The ObserverTravel This article is more than 9 years oldUkraine's last resort: discovering the real Crimea
This article is more than 9 years oldBefore the crisis in Crimea, the award-winning novelist David Bezmozgis travelled around the area researching his new book. From holidaymakers on the Black Sea he learned why the Russians love it – and why the Crimeans are happy to welcome themI landed in Crimea in August, at high season, because I was writing a novel and I'd decided it needed to be set somewhere in Crimea. I needed a Soviet seaside resort town with a large, luxurious hotel. This was in 2011, when Crimea was still part of a country called Ukraine, which, though rife with corruption, still showed no sign of revolution or violent fracture. From the perspective of the present day, one might almost feel nostalgic for it.
Before I arrived, my knowledge of Crimea was based mostly on my parents' stories and on the Russian classics. When I thought of Crimea I thought of Chekhov, of the battlefields of the Crimean war and of the gilded playgrounds of tsars and commissars. I had only a hazy conception of what Crimea was like now. My Russian friends weren't much help. One, a close friend from childhood who now mingles with oligarchs in London and Moscow, said dismissively: "I don't know anybody who goes there." The middle class booked tours to Cyprus or the Dominican Republic, the wealthy sunbathed on yachts in Cap Ferrat. Crimea was now for the narod, the masses, people from the provinces who either couldn't imagine or couldn't afford anything better.
When my family lived in the USSR, Soviet citizens couldn't travel abroad and the choices were the Baltic coast – where I summered as a boy – or towns along the Black Sea, like Sochi, Gagra, Odessa and those of the Crimean peninsula. Yalta was arguably the most desirable of those destinations.
But the town I originally had in mind for my novel was Koktebel. It is a small beach town four hours by car south of Yalta. Koktebel has a bohemian reputation. It even boasts a nude beach. It is also renowned as the place where the Russian poet and painter Maximilian Voloshin had his house, which he opened to artists and writers including Osip Mandelstam, Andrei Bely and Diego Rivera. The road leading to Koktebel passes villages reminiscent of the kind one encounters in parts of Greece or southern Italy.
By the time I check into my hotel – a tidy but spare three-storey operation – I understand that I will not be able to set my novel here. Koktebel has no luxury hotels to speak of. But one advantage my hotel is that it is a few hundred metres from Maximilian Voloshin's house, now a museum. A bronze statue of Voloshin is planted on the promenade, between his house and the sea. The sculptor hasn't aggrandised him: he appears life-size, bearded, wearing a peasant tunic, part saint, part gnome. I take a mid-afternoon tour. The house is filled to capacity. The Russian vacationers, narod of all ages fresh from the beaches, encircle the guide, a young woman, primly dressed. She begins the tour by reciting some lines from a poem of Voloshin's, Dom Poeta (The Poet's House). Everyone listens courteously, respectfully. The Russian narod still know what they are meant to hold sacred – the Poets, the Church and the Wars.
I spend the afternoon in the blaze of sun and sensation that is Koktebel. The promenade, which stretches for kilometres, passes through a gauntlet of souvenir booths, food kiosks, bars, restaurants, games arcades, street performers and miscellaneous vendors – women peddling homemade cakes; young men at tables piled with salt fish; other men selling boat tours. Beyond them is the crowded beach. The farther east you go the more bohemian it becomes. Hotels, restaurants and vendors give way and nudists start to appear. Here and there you can spot a naked man, his equipment pendulous, making conversation or contemplating the sea.
Crimea, even more than the rest of the former Soviet Union, hasn't settled on a coherent idea of itself. When the Iron Curtain fell 20 years ago everyone grabbed haphazardly at the trinkets of the wider world. The Club Santa Fe, just west of Voloshin's house, serves sushi and pizza and throbs nightly with techno music. Fast-food stands advertise "Hot Dogs" (spelt out phonetically in Cyrillic) – which are sausages in pittas. Everywhere are signs for "Fresh" (also spelt out in Cyrillic), the umbrella term for any freshly squeezed juice – orange fresh, apple fresh, strawberry fresh.
All these things are common, to be found all over the former Soviet Union. But other things are unique to Crimea. There are the citizens of Sevastopol, arguably the most Russian citizens of Crimea, their city steeped in martial and naval history. There is Bakhchisaray, the former seat of the Crimean Khanate, and in its winding streets one feels the imprint of the Orient. In the hills above the palace are more curiosities: the Uspensky Cave Monastery, still functioning, carved into the face of a mountain. On the day I was there, bearded, black-clad monks harvested apricots.
And then there is Yalta, where Dmitri Gurov famously courted the lady with the little dog. They walked its promenade, its pier. Now a new generation of Russian bourgeoisie strolls here. There are cafés and boutiques to satisfy them and, what I needed for my novel, a handful of upscale hotels. The largest and most prominent is the Oreanda, just off the promenade, with the requisite Mercedeses and Bentleys parked out front.
But resurgent capitalism coexists with recalcitrant communism. In Lenin Square the mythical Bolshevik leader stands huge and bronze, looking past a McDonald's to the sea. People converge at his feet. Then too, there are the reminders that not everyone is prospering in Yalta. Once, I saw a string quartet consisting of four young women in cocktail dresses who had attracted a sizable audience; farther down I saw another quartet, like a harbinger of sad fate: four older women, drably dressed, playing to themselves.
Culturally and historically, Yalta has its attractions. Its main draw is the Livadia palace, former summer residence of Tsar Nicholas II. When the Bolsheviks seized the palace they looted it thoroughly before turning it into a sanatorium and, later, an insane asylum. A museum that attracts far fewer pilgrims than Livadia – and is the better for it – is the Chekhov museum. One can go there and see where the master worked and slept. One can listen to the matronly women who serve as guides speak of him with reverence.
At either end of the promenade stretch the beaches, the hipper Massandra to the south, the more prosaic beaches to the north. They are relatively narrow and composed not of sand but of large pebbles or small stones. Someone whose idea of a beach is a spacious expanse of soft sand, and who saw a Crimean beach in August, might wonder at its appeal: the thousands of steaming, rubicund bodies; the great hubbub; the proximity of many boats with their oily effluences.
But this is Crimea's appeal. Restful or relaxing it isn't, but it has its charms. It is an authentic expression of a culture that is dear to many Russians. And, in a sense, to understand what is happening in Ukraine today is to understand the particular appeal of Crimea. The people who love it are precisely the people who distrust the pro-European government in Kiev and wish instead to join Putin's Russia. They prefer the familiar chaos of Crimea to some alien illusory paradise.
The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis is published by Viking on 28 August.
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