The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91
THE STEPPE AND OTHER STORIES
ANTON PAVLOVICH CHEKHOV, the son of a former serf, was born in 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov. He received a classical education at the Taganrog Gymnasium, then in 1879 he went to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines. He published his first volume of stories, Motley Tales, in 1886 and a year later his second volume, In the Twilight, for which he was awarded the Pushkin Prize. His most famous stories were written after his return from the convict island of Sakhalin, which he visited in 1890. For five years he lived on his small country estate near Moscow, but when his health began to fail he moved to the Crimea. After 1900, the rest of his life was spent at Yalta, where he met Tolstoy and Gorky. He wrote very few stories during the last years of his life, devoting most of his time to a thorough revision of his stories, of which the first comprehensive edition was published in 1899–1901, and to the writing of his great plays. In 1901 Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre. He died of consumption in 1904.
RONALD WILKS studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings by Pushkin, and five other volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories and Ward No. 6 and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.
DONALD RAYFIELD was born in 1942 and educated at Dulwich College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary College, University of London. He has written a number of monographs, notably Anton Chekhov: A Life and Understanding Chekhov, and is currently working on Stalin and the Hangmen and on a Georgian–English dictionary.
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Steppe and Other Stories
Translated with Notes by RONALD WILKS
With an introduction by DONALD RAYFIELD
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2001
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Translation, Chronology and Publishing History and Notes © Ronald Wilks, 2001
Introduction and Further Reading © Donald Rayfield, 2001
‘The Steppe’, ‘Panpipes’, ‘Verochka’, ‘A Dreary Story’ and ‘Gusev’ newly translated 2001. ‘The Kiss’ first published 1982, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1982. ‘The Name-day Party’ first published 1985, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks, 1985. ‘The Duel’ first published 1984, pre-existing translation © Ronald Wilks 1984
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the editors have been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-191570-8
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
FURTHER READING
CHRONOLOGY
NOTE ON TEXT
PATRONYMICS
The Steppe
Panpipes
The Kiss
Verochka
The Name-day Party
A Dreary Story
Gusev
The Duel
PUBLISHING HISTORY AND NOTES
INTRODUCTION
An interesting game (invented by the drama specialist Harai Golomb) can be played with Chekhov’s plays: leave one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and so on, before the curtain falls on the last act and see how completely you change your understanding of the play with each exit. We can play the game with Chekhov’s work. Imagine that tuberculosis had killed him not in 1904, but in 1897, 1891 or 1884, and how differently we would view him. A Chekhov who had died in the Moscow clinic in April 1897, leaving no Three Sisters or Cherry Orchard, would not be seen as a dramatist (despite the existence of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya), but almost solely as the progenitor of the modern short story, a prose poet who relegates plot, characterization and moral argument to equal or even lesser status than atmospheric mood. A Chekhov who had stopped with this volume (after all, his journey across Siberia to Sakhalin might very well have killed him in 1890 or 1891), leaving no Ward No. 6, Black Monk or Ariadna, might appear as a gifted disciple of Russia’s elder generation of great novelists, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Leskov, refining, miniaturizing their techniques, but as yet unable to match their cosmic vision or moral authority, or to devise a narrative language of his own.
Had Chekhov died at the age of twenty-four, of the haemorrhage that he suffered in 1884, only a very perceptive critic would have been able to discern the embryonic genius in a dozen or so of the two hundred five-page stories he had published ever since he had started medical school in 1879. (And, three years later, if Chekhov had not taken down his doctor’s brass plate, his desertion of literature for medicine might still have passed unlamented.)
There are no sharp breaks or blinding lights in Chekhov’s development; nevertheless, it was a development. The works of this volume are in no way juvenilia – we have excluded from this collection, however interesting, anything written before the end of 1886, when Chekhov had qualified, both as a doctor and as a writer. But the stories in this volume represent a Chekhov who is more self-conscious and more conventional – more dependent on the opinions of editors, critics and readers – than in his later work. The level of genius in ‘A Dreary Story’ or ‘The Steppe’ is not demonstrably lower than in the late work, but we can hear the author thinking, we can see the ties to the texts of the masters – to Tolstoy or Gogol – and the view of the world that emerges is not yet as hauntingly ambiguous as it is to become. Good and evil, heroes and villains still loom large in Chekhov’s fiction; the author can still justify the ways of art, science, morality and logic to his reader.
In his twenties, and in the supposedly stagnant eighties of Russia’s nineteenth century, Chekhov the writer was still an unusual phenomenon. Forty years ago the cliché of the nineteenth-century Russian writer was evoked by Russia’s wittiest dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–97), in a satirical monologue, a short story called ‘The Graphomaniacs’: ‘They lived on country estates, they knew a foreign language from birth and, in between balls and duels, wrote their novels which were immediately
published in all languages of the globe.’ Chekhov had no country estate (until 1892), he was not a member of the gentry, he was nearly forty before he had learnt enough French to read a newspaper, he attended neither balls nor duels and in his lifetime was virtually unknown in most of Western Europe. His life was more like that of the Soviet writer as Sinyavsky portrayed it: ‘the problem of three meals a day, paying for the gas, your shoes have worn out and you owe the typist for two hundred pages at a rouble a page… was this mind of genius really brought up on rotten hamburgers?’
Anton Chekhov and his elder brothers, looking back at how far sheer talent had brought them, used to exclaim: ‘Did such genius really come out of an earth closet?’ True, their origins were humble: but Chekhov’s father had the qualifications to produce genius; like Dickens’ and Ibsen’s fathers, he was a bankrupt shopkeeper. Taganrog, down south, on the Sea of Azov, may have had no sewerage or piped water, but it did have an opera house and an enterprising theatre, not to mention a good grammar school. Some of Chekhov’s teachers were alcoholics, sadists (among them the father of the ‘iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky who was to lead Lenin’s secret police) and police informers. Others, however, were original minds, even published writers. Taganrog gave Chekhov and his brothers a disrespectful, anti-metropolitan and multi-ethnic ethos which no amount of Moscow and St Petersburg sophistication could efface. It also provided the scheme of a southern provincial town to infuse much of Chekhov’s work: its cherry orchards and cemetery statuary are to recur right until Chekhov’s valedictory work, The Cherry Orchard. Its heterogeneous population of merchants, officials, vagabonds, its unhappy provincial heroines were also to populate – sometimes recognizably for themselves – much of Chekhov’s early prose.
Taganrog’s churches played an important, even oppressive, part in Chekhov’s formative years. His father’s tyrannical reign as a cantor gave Chekhov a knowledge and love of the Russian liturgy and its music unparalleled in any other major writer, except Nikolay Leskov. The rhythms of his prose are infused with the psalmodic periods of the Russian akathistos (a psalm improvised by the priest) and the Byzantine hymns for each event in the church calendar, the troparia. At the same time, as he was soon to admit, kneeling on frozen church floors in the early hours of the morning, a torture that alternated with parental thrashings, gave Chekhov an insuperable aversion to religion – in fact to any ideological system. This forced him as a writer to embrace doubt and uncertainty, and prevented him from adopting any of the mantles, Christian or secular, that so many Russian prose-writers felt compelled to don.
The education Chekhov received was like an English public school, minus sport, homosexuality and corporal punishment, strongly oriented towards the classics and to Orthodox Christianity. True, he read most of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and modern European literature when he had already become a writer himself, but lacking the culture of Russia’s gentry literati was not altogether a disadvantage, since it led him to seek his own literary paths.
Chekhov’s first writing was controlled by the strict formulas of the editors of the comic, satirical and didactic weekly magazines who first bought his work when he became an indigent medical student in Moscow. Their demands for simplicity, precision, topicality, exactness and conformity to a sometimes paranoiac censorship were not entirely inhibiting factors for a writer’s development. Like many writers, Chekhov also learnt economy, dispassionate observation and irony from his medical training. Writing a historia morbi for each new case in hospital gave him a new technique for story-writing: ‘A Dreary Story’, ‘Ward No. 6’, ‘The Black Monk’, ‘The Bishop’ are all stories built on the progress of a disease – angina, paranoia, tuberculosis, typhoid – and the parallel disintegration of a persona. As a doctor, Chekhov may not have been particularly distinguished, but what survives of his medical essays are terse models of autopsies that served as kernels for fictional stories. Perhaps it is significant that, though mediocre in surgery, Chekhov had high marks for gynaecology and psychiatry; he had an almost numinous gift for diagnosing fatal illness in colleagues, literary or medical, and he had the patient listening ear which marks off the best psychiatrists and best novelists. Though he deserted medicine as a career (treating first only friends and relatives, then afterwards only peasants), medicine did not desert Chekhov. The doctor as saint in countless stories and the doctor as observer, god, villain or clown in all the plays but the last testify to the parallels that Chekhov, wittingly or not, drew between his ‘mistress’, literature, and his ‘legitimate wife’, medicine.
Medicine had other values for the writer: the medical profession was the stratum in society that the Russian state feared. Its publications were uncensored, its political defiance respected. To be a doctor gave Chekhov a pride that none of the privations and humiliations of Grub Street could break.
A stubborn independence distinguishes Anton Chekhov from his elder brothers. One, Alexander, was a polyglot and polymath, whose letters show a Boswellian talent for self-parody; but dependence on alcohol and sex reduced him from leader of the family to clown. Nikolay, an artist with the talent of a Daumier, was destroyed spiritually, even before he collapsed physically, by similar factors – plus tuberculosis. Chekhov’s defining feature is a refusal to be dependent, on other human beings, their money or their opinions, on drugs, on sex. His brothers’ disastrous lives furnish material for many of his stories: they also served as a horrible warning.
If Anton Chekhov had a need, it was for a replacement father-figure. This is what saved him from remaining a gifted, productive – even prolific – hack. He admired, first of all, that most underestimated of the major Russian novelists, Nikolay Leskov: in Chekhov’s prose the elusiveness of the narrator, the tendency to infuse a narrative with lyricism, the indifference to the preoccupations of Western European writers stems from Leskov’s influence. (Leskov was the only prose fiction writer whom Chekhov’s father read.) Leskov was a cantankerous, isolated figure. Their initial encounter, when Leskov poured salad oil over the young Chekhov’s head to anoint him, was followed by mutual estrangement. By the mid 1880s, a deep but qualified admiration for Tolstoy’s morality, lapidary prose technique and sceptical analysis of all abstractions and received ideas had aroused in Chekhov a deeper admiration: some years were to pass before a personal encounter with Tolstoy (and a doctor’s refusal to accept Tolstoy’s more extreme pontifications on sex, science and the cosmos) led Chekhov to distinguish between Tolstoy the heroic man, the writer of genius and the preacher of absurdities – but the influence, however moderated, remains in Chekhov’s work.
The third of these senior influences was decisive: it was Aleksey Sergeyevich Suvorin, the St Petersburg newspaper magnate, publisher, political éminence grise, who had marked out Anton Chekhov’s potential. The Russian intelligentsia preferred, if they could afford to do so, to stay clear of Suvorin: they were horrified by Suvorin’s tragic aura (his family was beset by suicide and sudden death), Mephistophelean personality and apparent lack of political or moral principle (he was a consistent nationalist conservative anti-semitic radical, with pronounced private anarchic tendencies). Suvorin was twenty-six years older than Chekhov, but they had much in common: Suvorin too came from the provincial peasantry, was exploited by indigent relatives, and had, like Anton Chekhov, a fondness for the company of actresses and for wandering round cemeteries.
Suvorin paid three times as much and gave twice as much space as the Moscow editors to the writers who filled his paper’s Wednesday and Saturday supplements. His readers were more sophisticated, too: they, like their editor, had a salacious streak, they wanted dangerous women and wicked Jews in their stories; but they were prepared to have ambiguity and lyricism and to do without mockery and flippancy. Suvorin’s newspaper was once compared to a zoo whose animals were fed and watered by a kindly keeper: Chekhov was the elephant in this zoo, and the only animal encouraged to take walks abroad.
Many Russian writers, especially the radical left, regarded with distaste Chekh
ov’s alliance with the Suvorin family – the alliance weakened only at the end of the 1890s, when Suvorin and his heir’s anti-semitism became embarrassing. Quips flew through St Petersburg: ‘Suvorin the father, Suvorin the son and Chekhov the Holy Ghost.’ But from Suvorin’s paper it was possible for Chekhov to graduate, belatedly, to the conventional avenue for a novice Russian writer: the thick monthly journals to which the intelligentsia and gentry subscribed. Only then, from 1888 with the publication of ‘The Steppe’ could Chekhov have the freedom to write at as much length as he chose, for a fee which allowed him to write at his own pace. To survive as a writer for the Moscow weeklies, Chekhov would have had to go on writing two or three stories a week under various pseudonyms. Under Suvorin he could live like a bourgeois on a story a week; on the monthly journals, two or three longer tales a year were sufficient to raise the writer’s income to that of a gentleman.
Suvorin was not only a deus ex machina who found work and pensions for Chekhov as well as his parents and siblings; he was a friend who for several years tried to persuade Chekhov to marry his daughter (at first as a child of eleven) and share the family fortune. Here Chekhov began to show his mettle, what Suvorin called his flint, against what Chekhov called Suvorin’s ‘weak character’. Never was a Dr Faust better defended against a Mephistopheles: one of Chekhov’s mistresses had happened to be a certain Lily Markova, who had been the Suvorin family governess: Chekhov knew all Suvorin’s terrible secrets. Because he understood – and shared – Suvorin’s depression, this was a basis for a friendship almost unique between publisher and writer. Suvorin was also an influence – if only by reaction, for his salacious stories and anti-semitic plays evoked in Chekhov a powerful retort. Furthermore, Suvorin and his family served as material to Chekhov, to the amusement of Suvorin’s second wife, to the indignation of his sons and hangers-on. The lonely professor of ‘A Dreary Story’, like Professor Serebryakov of Uncle Vanya tormenting his young wife, is only one example of the use to which Chekhov could put his friends: the most extreme, perhaps, was the suicide of Suvorin’s young son, Volodya, in 1887, which Chekhov reworked in a story of that name and again in The Seagull.