Natasha's Dance

5

In April 1890 Chekhov left from Moscow on a three-month trek to Sakhalin, a barren devil's island in the Okhotsk sea, 800 kilometres north of Japan, where the Tsarist government sentenced some of its

26. Vladimir Stasov: title page of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera score Sadko

(1897). The title features an authentic fourteenth-century Novgorodian

capital 'D' formed around a skomorokh or minstrel playing the gusli

most dangerous criminals to penal servitude. Few of Chekhov's friends could understand why the newly famous writer should abandon everything for such a long and miserable trip, especially in view of his own poor health. Chekhov himself told Suvorin that he was 'departing

totally convinced that my journey will yield a valuable contribution neither to literature nor to science'.⁹⁷ But self-deprecation was natural to him. Whether he was driven by the end of a romance,* the need to find new inspiration for his work, the recent death of his brother Nikolai from tuberculosis, or simply the desire to escape from the oppressive atmosphere of his own illness, it would appear that Chekhov felt a desperate need to get away and achieve something 'serious' before he died.

One of Chekhov's heroes was the traveller and writer Nikolai Przhevalsky, who had opened up the world of Central Asia and Tibet to the Russian reading public when Chekhov was a boy. On Przhevalsky's death, Chekhov wrote a eulogy which tells us a great deal about his state of mind. 'One Przhevalsky', Chekhov wrote,

is worth dozens of scholarly institutions and hundreds of fine books… In our sick times, when European societies are seized by indolence, heroes are as necessary as the sun. Their personalities are living proof that besides people who out of boredom write trifling tales, unneeded plans and dissertations, there are people with a clear faith and objective who perform great feats.⁹⁸

Chekhov wanted to become a Przhevalsky - to carry out some obvious achievement for humanity and write something of greater consequence than the 'trifling tales' he had penned so far. He read a huge amount in preparation for the trip, researching everything from the geology to the penal settlement of the remote island, to the point where he complained that he was being driven to insanity: Mania Sachalinosa.⁹⁹

Chekhov's original aim, as far as one can tell from his correspondence, was to 'repay a little of my debt to the science of medicine' by focusing attention on the treatment of the prisoners in Sakhalin. 'I regret that I am not a sentimentalist', he wrote to Suvorin,

otherwise I would say that we should go on pilgrimages to places like Sakhalin, as the Turks go to Mecca. From the books I have read, it is clear that we have allowed millions of people to rot in prisons, to rot for no purpose, without

* With Lidya Avilova (a married woman).

any care, and in a barbarous way… All of us are guilty, but none of this has anything to do with us, it is just not interesting.¹⁰⁰

During the three months he spent on Sakhalin, Chekhov interviewed several thousand prisoners, working up to eighteen hours every day and recording all the details on a database of cards which he had printed up for his research. Officials were amazed by the ease with which he gained the convicts' trust, a capacity he had perhaps developed from his work as a doctor. It gave to his findings, which he wrote up in a simple factual style in The Island of Sakhalin (1893-4), the unmistakable authority of truth. In one of the final chapters of that work Chekhov gave an unforgettable description of the brutal beatings which were meted out on an almost casual basis to male and female prisoners alike.

The executioner stands to one side and strikes in such a way that the lash falls across the body. After every five strokes he goes to the other side and the prisoner is permitted a half-minute rest. [The prisoner] Prokhorov's hair is matted to his forehead, his neck is swollen. After the first five or ten strokes his body, covered by scars from previous beatings, turns blue and purple, and his skin bursts at each stroke.

Through the shrieks and cries there can be heard the words, 'Your worship! Your worship! Mercy, your worship!'

And later, after twenty or thirty strokes, he complains like a drunken man or like someone in delirium:

'Poor me, poor me, you are murdering me… Why are you punishing me?'

Then follows a peculiar stretching of the neck, the noise of vomiting. A whole eternity seems to have passed since the beginning of the punishment. The warden cries, 'Forty-two! Forty-three!' It is a long way to ninety.¹⁰¹

The passage made such an impression on the Russian public that it helped to bring about the eventual abolition of corporal punishment - first for women (in 1897) and then for men (in 1904). The campaign was led by members of the medical profession, with Chekhov in a vocal role.¹⁰²

A stirring indictment of the tsarist penal system, Sakhalin is also a masterpiece of travel writing whose extraordinary feel for the landscape and the wildlife of the Siberian steppe remains unsurpassed.

Let it be said without offence to the jealous admirers of the Volga that I have never in my life seen a more magnificent river than the Yenisey. A beautifully dressed, modest, melancholy beauty the Volga may be, but, at the other extreme, the Yenisei is a mighty, raging Hercules, who does not know what to do with his power and youth. On the Volga a man starts out with spirit, but finishes up with a groan which is called a song; his radiant golden hopes are replaced by an infirmity which it is the done thing to term 'Russian pessimism', whereas on the Yenisei life commences with a groan and finishes with the kind of high spirits which we cannot even dream about. Shortly after the Yenisei the celebrated taiga commences. At first one is really a little disappointed. Along both sides of the road stretch the usual forests of pine, larch, spruce and birch. There are no trees of five arm-girths, no crests, at the sight of which one's head spins; the trees are not a whit larger than those that grow in the Moscow Sokol-niki. I had been told that the taiga was soundless, and that its vegetation had no scent. This is what I had been expecting, but, the entire time I travelled through the taiga, birds were pouring out songs and insects were buzzing; pine-needles warmed by the sun saturated the air with the thick fragrance of resin, the glades and edges of the forest were covered with delicate pale-blue, pink and yellow flowers, which caress not merely the sense of sight. The power and enchantment of the taiga lie not in titanic trees or the silence of the graveyard, but in the fact that only birds of passage know where it ends.¹⁰³

As he sailed down the Amur passing Russian villages that had been settled only forty years before, he had the impression that he was 'no longer in Russia, but somewhere in Patagonia, or Texas; without even mentioning the distinctive, un-Russian scenery, it seemed to me the entire time that the tenor of our Russian life is completely alien to the native of Amur, that Pushkin and Gogol are not understood here and therefore not necessary, that our history is boring, and that we who arrive from European Russia seem like foreigners'.¹⁰⁴ The Russian prisoners were overwhelmed by this same sense of estrangement, so much so that, according to Chekhov, the convicts who attempted to escape the island were motivated chiefly by the physical yearning to see their native land:

First and foremost an exile is spurred to leave Sakhalin by his passionate love for his home district. If you listen to the convicts - what happiness it is, what

joy, to live in one's own place in one's own country! They talk about Sakhalin, the land here, the people, the trees and the climate, with scornful laughter, with exasperation and loathing, while in European Russia everything is wonderful and enchanting; the most daring thinking cannot acknowledge that in European Russia there might be unhappy people, since to live somewhere in the Tula or Kursk region, to see log cabins every day, and to breathe Russian air already by itself constitutes the supreme happiness. God knows, a person might suffer poverty, sickness, blindness, dumbness and disgrace from the people around, just as long as God permits him to die at home.¹⁰⁵

The visual engagement with the landscape of Sakhalin is so intense that it seems at times as if Chekhov's words are surrogates for paint:

If a landscape painter should happen to come to Sakhalin, then I recommend the Arkovo Valley to his notice. This spot, besides the beauty of its location, is extremely rich in hues and tints, so that it is difficult to get by without the hackneyed simile of a multicoloured carpet or a kaleidoscope. Here there is dense, sappy verdure with giant burdocks glittering from the rain that has only just fallen; beside it, in an area no larger than a few square feet or so, there is the greenery of rye, then a scrap of land with barley, and then burdocks again, with a space behind it covered with oats, after that beds of potatoes, two immature sunflowers with drooping heads, then, forming a little wedge, a deep-green patch of hemp; here and there plants of the umbelliferous family similar to candelabras proudly hold up their heads, and this whole diversity of colour is strewn with pink, bright-red and crimson specks of poppies. On the road you meet peasant women who have covered themselves against the rain with big burdock leaves, like headscarves, and because of this look like green beetles. And the sides of the mountains - well, maybe they are not the mountains of the Caucasus, but they are mountains all the same.¹⁰⁶

There was in fact a landscape painter who had meant to go with Chekhov on the trip to Sakhalin. Isaak Levitan was a close friend of the writer. Exact contemporaries, they had known each other since their teenage years, when Levitan met Chekhov's brother at art school. Born into a poor Jewish family in Lithuania, Levitan was orphaned by the time he met the Chekhovs, who adopted him as a brother and a friend. Levitan and Chekhov shared the same passions - hunting,

fishing, womanizing, brothels - and perhaps it was because he knew his friend so well that, when the artist fell in love with Chekhov's sister, the writer told Maria not to marry him.¹⁰⁷ The two men were such close friends, they shared so much in common in artistic temperament, that their lives and art were intertwined in many different ways. Levitan appears in various forms in Chekhov's works - perhaps most famously (and almost at the cost of their friendship) in 'The Grasshopper' as the lecherous artist Ryabovsky who has an affair with a married woman to whom he teaches art. Many of the scenes in The Seagull - the suicide attempt by the playwright Treplyov, the killing of the bird - were taken directly from Levitan's own life.¹⁰⁸

Levitan's approach to landscape painting was very similar to Chekhov's own depictions of nature. Both men shared a passion for the humble, muddy countryside of Moscow's provinces, whose melancholic poetry was captured perfectly in both their works. Each admired deeply the other's work. Many of Levitan's paintings are the prototypes for Chekhov's best descriptions of the countryside, while Levitan thought this passage from the story 'Fortune' (1887) was 'the height of perfection' in landscape art:¹⁰⁹

A large flock of sheep was spending the night by the wide steppe road that is called the main highway. Two shepherds were watching over them. One was an old man of about eighty, who was toothless, with a face which shook, and who was lying on his stomach by the edge of the road, with his elbows resting on dusty plants. The other was a young lad with thick black brows and no moustache, dressed in the sort of cloth from which they make cheap bags, and lying on his back with his hands behind his head looking up at the sky, where stars were twinkling and the Milky Way stretched out right over his face… The sheep slept. Silhouettes of the sheep which were awake could be seen here and there against the grey background of the dawn, which was already beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky; they were standing up and had their heads lowered, thinking about something… In the sleepy, still air there was a monotonous humming sound which you cannot get away from on a summer night on the steppe. Crickets chirped without stopping, quails sang and young nightingales whistled lazily about a mile away from the flock in a gully where a stream ran and where willows grew… It was already getting light. The Milky Way was pair and inching away little by little like

snow, losing its definition. The sky became cloudy and dull, so that you could not determine whether it was clear or completely filled with clouds, and it was only by the clear and glossy strip towards the east and the occasional star here and there that you could work out what was going on… And when the sun began to scorch the earth, promising a long, unvanquished sultriness, everything that had moved during the night and emitted sounds now sank into somnolence.¹¹⁰

What Chekhov most admired in Levitan's art (and Levitan in Chekhov's) was its spiritual response to the natural world. Levitan's landscapes evoke reflective moods and emotions, even when their subjects are the most mundane. In this respect he was very much the pupil of his teacher Savrasov, whose famous painting The Rooks Have Returned (1871) was a perfect illustration of the poetry contained in the most ordinary provincial scene. Chekhov found in Levitan the sort of images he wanted to create in his reader's mind. In 'Three Years' (1895) he gives a description of Levitan's painting A Quiet Dwelling (1891) which captures perfectly the effect which Chekhov himself wanted to achieve:

In Easter week the Laptevs went to the School of Art to see a picture exhibition… Julia stopped by a small landscape and idly looked at it. The foreground was a stream crossed by a wooden bridge with a path merging into dark grass on the far side. On the right was part of a wood with a bonfire near it - there must be grazing horses and watchmen hereabouts. Far away the sunset's last fires smouldered. Julia imagined going over the bridge, and then further and further down the path. It was quiet there, sleepy landrails cried. A light winked far away. Suddenly she vaguely felt that she had often seen them long ago -those clouds spanning the red of the sky, that wood, those fields. She felt lonely, she wanted to walk on, on, on down the path. There, at the sunset's end, lay reflected an eternal, unearthly something.¹¹¹

Chekhov knew the works of Monet and Cezanne; none the less, he considered Levitan the greatest landscape painter of his day.¹¹² Throughout his life he bitterly regretted that he had not bought his favourite Levitan painting, The Village (1888). As he told a journalist in 1904, it was just a 'village that was dull and miserable, God-forsaken and lifeless, but the picture imparts such an inexpressible charm that

you can't take your eyes off it; you just want to keep looking and looking at it. No one has managed to achieve the simplicity and purity of conception which Levitan achieved at the end of his life and I do not know if anyone else will ever achieve anything like it.'¹¹³

In 1886 Levitan made the first of several trips to the Volga steppe. These marked the start of a new epic style in his landscape painting, completely different from the intimate and lyrical approach to nature in his earlier landscapes of the Moscow provinces. The first of these epic canvases was Evenings on the Volga (1888), where the steppe-land's broad expanse is suggested indirectly by the dominating presence of the sky. Chekhov, too, was inspired by a visit to the Volga steppe-lands at this time. His approach to landscape in 'The Steppe' (1887), the first story to bring him literary fame, was very similar to Levitan's:

A wide boundless plain encircled by a chain of low hills lay stretched before the travellers' eyes. Huddling together and peeping out from behind one another, these hills melted together into rising ground, which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the violet distance; one drives on and on and cannot discern where it begins or where it ends…¹¹⁴

Enthused by the steppe, the two men thought of travelling together to Siberia, and Chekhov included his friend in his plans for the trip to Sakhalin. Levitan was in the entourage of friends and family who accompanied the writer on the first leg of his trip. But he did not go with Chekhov to Siberia, deciding in the end that he could not leave his lover and her husband for that long. Chekhov was annoyed at Levitan (it was perhaps the cause of his cruel satire in 'The Grasshopper' which broke off their relations for three years). In several letters from Siberia Chekhov told his sister that the artist was a fool to miss out on the scenery of the Yenisei, on the unknown forests and the mountains of Baikal: 'What ravines! What cliffs!'¹¹⁵

Like Chekhov, Levitan was drawn towards Siberia's penal history. In his Vladimirka (1892) (plate 23) he combined landscape art with a social history of the steppe. It was Levitan's attempt to achieve in painting what Chekhov had achieved in Sakhalin. The idea of the painting had come to levitan on a hunting trip with his lover, the young artist Sofya Kuvshinnikova (the one described by Chekhov in

'The Grasshopper'). The painter had chanced upon the famous highway near Boldino in Vladimir province. Levitan had just been staying with Chekhov and Chekhov had told him of his trip to Sakhalin, so perhaps this influenced the way he saw the road.¹¹⁶ 'The scene was pregnant with a wondrous silence', recalled Kuvshinnikova.

The long white line of the road faded as it disappeared among the forests on the blue horizon. In the distance one could just make out the figures of two pilgrims… Everything was calm and beautiful. All of a sudden, Levitan remembered what sort of road this was. 'Stop,' he said. 'This is the Vladimirka, the one on which so many people died on their long walk to Siberia.' In the silence of this beautiful landscape we were suddenly overwhelmed by an intense feeling of sadness.¹¹⁷

Looking at this scene, as Levitan portrayed it, one cannot fail to feel the desolation - it is haunted by the suffering of those distant prisoners, by people like Volkonsky, who for three hot summer months had dragged his heavy chains along the Vladimirka to Siberia.

Chekhov's 'Steppe' is also dominated by this atmosphere of suffering. Its boundless space seems inescapable - a prison in itself. The landscape in the story is stifling and oppressive, without sound or movement to disrupt the tedium. Time seems to come to a standstill, the scenery never changes, as four men cross the steppe in a 'shabby covered chaise'. Everything is subdued by a feeling of stagnation and desolation. Even the singing of a woman in the distance sounds so sad that it 'made the air more suffocating and stagnant'.¹¹⁸

Chekhov's ambiguity toward the steppe - seeing both the beauty and the bleak monotony of its vast space - was shared by many artists and writers. There were many, on the one hand, who took pride and inspiration from the grandeur of the steppe. In the epic history paintings of Vasnetsov and Vrubel, for example, the heroic stature of the legendary figures of the Russian past is thrown into relief by the monumental grandeur of the steppe. In Vasnetsov's painting After Igor's Battle with the Polovtsians (1880), the notion of the epic is carried entirely by the vastness of the steppe, for what commands the eye is the lowered line of the horizon. Similarly, in his Bogatyrs (1898), it is the landscape which is the real subject of the painting, rather than

the legendary warriors from which it takes its name. This is emphasized by the central bogatyr, who puts his hand against his brow to gaze farther into the distance. Vrubel's panneau of the legendary ploughman Mikula Selianovicb (1896) is similar in this respect - the strangely inert peasant figure is raised to epic status by his relationship with the landscape. For these artists the national character had been shaped by the open plain: the Russians were as 'broad and unrestrained' in nature as the boundless steppe. This was the view which Gogol took in his 'Thoughts on Geography', published in his collection Arabesques in 1835. He also expounded it in his story 'Taras Bulba', where the vast size of the steppe is used as a projection of the Cossacks' open nature and expansiveness. Many artists thought that the boundless plains were a spur to contemplation and religious hope - its infinite horizon forcing people to look upwards to the sky.¹¹⁹ Chekhov, too, was inclined to fantasize that 'giants with immense strides such as Ilia Muromets' were still alive and that, if they were, 'how perfectly in keeping with the steppe… they would have been!'¹²⁰

On the other hand, the sheer monotony of the never-ending steppe drove many Russian poets to despair. Mandelstam called it the 'watermelon emptiness of Russia' and Musorgsky, 'the All-Russian bog'.¹²¹ At such moments of despair these artists were inclined to view the steppe as a limitation on imagination and creativity. Gorky thought that the boundless plain had

the poisonous peculiarity of emptying a man, of sucking dry his desires. The peasant has only to go out past the bounds of the village and look at the emptiness around him to feel in a short time that this emptiness is creeping into his very soul. Nowhere around can one see the results of creative labour. The estates of the landowners? But they are few and inhabited by enemies. The towns? But they are far away and not much more cultured. Round about lie endless plains and in the centre of them, insignificant, tiny man abandoned on this dull earth for penal labour. And man is filled with the feeling of indifference killing his ability to think, to remember his past, to work out his ideas from experience.¹²²

but it was not just the peasant who became more dull from living on the steppe. The gentry did as well. The loneliness of living in a

country house, miles away from any neighbours in that social class, the lack of stimulation, the interminable hours without anything to do but stare out of the windows at the endless plain: is it any wonder that the gentry became fat and sluggish on the steppe? Saltykov-Shchedrin gives a wonderful description of this mental slumber in The Golovlyov Family (1880):

[Arina] spent most of the day dozing. She would sit in her armchair by the table where her grubby playing-cards were laid out and doze. Then she would wake with a start, look through the window and vacantly stare at the seemingly boundless fields, stretching away into the remote distance… All around lay fields, fields without end, with no trees on the horizon. However, since Arina had lived almost solely in the country since childhood, this miserable landscape did not strike her as in the least depressing; on the contrary, it even evoked some kind of response in her heart, stirring sparks of feeling still smouldering there. The better part of her being had lived in those bare endless fields and instinctively her eyes sought them out at every opportunity. She would gaze at the fields receding into the distance, at rain-soaked villages resembling black specks on the horizon, at white churches in village graveyards, at multi-coloured patches of light cast on the plain by clouds wandering in the rays of the sun, at a peasant she had never seen before, who was in fact walking between the furrows but who seemed quite still to her. As she gazed she would think of nothing - rather, her thoughts were so confused they could not dwell on anything for very long. She merely gazed and gazed, until a senile drowsiness began to hum in her ears again, veiling the fields, churches, villages and that distant, trudging peasant in mist.¹²³

The Russians have a word for this inertia - Oblomovshchina - from the idle nobleman in Goncharov's Oblomov who spends the whole day dreaming and lying on the couch.* Thanks to the literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov, who first coined the term soon after the book's publication in 1859, Oblomovsh china came to be regarded as a national disease. Its symbol was Oblomov's dressing gown (khalat).

* Though Gogol, too, had referred to such Russian 'lie-a-beds' in the second volume of Dead Souls (N. Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, 1961),

p. 265).

Dobroliubov even claimed that the 'most heartfelt striving of all our Oblomovs is their striving for repose in a dressing gown'.¹²⁴ Goncharov made a careful point of emphasizing the Asian origin of his hero's dressing gown. It was 'a real oriental dressing-gown, without the slightest hint of Europe, without tassels, without velvet trimmings', and in the true 'Asiatic fashion' its sleeves 'got wider from the shoulders to the hands'.¹²⁵ Living 'like a sultan', surrounded by his serfs, and never doing anything that they could be commanded to do instead for him, Oblomov became a cultural monument to Russia's 'Asiatic immobility'. Lenin used the term when he grew frustrated with the unreformability of Russian social life. 'The old Oblomov is with us', he wrote in 1920, 'and for a long while yet he will still need to be washed, cleaned, shaken and given a good thrashing if something is to come of him.'¹²⁶