A banker on holiday in Yalta picks up a married woman with a small dog, expecting the usual resort affair, and finds he cannot go home from it. Chekhov practiced medicine throughout his career — he called it his lawful wife and literature his mistress — and brought a doctor's refusal to moralise to everything he wrote. Nothing is resolved in these stories, which is the point and the reason they never age. Fifty-eight plates of Black Sea weather and coast by painters including Ivan Aivazovsky and Ilya Repin run from 1801 to 1920, giving these Yalta stories their own sea air.
