In spring 1897, the smooth course of life in Melikhovo was interrupted. Pulmonary tuberculosis that Chekhov developed while a student, aggravated. 

A year later, the writer spent some time in Yalta again living, as he said, “just few steps from the sea”, near the embankment. And the third Chekhov’s visit to the seashore took place in spring 1894. He stayed in the ‘Rossiya’ hotel and it was there that he wrote his short story called ‘The Student’.

In 1898, as the doctors recommended Chekhov to relocate to a place with a warmer climate, a new, Yalta period of his life began. Before his own house was built, the writer stayed in private boarding houses and country houses (‘dachas’). Those buildings and other Chekhov’s memorial places in Yalta are displayed in the exhibition of the drawings of Sergey Chekhov, the writer’s nephew. On the first display panel of the Yalta period there is a drawing of ‘Bushuev’s Dacha’ (country house) where Chekhov stayed in 1898. Wherever the writer lived, artistic people assembled around him. The autumn of 1898 was best remembered for the meetings with KonstantIn Balmont, Sergey Rakhmaninov, FyOdor Shalyapin. Around that time Chekhov got acquainted with such the men of letters as Yevgueny ChIrikov, MikhaIl Pervukhin, Alexander Beschinsky, and made close friends with the writer and medical doctor Sergey Yelpatyevsky who came to live in Yalta at the same time with Chekhov. The pictures of Balmont, Levitan and Shalyapin are in the bottom row on the stand.