Anton Chekhov's house in the Crimea was a centre of artistic, political, social and humanitarian activity, writes Bernard Adams.

Through the Dardanelles, across the warm, shallow, mysterious Black Sea going north, the Crimea looms in front of you. At the southernmost tip of this lozenge of land, nestling under a high mountain cliff, lies Yalta.

This is the elegant Ukrainian resort where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin shaped the post-war world in a palace chamber and where, for more than half a century, privileged citizens of the Soviet Union enjoyed the sea, the food and the mild climate. But it is also the place where Anton Chekhov came to find a cure for his consumption and where he built his delightful house, White Dacha, and planted a marvellous garden.

Miraculously, despite the upheavals and destruction caused by the Russian Revolution, two world wars and the collapse of communism, both house and garden have been preserved virtually intact. Together they form one of the world's most evocative museums - all the more so because the writer had so few years left to enjoy what he had created.

Chekhov, his mother and his sister (he was not yet married) had a house-warming party at the dacha on September 9th, 1899. The house was designed by the Russian architect L. N. Shapovalov, and Chekhov helped shape the plans.

The dacha is tall and non-symmetrical, with wide and narrow windows, and there's a touch of art nouveau about the way stained glass has been used. There are delightful views of Yalta, the mountains and the blue Black sea from verandas on the first floor. The rooms are smallish, intimate and generally quite simply furnished - although the study is attractively cluttered. Here, at the big blue desk, although he was often weak and unwell, Chekhov wrote Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard and The Lady with a Dog and filled notebooks with dozens of ideas that he sadly never had time to develop.

The house has a pleasant family feeling: Chekhov's sister's watercolours hang on the walls; his mother was religious, so the house contains numerous icons. And his wife, the famous actress Olga Knipper, whom he married in 1901, had a room of her own. She was often away on tour and when she came back to Yalta and the dacha she used a modest, red wallpapered bedroom with a sofa where she could relax, and a desk where she could conduct her theatrical business.

By the time he came to live in White Dacha, Chekhov was at last being recognised as a formidable dramatist. In 1900, Stanislavsky's Moscow Arts Theatre company performed The Seagull and Uncle Vanya at Yalta.

On display at the house is the palm branch and the wide red ribbon they gave him to mark the occasion. The inscription reads: "To A. P. Chekhov, a profound interpreter of Russian life, Yalta, April 23, 1900."

White Dacha became a magnet for liberal writers, artists and musicians. The piano where Rachmaninov played is in the sitting room; Chaliapin sang for the family; Gorky strolled the garden and now visitors can sit on the seat where he and Chekhov used to rest and talk. Levitan, the great Russian landscape painter, was also a guest and one of his pictures hangs in the study. Chekhov used to talk to Tolstoy on the telephone and the instrument he used sits on a small table in the hall.

Chekhov did much more than write, entertain and talk at White Dacha. He was active politically - supporting students unions, refusing to become an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences when his friend Gorky was excluded because of his political views.

He was also active locally. He had qualified as a doctor before he became a writer, and he continued to see patients in Yalta as long as his own health would allow. He raised money to build a health centre for poverty-stricken consumptives - now called the Chekhov Sanatorium. With Gorky he started a fund to create a Yalta public library, which is now the biggest in the Crimea.

It's difficult not to marvel at Chekhov's energy and determination to get things done despite his illness. The garden at White Dacha shows just how hard he worked. He had previously owned land and run an enlightened farm just outside Moscow. But in 1897, he had a severe lung haemorrhage. He knew that not only would the Yalta climate help him, there would also be wonderful horticultural opportunities in the acre of ground surrounding the house.

"I am planting trees with my own hands," he wrote. "I have planted 100 rose saplings and all of them are the most valuable, cultured species." The rose bushes were a tribute to the poet Pushkin, whose centenary occurred in 1899. Most of the roses and many of the hundreds of shrubs and trees the writer planted are still there in a magical ensemble where cedars, palms, cypresses, magnolias, acacias and mulberry trees have grown and flourished. A silver birch, which Chekhov imported from central Russia, is now 50 feet high. The garden has colour almost all year round; delightful paths wind through the trees, sometimes with a tiny stream running alongside or underneath; the vats Chekhov's wine came in have been recycled ingeniously as rainwater butts.

Chekhov can have seen only the first hints of the cornucopia to come. He died in July 1904 in Germany, at a Black Forest resort where he had gone to make one last attempt to defeat his tuberculosis. His sister Maria continued living in White Dacha and it was she who made it possible for us to savour it now. She arranged for the house to become a state-supported museum in 1921, and it miraculously survived the Nazi occupation intact. Maria lived until 1957, carefully preserving all her brother's manuscripts, letters, notebooks and personal belongings.

Visiting the museum and the garden today reveals the scientist as well as the artist in Chekhov. It shows the good taste, the down-to-earth practicality and the courageous resilience of one of the world's greatest dramatists. Perhaps the last word on the writer should come from his telephonic friend Leo Tolstoy, who said he was "an incomparable painter of life patterns; his art's preciousness lies in its general comprehension - not only by Russians but by any man".