On Chekhovian landscapes in the Ukrainian steppe, and burial mounds

I have been scanning my films from Crimea, and some of the landscape images of the steppe kept bringing me back to thoughts of Chekhov, who had grown up not far away and spent early days wandering the steppe - many of his later plays and stories involve people adrift in houses set in wide empty spaces. Yesterday I read his short story "Happiness" with its description of the open steppe and the 'kurgany' - enormous burial mounds of Scythian or Bosporan kings that arise out of the flat landscape. Two shepherds are sitting in the steppe, discussing the nature of happiness - or luck - since schastye in Russian can mean either, or both. The kurgany are well known for hiding treasure - crocks of exquisite Scythian gold. The older shepherd was dreaming of finding a crock of Scythian or Cossack happiness - or luck - while recognising that it wasn't going to happen:

“In the bluish distance where the furthest visible hillock melted into the mist nothing was stirring; the ancient kurgany, once watch-mounds and tombs, which rose here and there above the horizon and the boundless steppe had a sullen and death-like look; there was a feeling of endless time and utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence; another thousand years would pass, myriads of men would die, while they would still stand as they had stood, with no regret for the dead nor interest in the living, and no soul would ever know why they stood there, and what secret of the steppes was hidden under them.”

Here was the image I was scanning:

I posted a digital test picture for this image while I was travelling so if it looks a little familiar from an earlier post, don't be surprised, but this is the final version, quite a different composition from the (somewhat cropped) earlier on-the-road image.

Day 10, homeward bound

My main purpose in heading to Ukraine was to take pictures on medium format on film, so many of the images posted over the last few days, especially portraits, were by way of test images for the final film version, and they were roughly posted through the iPad so please forgive some of the slightly dodgy colour balances. Many other images I only took on film so of course I couldn't blog temporary digi versions, so let's hope that there are one or two interesting ones among this lot!:-

Take off from Simferopol followed by Kiev airport in the early morning gloom:

And that is it! Hoping to make it back in the new year, it's been an interesting trip.

Day 9, Into the Valley of Death (Balaklava)

On the road to Balaklava, a new district for the rich takes shape higgledy-piggledy:

Balaklava is a place of course known to every British schoolboy through Tennyson ('"Forward, the Light Brigade!"/ Was there a man dismay'd?/ Not tho' the soldier knew/ Someone had blunder'd"). Tennyson's view of the war was rather more romantic than Tolstoy's ("the only hero of my story is truth"), perhaps because, unlike Tolstoy, Tennyson wasn't there.

Nobody I met in Balaklava seemed to have heard of the Charge of the Light Brigade, and seemed vaguely puzzled when I told that Balaklava is a household name in the UK. When I mentioned the Anglo-French invasion, Vova, a security guard, said: "everyone has been here at some stage. We joke that we think of ourselves not as Ukrainian, or even Russian, but 'theirs' - belonging to the abroad".

Balaklava was a top secret submarine base during Soviet times, with a James Bond-style base hidden inside the mountain, with caverns at sea level that submarines disappeared into. When I visited ten years ago, the bay where Florence Nightingale had set up her hospital was rusting and ramshackle, what has happened since is truly remarkable - the town has been transformed into a superyacht base and holiday resort for the super-rich. Here is an image of the entrance to the bay, you can see the entrance to one of the submarine pens at the base of the hill opposite:

A Volga in Balaklava village, many of these Soviet era cars are still going strong:

Staircase to nowhere, Balaklava:

Balaklava was one of the lynchpins for the defence of Sevastopol during the Great Patriotic War. I found an informal memorial to soldiers of the 'Cheka' - the NKVD - more commonly known as the KGB, who died in the defence of Balaklava. Here is another, official memorial, to Gerasim Arkhipovich Rubtsov, commander of the Border Regiment, who died in 1942 in the defence of Balaklava:

When I climbed the hill over Balaklava I met Ira and Ira and Anatoly having a picnic consisting mainly of vodka and salo - Ukrainian national dish consisting of raw pig fat. They kindly invited me to join them, so getting down the hill was much harder drunk. As a former soldier, Anatoly wasn't keen to have his portrait taken, but here is Ira and Ira, with the spectacular setting of Balaklava Bay in the background:

Day 8, Lev Tolstoy ('Sketches from Sebastopol')

This was mostly a day of bus travel, so I did not take many pictures. However, I arrived in Sevastopol just before sun down and took a stroll along the famous Grafskiy Pristan. Sevastopol is a household name for us Brits, mainly because of the siege, and if you like Tolstoy then you will already know something about Sevastopol's remarkable topography, because it was all described in his gripping Sketches from Sebastopol, a first hand description of the heroic and remarkably successful (thanks partly to the competence of Admirals Kornilov and Nakhimov) defence of Sebastopol against the British and French forces. Of course, the city ultimately fell, after a whole year of siege, but the allies suffered such losses that they were forced to quit the Crimea shortly after. Tolstoy knew what he was talking about, because he was there, a second lieutenant in the thick of the fighting.

Sevastopol was a closed city during Soviet years - strictly out of bounds to foreigners, as it was the home of the Black Sea Fleet, noawadays happily it is open to foreigners.

I passed an abandoned building ten years ago when I first visited Sevastopol. At that time there were swarms of people climbing over it with saws and all other kinds of tools, plundering what steel they could hack off to sell as scrap. Those were diffficult times. The building is pretty much as it was except with less steel in it, more stripped out - but the main steel beams were too much for individuals, so they remain untouched.

William Eggleston left his tricycle nearby:

I just love Soviet monumental statues, looking forward to socialist realism becoming popular again, I don't think it'll be long:

Grafskiy Pristan:

Day 7, Koktebel (the promised land)

Koktebel is an idyllicly located village on the Crimean coast whose name became a symbol of a kind of paradise here on earth, a utopia, it was a get-away-from-it-all secret location during Soviet times for the few in the know, particularly writers, with a bohemian and clothing-optional style of life almost unheard of in the Soviet Union. If you've seen the beautiful, award-winning film 'Koktebel' by Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky, you'll get the idea. The film is about a small boy who is travelling to Koktebel from Moscow with his father, but becomes separated and has to make his own way there. The idea of Koktebel begins to feel like an unattainable place that seems scarcely believable that it actually exists, a promised land for the small boy.

I went there today. It's unfair, maybe, visiting a summer resort out of season, but interesting to do so. It was almost totally deserted, which gave it this nice sense of absence, in the summer it must be on the contrary absolutely packed. It has long ceased to be a village.