Voloshin chose well. Koktebel sits roughly halfway along the coast between Feodosia and Sudak, a place of good light, warm water, and dramatic scenery, and the poet made his residence into something like an open salon for the Russian literary world. The guest list reads like an anthology. Tsvetaeva, one of the towering voices of Russian poetry, spent formative time here. Mandelstam, whose verse would later cost him his life in the Soviet camps, wrote in this bay. Bely, the Symbolist novelist and poet, suffered the stroke here in 1933 that ended his life in Moscow a few months later. What drew them was partly Voloshin himself, generous and magnetic, and partly the place, a landscape stark enough to sharpen a writer's eye. To walk the town today is to move through a setting that shaped some of the most enduring literature of its era.

Beyond its literary ghosts, Koktebel offers the plain pleasures of a good coast. Climb into the eastern hills above the town and the whole bay opens beneath you, and often, out in the middle of the water, schools of dolphins break the surface, leaping and playing where the light catches the swell. From the harbor, boat trips run out around the neighboring nature reserve to see the coast's most famous feature, a natural stone arch reaching out into the sea several hundred meters offshore, carved from the volcanic rock of Kara Dag. There are wide beaches for swimming, horseback rides into the protected hills, and a long tradition of naturist beaches that has drawn visitors from Russia and Eastern Europe for years. The town wears its leisure comfortably, an easy counterpoint to the brooding mountain at its back.

Once each September, Koktebel trades poetry for music. The town hosts a jazz festival that fills its warm end-of-summer nights with sound, drawing crowds to a place better known for its silence and its scenery. It fits the character of Koktebel, which has always been a town that attracts artists and the people who love them. Accommodation here runs a little dearer than in many Crimean towns, and a little nicer for it, though a walk east down the main road toward the big landmark hotel turns up cheaper rooms that are clean and pleasant enough. Whether you come for the music, the beaches, the dolphins, or simply to stand where Voloshin once stood and look out at the same sea and the same black mountain, Koktebel rewards the visit. Few small towns carry so much culture so lightly.