The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91 Read online

  Suvorin and his cronies had recognized in Chekhov’s Moscow stories an extraordinary evocation of nature, a gift for a single brush-stroke to convey a picture. Under Suvorin, Chekhov now developed a psychology for his heroes, and particularly his heroines. The fourth story in this volume, ‘Verochka’, is not Chekhov’s best-known story, but it is a landmark in its sensitive use of the non-encounter for a story. Russian dramatists had always distinguished themselves by their ability to remove from classical comedy its key element: the wedding bells for the young couple in the final act. In Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit (1827), a variation of Molière’s The Misanthropist and the most remarkable verse comedy ever written inside or outside Russia, the heroine is publicly humiliated while her admirer calls for a carriage to take him far away. The hero of Gogol’s Marriage leaps through a second-floor window rather than go through with the betrothal which his friend has worked so hard to arrange for him. Turgenev’s Home of the Gentry (A Nest of Gentlefolk), where the heroine goes to a nunnery instead of marrying the hero, is another precedent. Never, however, had Russian literature achieved such a touching tragi-comedy of non-communication, of the failure of the male to fulfil his role of hunter and decision-maker, as in Chekhov’s ‘Verochka’: the strength of the story is in its complete absence of moralizing or even morality, in the way that nature seems to predetermine the failure of the encounter, even to symbolize the mystery of non-motivation in the mist that pervades the air.

  Chekhov had found his scene. Although he was to become a landowner and gardener only six years later, the garden is in his work, as in medieval romance or in Turgenev’s novels, the setting for the crucial events and non-events in human life. In Chekhov’s case one can go further: his stories take their indirect lines and fuzzy boundaries not from literary, but from horticultural technique. In gardens, paths should lead you circuitously back to an exit which was your entrance; the boundaries between the artificial garden and the natural landscape should be invisible. Thus the protagonists of ‘Verochka’, as of many Chekhov stories and plays, end up in the same predicament with which they began, only now with a knowledge of the circularity in their existence. Chekhov has found a pattern for a story, a couple thrown together – a feckless but well-meaning male visitor to a provincial girl, literally leading her up the garden path and then failing to utter the expected words that will bring the story to an end. We will encounter this pattern again and again, but with ever subtler variations: it is there in the sub-plot of ‘A Dreary Story’; it is the primary theme, much more cruel, in ‘A Visit to Friends’; it is to be found in the plays – Dr Astrov and Sonya in Uncle Vanya, Lopakhin and Varya in The Cherry Orchard.

  At the end of 1887, the same year and in the same newspaper – Suvorin’s New Times, in which ‘Verochka’ was printed – Chekhov published ‘The Kiss’. Here, too, at the end the hero deliberately refuses to take the opportunity to make sense of a brief encounter, when he decides to sleep alone in a peasant hut rather than accept the invitation to the general’s house where, on his last visit, he was kissed by a mysterious young woman in the dark, by mistake. The mood of ‘Verochka’ is pathetic – we feel for the heroine who is given no explanation. In ‘The Kiss’ the erotic encounter was a mistake, no forsaken woman is suffering, and the situation is touchingly comic. The lonely hero’s name Ryabovich, ‘pock-marked’, mutes our sympathy for his obsessive reaction; moreover we see him as one of a group of unmarried, unhappy and dull officers. Yet Ryabovich is the victim of the same forces as the hero of Verochka’s If the autumnal mists cool the ardour of Verochka’s admirer, Ryabovich is compelled by the smell of spring in the poplar trees, the lilacs and the roses, to a frenzy of erotic introversion (Chekhov’s acute sense of smell, which reminds one of the decadent sympathies of a Huysmans, shows itself in the importance of scents in determining the reactions of his characters.)

  ‘The Kiss’ met with a very positive response – partly because of Chekhov’s extraordinary ease in conveying a military milieu, something he was not to attempt again until the play Three Sisters. Mainly, perhaps, such stories evoked a positive reaction because they reminded the Russian reader of Maupassant. Chekhov’s work of the mid 1880s has much in common with Maupassant: extraordinary economy of language, an ability to penetrate the inner life of another social element (Maupassant too could write about officers), a fondness for highly sexed heroines, a love of rivers, seascapes and fishing. ‘The Kiss’ has the symmetry of a Maupassant story and, if it lacks the melodrama or violent action so characteristic of Maupassant, that lack was yet to be appreciated by Chekhov’s readers as a positive advance. We will find Maupassant often mentioned, even loudly praised, in Chekhov’s fiction; Maupassant’s fine tale, A Life, where a patrician estate falls into ruin and is sold to the heroine’s exploiters, was to provide much material for The Cherry Orchard. For a while, too, Chekhov shared Maupassant’s modest view of the modern writer as an honest artisan providing workmanlike prose for an era in which the great writers (whether Flaubert and Stendhal, or Turgenev and Dostoyevsky) had become canonized and new genius was still to be born.

  Yet Chekhov’s modesty could not have been entirely sincere. Unlike Maupassant, he intuits forces in the universe which are not mere chance, and he is not content to limit himself to portrayal and condemnation of human folly. Chekhov’s medical training had given him a deeper, more tragic philosophy than Maupassant’s; his passion for Russia’s harsh nature, too, has a less hedonistic side than Maupassant’s enjoyment of the Côte d’Azur.

  Nature, whether in the garden or the wild, dominating and directing the behaviour of the human beings who mistakenly believe they control nature, was what drew the envious attention of older writers to Chekhov’s early work. In 1887 Chekhov revisited nature. Taking a substantial advance from Suvorin, for the first time in several years, he crossed Russia from north to south to revisit not just the town where he had grown up but the steppe and forest landscapes he remembered as a child. (There were, it now transpires, other reasons for the journey: an infatuated woman desperately waiting for him in Taganrog.) If any external experience that transformed Chekhov can be identified, it is this revisiting of childhood landscapes: they had vanished. A Welshman called Hughes had established coal mining in what had been the Switzerland of the Don and built a coal-mining town, Khiuzovka: the forests were put to the axe to make pit-props, slag heaps despoiled the steppes. Lyricism about landscapes is central to Gogol’s and Turgenev’s work. Chekhov is different, for he is the first ‘green’ writer in the modern sense: he mourns the irreversible destruction of nature by man and implies that nature might be better off without man. Of the stories that resulted from this journey south, ‘Panpipes’ is perhaps the most poignant in lamenting the dried-up rivers, the disappearing birds and mammals, the deforestation.

  Something of a dream of Eden underlies this sense of an irreversible fall. In Chekhov’s only novel, a half-spoof, half-serious detective story of 1884 known as The Shooting Party, the most striking element is the evocation of an estate run wild in which exotic trees (ignoring the realities of the Russian climate) create a Douanier Rousseau jungle, while human beings degenerate into liars and murderers. The peasants of ‘Panpipes’, dismayed and upset by the disappearance of their environment, are to find their dismay echoed for a long time in Chekhov’s work. He gives their phrases to the forest-loving doctor in his plays The Wood Demon and Uncle Vanya. The chopping down of trees is to be a typical token of the villain: right until the victorious Natasha in Three Sisters, celebrating her victory in driving (by breeding) the sisters out of their house by announcing that she will destroy a maple tree and an avenue of firs. From now on in Chekhov’s work characters are assigned the roles of dendrophiles or dendrophobes: they are to be judged by their effect on the environment. Not to have planted a tree becomes nearly as great a sin as having chopped one down.

  For Chekhov’s critics, however, to give a moral and political lead was the prime duty of a conscientious writ
er. As Chekhov escaped from Suvorin’s zoo to become a self-sufficient writer, nobody reproached him directly for his lowly provincial origins, but it was clear that the public had expectations of an extended prose piece that would have to be structured along a plot and thus express a philosophy and take a stand: Chekhov’s claim to metropolitan nobility (at least of spirit) would be decided by the idealistic nature of the stand he adopted.

  The extended piece, for which stories such as ‘Panpipes’ appear to be studies, was ‘The Steppe’. It is not actually Chekhov’s longest work: The Shooting Party is twice as long but, as it appeared in Chekhov’s lifetime only in daily newspaper instalments, it passed unnoticed. ‘The Steppe’ was commissioned for a very different readership from Suvorin’s New Times – the prestigious liberal monthly the Northern Herald. The story was successfully nominated for a prestigious prize; it was literally a masterpiece in that it proved that Chekhov had finished his apprenticeship to other writers and to professional editors. But ‘The Steppe’, for all the wonderment at its evocation of southern landscapes, left critics puzzled.

  Where is the plot? A boy leaves his home town (presumably Taganrog), to be taken by strangers to begin his schooling in Kiev, on the other side of the Ukraine. A journey, centred on a carriage, is a conventional enough European and Russian device, from Laurence Sterne and Gogol to Chekhov. But the boy-protagonist is handed over to a convoy of drovers, the purpose of the priest who had taken him is forgotten and then turns out to be unimportant. The boy finally arrives in Kiev and we have no hint of what will happen, just as we have only odd hints of why it has happened in the first place. Delight at the story in Suvorin’s circle turned to frustration: a sequel was suggested – one in which little Yegorushka would become a suicidal adolescent, like Suvorin’s third son. Critics could not see in ‘The Steppe’ the thread holding together a succession of literary pearls – the Jewish innkeeper scene, fishing for crayfish, the thunderstorm – and felt betrayed.

  Perhaps it is in response to the strong prejudice in the Russian reader that literature should make him not just happier, but elevated and enlightened, that after ‘The Steppe’ we find the influence of Tolstoy as a writer becoming very marked in Chekhov’s work. Undoubtedly, the success of ‘The Steppe’ made Chekhov secure from poverty or pressure: in the sixteen years left to him he wrote far less than in the previous seven, and he wrote very little comic work, and almost nothing that he did not want to write. But there was a catch in this freedom: public expectations brought his prose closer to the structures and themes that Tolstoy, who was after all the only novelist of genius to have survived into the mid 1880s, had made a norm.

  Public recognition also led Chekhov into the theatre – the history of the Russian theatre is made by writers, with the exception only of Griboyedov and Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–86), the almost single-handed creator of the Russian tragic repertoire, who were not professional playwrights but poets or novelists who, after proving themselves masters, then ventured, like fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, into the theatre. Had Chekhov perished in 1890, it is unlikely that there would have been many performances of Ivanov let alone of The Wood Demon. If Ivanov has merit, it is in the way that Chekhov reworks many characters, for example the dispossessed Jew, the morally bankrupt intellectual landowner, from prose fiction into drama, and in the way the play parodies and thus attacks Suvorin’s successful but anti-semitic play Tatyana Repina. The Wood Demon of 1889 is all the more disastrous as a play for taking the material of ‘A Dreary Story’ and of ‘Panpipes’ and failing to make it work as theatre. Two ignoble factors explain Chekhov’s first venture into drama: firstly, a virulent love–hate of the theatre, its repertoire and denizens – he was drawn to actresses yet felt them to be ‘Machiavellis in skirts’; secondly, because through the theatre a Russian writer established an audience and readership in circles, aristocratic and provincial, that did not read the ‘thick monthlies’; thirdly, because of the highly efficient Russian Society of Playwrights and Composers, even a moderately successful play in Russia was a pension – authors collected up to ten per cent of the gross box office for every performance in any town. Over the next two decades, Ivanov thus earned Chekhov more than all the stories he was to write.

  Great Chekhovian theatre was only to arise out of more and more mischievous attempts to upset the conventions of the Russian stage – and out of the painful symbiosis that Chekhovian drama would establish with Stanislavsky’s and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s revolutionary Moscow Art Theatre. In this early period, Ivanov, The Wood Demon and the vaudevilles brought Chekhov only an income: literary esteem could come only as his prose took on more novel-like forms.

  Tolstoy weighs somewhat heavily on a number of stories of the mid eighties. Not that Tolstoy’s use of language affected Chekhov – his own copy of War and Peace is scored with red underlinings marking disapproval of Tolstoy’s repeated metaphors and sermonizing syntax: one character in Chekhov is to remark that Tolstoy writes with a plasterer’s trowel, not a painter’s brush. Sometimes, however, Chekhov makes an interesting experiment out of Tolstoyanism: he preaches neither ‘simplification’ nor ‘non-resistance to evil’, but explores the morass into which honest people stray when they try to put these precepts into practice. Tolstoyanism shows its mark in the technique of seeking the concrete reality behind an abstraction or a pretended virtue, to look for hypocrisy and lies in the words of the characters and to show the reader what is really happening by monitoring the protagonists’ unconscious body language and internal stream of consciousness. Tolstoyan influence can also be seen in Chekhov’s temporary adoption of a secure judgemental authorial stance.

  The best of these Tolstoyan works is probably ‘The Name-day Party’ – it is one of the half-dozen Chekhov works which Katherine Mansfield used as models to evolve her own prose (her The Garden Party is likewise a party spoiled by a catastrophe which the celebrants do everything to suppress). ‘The Name-day Party’ punishes hero and heroine, hosts who have hidden their own misapprehensions and neglected their moral duty in order to impress their guests, with a dramatically disastrous ending; it is full of allusions to Anna Karenina in the hero’s hay making, the worried pregnant heroine’s seeking solace from a peasant, in the parallel of a gathering thunderstorm and miscarriage.

  Undergoing Tolstoy’s influence was as much a process of inoculation as were Chekhov’s early years spent singing in church: the essential aesthetic element remained, the ideology evaporated. In a year or two the initial influence is assimilated and even to a certain extent rejected. ‘A Dreary Story’ has Tolstoyan allusions, Tolstoyan parallels, but is not Tolstoyan. Common sense, an aesthetic sensing of the limits between art and philosophy, a doctor’s confidence in science and the unknowability of absolute right and wrong have overcome the temptation to pontificate. Perhaps the key element in Chekhov’s medical training was a conviction that only those qualified in a profession were competent to practise it. Chekhov abjures moralizing because he is not a bishop and philosophizing because he is not a philosopher. Unlike Tolstoy, he is convinced that it is not for the writer to ‘show the paths to paradise’.

  In the course of 1888 and 1889 Chekhov’s mood was clouded by serious tragedy: the moral collapse of his brother Nikolay was followed by a physical one, and in summer 1889 Nikolay had to be nursed (mainly by Chekhov’s eldest brother Alexander) as he lay dying of tuberculosis, typhoid and drug addiction. Chekhov had seen two grandparents, several uncles and an aunt die of ‘the white plague’; he, too, had haemorrhages, fevers and coughs and could estimate with fair exactitude his own shortened lifespan. The death of Nikolay brings a despair and depression into his work. Helplessness in the face of death was to expel from Chekhov the last assumptions of certainty or immortality. If ‘The Steppe’, which celebrates a lost primeval natural world, is a masterpiece, then ‘A Dreary Story’, which mourns the loss of all meaning in life, transcends anything that was written by Chekhov’s contemporaries in Russia or Western
Europe. It is not just a response to the great classics, it is a riposte to them.

  One key element in the first-person narrative is that the hero, who has no surname, is a generally recognized hero: a professor of medicine. If there was one idol generally accepted by all ranks and ideological groups in Russia, it was the new generation of Russian medical scientists. Nikolay Stepanovich, who narrates his own last months, in many ways resembles the renowned surgeon, Professor Botkin, who was known to be dying of a liver cancer he himself refused to diagnose. The Tolstoy work which ‘A Dreary Story’ seeks to supersede is The Death of Ivan Ilich. Tolstoy’s hero is a prominent civil servant, and no reader is particularly surprised that he is to find, as he dies in agony, that his life is meaningless. Chekhov’s hero represents the summit of what is attainable to a human being. If Nikolay Stepanovich, the world authority on medicine, is in thrall to existential despair, what hope is there for anyone? Tolstoy consoles his dying man with a peasant lad to nurse him compassionately and a vision of light at the end of a black sack into which he is being sucked. There are no compassionate peasants or lights at the end of the tunnel in ‘A Dreary Story’.

  In technique, too, introspection and melancholy have moved Chekhov to a new plane: the interaction of thunderstorm and characters’ moods and behaviour in ‘A Dreary Story’ has none of the obvious Romantic pathetic fallacy – it is an ironic, moving interaction of natural forces and human mood, with nothing of the moral metaphorical import of ‘The Name-day Party’. For the first time, too, Chekhov has hit on a method of first-person narrative that reveals to the reader more than it appears to reveal to the narrator. The all-knowing Nikolay Stepanovich, noting every foible of the family and friends he is alienated from, is not aware that he is in love with his ward, the unhappy actress Katya, from and to whom he refuses all consolation. Here, too, for the first time in Chekhov, we have the hallmark of the mature work – the blurring of the boundary between protagonist and author. There is a distance between the hero–narrator, through whom we see all the rest of the action, and the silent, ubiquitous authorial presence, which has the empathy of an actor for his role. Nikolay Stepanovich expresses hundreds of opinions, usually contemptuous, on his postgraduate students, the city of Kharkov, Brahms, the theatre, fame, the family, Russian literature. Many are to recur in Chekhov’s later work, to acquire an authorial stamp, but for the first time in Chekhov’s work we can no longer mark the frontier between the author and the protagonist: yet another major conventional orienteering aid for the reader has been abolished, and we are deprived of our ability to pass judgement.