
Ukrainian.
"The Ukrainians really should be supporting this house, it's so
important," said Alexander Walsh, one of the campaigners. "It's a
tragedy that [the government's] nationalist agenda seems to preclude
doing so." The campaign hopes to raise enough money to restore the house
by 2010, the 150th anniversary of Chekhov's birth.
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