The writer was already very famous and the overflow of guests in his Yalta house never exhausted. He was getting tired of them. It was then that he started dating his future wife Olga Knipper, and it was of much interest to everybody. So, Chekhov decided to buy a small cottage to have a refuge there. 

 
Once he saw an advertisement of the sale of a tartar saklya (stone house) in Gurzuf, for 3000 roubles. In those times it was a substantial sum of money. The writer visited the house and bought it without negotiating the price as he was greatly impressed by the view of the landscape available from the harbor side. He wrote to his sister Maria: 

Under it is the picture of Chekhov’s dacha in Gurzuf. The single-store house with four small rooms was meant solely for the family members and close friends to stay there in summer time. Under the Gurzuf view, on the right-hand side, there is a postcard showing the ‘MarIino’ hotel where the writer stayed several times. In that hotel the main female character of Chekhov’s story, “The Lady with the Dog” stayed. Below are several pages of the story manuscript written in Yalta in 1899. 

Only several selected friends were aware of the Gurzuf dacha. While Chekhov was alive, he was visited there only by Ivan Bunin and the actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya. Chekhov gave her his picture in commemoration of that meeting, with a dedicatory inscription: “To Vera Fyodorovna Komissarzhevskaya, 3 August, on a stormy day when the sea was thundering, from the quiet Anton Chekhov”.