Chekhov

Chapter Five

Although Suvorin had freed Chekhov from the need to live as a facile popular hack, Chekhov’s emergence was not sudden. Life in Moscow was expensive and the demands of what he called his “abnormal family,” of which he had appointed himself the head, were heavy and Moscow was bad for his health. His two younger brothers were settling into decent jobs; his sister was dedicated to her teaching career, but Nikolay had given up painting and become a drunken vagrant. In a famous letter Chekhov became a kind of Dr. Lvov, lectured Nikolay item by item on the behavior one must follow if one was to be regarded as a “cultured man.” Alexander, the eldest of the brothers, who had introduced Chekhov to the comic magazines, had given up writing and had drifted into a minor job as a customs official, which he soon lost, and was living in careless squalor with a common-law wife in St. Petersburg. Early in March 1887 Chekhov found an hysterical telegram from Alexander saying there was a typhus epidemic and that he and his wife were dying of it, and begging Anton to save them. Anton himself had had a hemorrhage recently but he traveled third class in the train, coughing over the bad cigarettes he smoked, and arrived to find Alexander perfectly well but hysterical in a filthy flat. Only his wife was ill, and not with typhus. Anton treated her and she recovered. Alexander was in fact even deeper in drink than Nikolay and was chasing another woman. He had the nerve to demand that Anton take his children off his hands and look after them in Moscow.

In any crisis Chekhov’s instinct was to get away. He was in any case an instinctive nomad. He went to see Suvorin. He told him that he wanted to go to the south, to the scene of his childhood, and write a novel. Suvorin at once advanced the money. Chekhov was to pass through detestable Taganrog, but he was returning not to the memories of his father’s shop, where he had been abandoned as a schoolboy, but to his genial uncle Mitrofan and the nearby country of the Donets steppe, where he would be free and happy. We are alarmed to hear that he had the idea of making this place the background of a topical novel on the theme of the wave of child suicides that was sweeping across Russia. He wrote:

Russian life bashes the Russian till you have to scrape him off the floor, like a twenty-ton rock. In Western Europe people perish because life is too crowded and close; in Russia they perish because it is too spacious….

That spaciousness he was now seeking in the steppe. It strikes us that he would be making one of those returns to the source of his imagination in childhood which have so often revived the gifts of harassed writers. Chekhov split Suvorin’s money, leaving half to his sister for the family, and in April 1887 set off by train.

In letters to his sister he chatters on about his fellow passengers, people interested only in the price of flour, on the way to Serpukhov; they were livelier after Kursk. There was a jokey landowner from Kharkov; a lady who had just had an operation in Petersburg; an officer from the Ukraine, a general in uniform whose arguments on social questions were surprisingly “sound, short and liberal”; a police officer who was an old battered sinner who growled like a dog. At Slavyansk a railway inspector got on and told them how the Sevastopol railway company had stolen three hundred carriages from the Azov line and painted them in its own company’s color. (Chekhov used the incident in Cold Blood.) Then comes the wild scent of the steppe. He hears the birds singing and sees his “old friends” the ravens flying over the barrows. At one station, “at an upper window sits a young girl in a white blouse, beautiful and languid.” Chekhov puts on his pince-nez; she puts on hers; the two gaze at each other. That will be evoked in a remarkable prose poem, The Beauties. He is in “devilishly, revoltingly fine form”; there are more Ukrainians, oxen, ravens, white huts, telegraph wires, daughters of landowners, farmers, red dogs; trees flit by as he drinks his vodka and eats rissoles and pies. At eight in the evening he is at last in Taganrog. A shock: all the houses look ruinous and flattened. It’s a town “like Her-culaneum and Pompeii”—where he had never been—and when he finds his uncle, the family, even the rats in the storehouse, are fast asleep. He has to sleep on a short sofa and his long legs hang down on the floor. At five in the morning he wakes up. The family are still asleep.

The house pretends to luxury but there are no cuspidors and there is no water closet. He hates Taganrog; still, the Grand Street smells of Europe. The upper-class people, all Greek and Polish, walk on one side of the street, the Russian poor on the other. Now he is suffering from diarrhea (caused by his aunt’s rich cooking) and inflammation of his leg— “my infirmities are counless.” He is drinking more than he should. The young ladies of the town are not bad-looking, but they move abruptly and behave frivolously with him. In general, he says, they fall in love and elope with actors, guffaw and whistle for their dogs. Taganrog is still plagued by dogs. He goes on to Morskaya Stantsiya and he eats caviar for breakfast at seventy kopecks a pound, and marvelous butter. But sleeping? ‘The devil only knows what I haven’t spent the night on: on beds with bugs, on sofas, settees, boxes.” Then he is off by train to a Cossack wedding; everyone drinks, including himself Millions of girls rush about in a crowd like sheep. “One … kept striking me … with her fan and saying ‘Oh you naughty man!’ while at the same time her face wore an expression of fear.” Chekhov, the Moscow worldling, teaches her to say to her swains, “How naive you are!”

Another train, and from the siding he sees the boundless steppe and its ancient grave mounds by moonlight. At Ra-gozina Balka he stays with a large wild Cossack family—the one his pupil took him to stay with in his teens. The tedious father is still running his farm on “scientific” principles, i.e., by a new book he has picked up. This has led to a Cossack war on all wild life.

They kill sparrows, swallows, … magpies, ravens so that they should not eat the bees; they kill the bees so that they should not damage the blossoms of the fruit trees, and fell trees so that they should not impoverish the soil…. [At night] my hosts fire rifles at some animal that is damaging the economy.

And once more there is no water closet. You go out to the hills. This is more material for The Pecheneg—his story about the greatest rural, demented, speculative bore in Russia.

Chekhov has gone lame. More trains. In agony he reaches the monastery at Svyatyye Gory. Here the dogs bark, the frogs croak, the nightingales sing, there are pilgrims. He meets a converted Jew. Back again to Taganrog, and he writes to a friend who is an architect: “If I were as gifted an architect as you I would raze it.” The Taganrog that seriously remained in his mind was “stark” Asia,

such an Asia that I cannot believe my eyes. The sixty thousand inhabitants busy themselves with eating, drinking, procreating, but no newspapers and no books…. the fruits of the earth abound, but everyone is apathetic. Yet they are musical, they have fantasy and wit; they are high-strung and sensitive, but all is wasted.

What about the masterpiece? He goes back to Moscow to write it. The theme of the child suicides is scrapped: will the book simply be a work of travel, an “encyclopaedia of the Steppe”? Some words of Camus come to one’s mind: “one of our contemporaries is cured of his torment by contemplating a landscape.” Chekhov is recovering his childhood imagination.

The Steppe is the account of a journey seen through the eyes of a very young boy, a memory conjured out of himself. If the long book seems to be no more than a series of interlocking incidents, it is really a sustained prose poem and the longest “story” Chekhov ever wrote. Above all, it evokes the mysterious, fated feeling that Russians felt and still feel about the vast empty distances of central Russia and their outlying parts on the edge of the Ukraine in the south, just as the tableland, or steppe, of Castile, with its isolated flat-topped hills and the wide empty distances, haunts the Spaniards. Spain and Russia: they echo each other. From the Russian steppe something has passed permanently into the Russian mind and Russian literature: the sensation of endless time, mysterious in its primitive beginnings. It was natural for Russian writers of Chekhov’s time to think of the steppe as the country of Don Quixote, and Chekhov had been deep in Cervantes from his boyhood. There was also for him the romantic Russian counterpart in Gogol’s story of Taras Bulba. Literature grows out of literature as well as out of life: the difference between The Steppe and Gogol’s magnificent book is that Gogol was glorifying Cossack history, whereas Chekhov stuck to a young boy’s response to the sights and tales of the road.

So we see the boy, Yegorushka, who is the hero, taken on a long journey from Taganrog to boarding school in far-off Kiev. He is whimpering in misery, in a springless carriage, in the company of his uncle Kuzmichov, a stern wool merchant, and the pious Father Christopher, who tries to teach the boy history and religion. The boy sits on the box and clings to the arm of the coachman, who does not stop whipping up his pair of bay horses. They drive out of Taganrog past the brickfields and the town prison, where, because it is Easter, the boy had been to give Easter eggs to the convicts. A prisoner had given him “a pewter buckle of his own making.” A small comfort. The uncle is mostly silent, except when he is arguing with the delightful chattering priest—Chekhov’s Sancho Panza—who is on to an illegal deal in wool himself for dubious “family reasons,” but really for the amusement of gossiping with any passing strangers. The sun rises. The boy fixes his eyes on a distant windmill, which seems to wave to him. He is puzzled because, at the turns of the road, the windmill appears on the left instead of the right. The day is hot and sullen.

The low hills were still plunged in the lilac distance, and no end could be seen to them…. But at last, when the sun was beginning to sink into the west, the steppe, the hills and the air could bear the oppression no longer, and, driven out of all patience, exhausted, tried to fling off the yoke. A fleecy ashen-grey cloud unexpectedly appeared behind the hills. It exchanged glances with the steppe, as though to say, “Here I am,” and frowned. Suddenly something burst in the stagnant air; there was a violent squall of wind which whirled round and round, roaring and whistling over the steppe. At once a murmur rose from the grass and last year’s dry herbage, the dust curled in spiral eddies over the road, raced over the steppe, and carrying with it straws, dragonflies and feathers, rose up in a whirling track column towards the sky and darkened the sun. Prickly uprooted plants ran stumbling and leaping in all directions over the steppe, and one of them got caught in the whirlwind, turned round and round like a bird, flew towards the sky, and turning into a little black speck, vanished from sight.

Then a corncrake is up, flying with the wind, not against it, not like the rooks “grown old in the steppe.” Then “the cloud vanished, the sun-baked hills frowned and the air grew calm, and only somewhere the troubled lapwings wailed and lamented their destiny.”

It irks us at first to see Chekhov personifying and moralizing nature in the romantic nineteenth-century way, but we know that a boy might very well do this. When night falls, “as though because the grass cannot see in the dark that it has grown old, a gay youthful twitter rises from it.” Chekhov, the onetime chorister, hears the “whistling, scratching, the basses, tenors and sopranos of the steppe, all mingling in an incessant monotonous roar.”

There is a haze; a solitary bush or boulder will look like a man. Such immobile waiting figures stand on the hills, hide behind the ancient barrows, peep out of the grass. The moon rises and the night grows pale and languid. The effect is eerie. The legends of the steppe come to the boy’s mind, folktales told by some old nurse.

Up to now Chekhov is mostly evoking the steppe as the boy simply sees it. Presently, as in his short stories, Chekhov enters fully into the feelings of the boy he once was. The party has had a roadside meal, and while his elders sleep it off, the boy wanders about, hears someone singing one of those long plaintive, passionate songs, meaningless to a child. First of all, he thinks no one is there and that the grass is singing; then he suddenly sees that a woman is singing and this bores him, but now there is a startling sight. Another boy! He is standing nearby. The two boys stare at each other awkwardly, unbelieving, in a long silence, like two animals staring at their own kind. Suddenly Yegorushka calls, ‘What’s your name?”

The stranger’s cheeks puffed out more than ever; he pressed his back against the rock, opened his eyes wide, moved his lips and answered in a husky bass: “Tit!”

The boys said not another word to each other; after a brief silence, still keeping his eyes fixed on Yegorushka, the mysterious Tit kicked up one leg, felt with his heel for a niche and clambered up the rock; from that point he ascended to the next rock, staggering backwards and looking intently at Yegorushka as though afraid he might hit him from behind, and so made his way upwards till he disappeared altogether behind the crest of the hill.

The melancholy song has died away. Time drags on.

[To Yegorushka] it seemed as though a hundred years had passed since the morning…. God’s world [had] come to a standstill…. with smarting eyes [he] looked before him; the lilac distance, which till then had been motionless, began heaving, and with the sky floated away into the distance. … It drew after it the brown grass, the sedge, and with extraordinary swiftness Yegorushka floated after the flying distance. Some force noiselessly drew him onwards, and … the wearisome song flew after in pursuit.

He comes out of his dream when Deniska, the driver, incurably boyish himself, distracts him by teaching him how to hop on one leg.

The narrative has scores of these little incidents. The most striking things are the encounters with people on the road. The priest is eager for gossip. The party arrive at a dirty inn run by an hysterically excited Jew and Solomon, his satanic and resentful brother. We remember that once when Chekhov was a boy he was rushed to such an inn when, after a swim, he collapsed with acute peritonitis, and a doctor saved his life. The young brother, Solomon, resents the older one because he had been treated as a servant in the past. Solomon’s only moments of liberation have come to him when he had run off to do funny Jewish turns at local fairs, but at present he is all bitterness:

“What am I doing? … The same as everyone else. … I am my brother’s servant; my brother’s the servant of the visitors; the visitors are Varlamov’s servants; and if I had ten millions, Varlamov would be my servant. … because there isn’t a gentleman … who isn’t ready to lick the hand of a scabby Jew for the sake of making a kopeck…. Everybody looks at me as though I were a dog, but if I had money Varlamov would play the fool before me just as my brother Moysey does before you.”

And he goes on to say: “I throw my money into the stove! … I don’t want money, or land, or sheep.”

Moysey says his brother is mad, never sleeps at night and is always thinking and thinking and when you ask him what he is thinking he is angry and laughs. They are all having tea, and Yegorushka is astounded to see Solomon counting his money, a huge pile of ruble notes. And then, as if in a dream, a beautiful and elegant woman comes in, a Polish countess with a huge estate, asking for the mysterious, powerful Varlamov; because she loves haggling in her deals with him, she laughs, doesn’t mind if she is swindled. She is a legend for miles around. Everyone has fantastic stories of her wealth. Yegorushka will never forget that she kissed him, and he is left with the idea that the unseen Varlamov must be an all-powerful wonder. It is a blow to him later on when he at last sees the real Varlamov: he is a nondescript moneyed merchant who swanks about, giving orders to everyone.

The journey crawls on and suddenly the boy has a shock. They catch up with a long procession of wagons carrying wool, and the stern uncle calmly hands the scared boy over to a carter. The uncle has heard that the powerful Varlamov, with whom he and the priest are going to do a deal, has left the high road for a distant village. They will pick the boy up in a day or two. Now the boy is scared and alone. Still, the carters are a jolly lot. They stop to swim naked in a pool; they catch fish and tell frightening stories of robberies and murders.

And the boy finds for the first time in his life a real enemy—one of Chekhov’s sinister and best-drawn characters, a bully named Dymov. He has heard the boy is being taken to “a gentleman’s school” and treats him with provoking contempt. Dymov is the handsome son of well-to-do peasants but has run wild in his youth, spent his money and been forced to start at the bottom and become a laborer. He has dangerous fits of resentment and takes his resentment out on the boy. “You can’t eat with your cap on, and you a gentleman, too!” he sneers. With no uncle or priest to protect him the boy faces a man he fears. He hates Dymov. In one of his sadistic fits Dymov sees a snake, jumps off his wagon and beats it to death, saying it is a viper. It is not; it is a harmless grass snake. To the carters and the boy this act is a terrible sin. Later on in his life Chekhov told the novelist Bunin that Dymov was the sort of déclassé who would either become a revolutionary or go to pieces— “but there will be no revolution in Russia.”

Soon the sky puts on one of its grand scenes: an appalling thunderstorm—and evokes one of Chekhov’s most famous descriptive images. There is a flash of lightning— “someone seemed to strike a match in the sky”—exactly the image a boy would use. The whole steppe is lit up, a hulking black cloud comes over, the wind tears the steppe to pieces, the thunder rolls across the sky. There is a downpour and the boy, alone in his wagon, covers himself with a straw mat and at one point sees a flash “so broad that [he] suddenly saw through a slit in the mat the whole highroad to the very horizon, all the waggoners and even Kiryukha’s waistcoat.”

The end of the story is flat, as life is for us when waking up from a long dream. Reality returns. His elders abruptly hand him over, at a cottage in a small town, to a woman who will take him to the school he dreads. The stern uncle and the jolly priest go off.

Some critics thought The Steppe was no more than a string of disconnected incidents; but the discerning saw it as a superb and sustained prose poem. If his reputation had been uncertain, now Chekhov is seen to be a master. The story at once appeared in one of the “thick journals”; he was awarded the Pushkin prize.

Chekhov also wrote other, shorter stories on comparable themes. One of these is Happiness (sometimes called Fortune). We are in the longer, secretive minds of the peasants and the shepherds. We can point to the exact incident in The Steppe from which Happiness was conjured. We see a shepherd sitting with others in the evening while the sheep are asleep and the dogs are quiet. The only sound is the talking of the men. Another figure (whom we have also briefly seen before) is a superior man, in fact the landowner’s overseer, who stands listening with condescension to the folkish fancies of the shepherds, saying little beyond “Yes, it could happen.” They are gossiping about a man called Yefim who was possessed of the Devil: it is claimed he had “whistling melons” in his “market garden” and a pike has been heard to laugh when it was caught by him; a shepherd says he has seem Yefim diguised as a “talking bullock.” It is agreed that the Devil can make a rock whistle, for this was heard on the Day of Freedom when the serfs were liberated. And now the talkers are cunning enough to reveal other preoccupations with hearsay. Pretending to be stupid, they are testing the overseer. Is it true that there is treasure hidden in the steppe? Yefim had said so. He also said he had discovered it. They tell the dramatic story of the find and of how this clever man died without revealing where the treasure was hidden. We see the dream of Fortune—nevertheless, they ask, Is this happiness?—brought into the open. There is profit for everyone, but not for the peasants—is that not so?

The overseer gets on his horse and evades the question. He says, “Your elbow is near, but you can’t bite it,” and gallops off, leaving something in their minds never spoken of in the boundless steppe:

The ancient barrows … had a sullen and death-like look; there was a feeling of endless time and utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence.

They know tales of all the treasure buried by generation after generation of robbers and Cossack invaders: Is that the real treasure?

The night goes on, the dawn begins. There is a sudden menacing sound racing over the steppe: “Tah! Tah! Tah! Tah!”—the sound of a bucket falling down a mine shaft. (We shall hear it years later in The Cherry Orchard, pronouncing the new industrial order that will ruin that feckless family.) The mines—they are the buried treasure! The industrial revolution is already destroying the grace and fertility of Nature. And who has the treasure? The gentry, the foreign immigrant miners, the government, all have it; not the shepherds.

Happiness has the note of fable, and its merit lies in the exact rendering of the shepherds’ sly, wondering, legend-consuming talk as they interpret a new aspect of human fate. The ancient burial mounds of the steppe are monuments to races of men who have died, as all men and dispensations the. The drollery of the shepherds is a mask for longheaded thoughts. And one thing is historically important: Chekhov knows that shepherds are not peasants. As shepherds they are the last survivors of a nomadic culture and have an inherited earlier precivilized apprehension of human fate.