In the summer of 1899, Chekhov had yet another worthy reason to visit Moscow. It was an overwhelming feeling for the Moscow Art Theater actress Olga Leonardovna Knipper. Their first meetings date back to 1898. They met at rehearsals of the plays ‘The Seagull’ and ‘Tsar Fyodor Ioanovich’. Knipper’s heroines in both performances were called Irina. Later Chekhov wrote: “If I stayed in Moscow, I would fall in love with this Irina.”

The next year, on April 12, Anton Pavlovich came to Moscow again. A week later, on April 18, he paid an unexpected visit to Olga Leonardovna. They later visited an exhibition of Levitan’s new paintings.

It was just the beginning of love. The relationship between Knipper and Chekhov began to develop rapidly in Yalta, where the actress arrived in the summer of 1899 at the invitation of the writer. Chekhov showed his future wife how the Belaya Dacha was being built, spending all the days with her.

In the summer of the next year, Olga Leonardovna arrived at the already finished house with Maria Pavlovna, the writer’s sister. She took the best guest room overlooking the famous garden. A little later, the troupe of the Moscow Art Theater came to the White Dacha.

The couple’s wedding took place on May 25, 1901 in one of the Moscow churches. After the ceremony, the marrieds went to the Bashkir steppes ‘for koumiss’, from where on July 8 they arrived in Yalta. In the future, Olga Leonardovna lived in Moscow for most of the year, coming to her husband in the Crimea during periods free from tours and rehearsals.

Chekhov was totally against his wife leaving the theater. Knowing that she reproaches herself for not living in Yalta, but in Moscow, Chekhov consoled his spouse saying that he would suffer if it were the other way around. ‘I knew that I would marry an actress, that is, when I got married, I clearly knew that in the winters you would live in Moscow, ” wrote Anton Pavlovich. And then he assured that he did not feel resentment or abandonment. The relationship with Chekhov enriched Knipper both as an actress and as a person. In her memoirs, she noted that for all six years of her acquaintance and life with Anton Pavlovich, her inner world was so filled, colorful, interesting and complex that everything else faded against this. Olga Leonardovna’s visits to Yalta did not stop with Chekhov’s death. For more than half a century, she visited the city almost every year. She came to the White Dacha for the last time in 1953, for Maria Pavlovna Chekhova’s 90th anniversary.