ran away from it to Yalta in December, but did not escape it there. His
cough was worse; every day he had a high temperature, and these symptoms
were followed by an attack of pleurisy. He did not get up all through the
Christmas holidays; he still had an agonizing cough, and it was in this
enforced idleness that he thought out his play "The Cherry Orchard."

It is quite possible that if Chekhov had taken care of himself his disease
would not have developed so rapidly or proved fatal. The feverish energy of
his temperament, his readiness to respond to every impression, and his
thirst for activity, drove him from south to north and hack again,
regardless of his health and of the climate. Like all invalids, he ought to
have gone on living in the same place, at Nice or at Yalta, until he was
better, but he lived exactly as though he had been in good health. When he
arrived in the north he was always excited and absorbed by what was going
on, and this exhilaration he mistook for an improvement in his health; but
he had only to return to Yalta for the reaction to set in, and it would
seem to him at once that his case was hopeless, that the Crimea had no
beneficial effect on consumptives, and that the climate was wretched.

The spring of 1903 passed fairly favourably. He recovered sufficiently to
go to Moscow and even to Petersburg. On returning from Petersburg he began
preparing to go to Switzerland. But his state of health was such that his
doctor in Moscow advised him to give up the idea of Switzerland and even of
Yalta, and to stay somewhere not very far from Moscow. He followed this
advice and settled at Nar. Now that it was proposed that he should stay the
winter in the north, all that he had created in Yalta--his house and his
garden--seemed unnecessary and objectless. In the end he returned to Yalta
and set to work on "The Cherry Orchard."

In October, 1903, the play was finished and he set off to produce it