The management of the Russian Geographical Society send Yartsev to work in the Crimea. Working as a forester, Yartsev represented the State Assets Directorate in Yalta district zemstvo (local administration), took an active part in charity associations. In Yalta he built a 3-story house for himself, after his own plan, and rent an ancillary building out to MaxIm Gorky, to doctor Leonid Sredin. 

 
Yartsev’s family lived on the third floor. Leonod Sredin, a surgeon, lived on the second floor. Sredin came to live in Yalta because of his illness (pulmonary tuberculosis) in 1891. He opened a department of surgery in Yalta hospital, in KoreIz, worked in a Red Cross hospital. He was fond of music, astronomy. The Yalta intellectuals gathered around him. Opposite the Sredin’s apartment there was a balcony-porch where the guests got together – it is mentioned in the correspondence of the house habitues as “Sredin”s Balcony”. Sredin’s flat was sort of a literary salon and a centre of attraction for progressive Yalta intellectuals and visiting cultural luminaries. 

Anton Chekhov also loved Sredin sincerely.

In the right bottom corner of the stand there is an old postcard showing the building of a fashionable and very famous hotel “RossIya”. At different times, many famous people stayed there: Nekrasov and Musorgsky, Shalyapin and Bunin, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. In April 1894, Chekhov came to Yalta to improve his health and stayed in room 39 of that hotel. He wrote his short story “The Student” there. The writer’s brother, Mikhail Chekhov remembered that Chekhov considered the short story ‘The Student’ ‘well-honed’. It’s true that Chekhov liked the story very much but in a way different from ours -in terms of elegance, refinement — a very short story without many words, but with those few available in appropriate places, succinct and to the point.