The presented picture shows a view from a window to Sasha Chorny’s dacha, located in France, in the town of La Favière. It was painted by Alexandra Vasilievna Shchekatikhina-Pototskaya in exile, when, by the will of fate, the south of France for a time became the center of life for the Russian intelligentsia who emigrated en mass.

In 1927, Bilibin and Shchekatikhina-Pototskaya, together with a group of emigrants from Russia, acquired a small piece of land in the south of France by the sea — in the town of La Favière near Toulon. The companions divided the land by drawing lots, built simple cottages or dachas on their plots and settled there. The sprawling pine trees shading the beach, the surrounding vineyards stretching to the seashore, the fresh sea air, the loud chirping of cicadas — all this reminded the residents of the Russian settlement in La Favière of Crimea.

Soon the settlement in La Favière welcomed new residents. The owners of the plots on the seashore were the Siberian writer Grebenshchikov, the former minister of the Crimean regional government Bogdanov and the poet Sasha Chorny, who immediately planted a small vineyard next to his house. In the vicinity of La Favière on the rocky, pine-covered Cape Huron, the writer Aleksandr Kuprin bought a fishing house.

From the memoirs of Alexandra Vasilievna’s son Mstislav Nikolaevich Pototsky: