Reading Chekhov

Nine

Chekhov’s decision to write a book of nonfiction about his journey to Sakhalin, instead of allowing the trip to develop into fiction in his interior darkroom, may have been influenced by the fact that he had already written a masterpiece of fiction about a journey. This was the long story “The Steppe” (1888), the first Chekhov story to appear in a literary journal (as opposed to a newspaper) and the work that catapulted him into the ranks of major Russian writers. The story chronicles a summer journey across the steppe of a nine-year-old boy named Yegorushka, accompanying his merchant uncle, Ivan Ivanitch Kuzmitchov, and an old priest, Father Christopher Sirevsky, who are taking a convoy of wagons filled with wool to a distant town, where the wool will be sold and the boy put in school. Along the way, they search for a mysterious, powerful entrepreneur of the steppe named Varlamov, on whom the sale of the wool obscurely depends. “I describe the plain, its lilac vistas, the sheep breeders, the Jews, the priests, the nocturnal storms, the inns, the wagon trains, the steppe birds and so on,” Chekhov wrote to Grigorovich on January 12, 1888, while composing the story. But he was nervous about it:

. . . I’m ending up with something rather odd and much too original. Since I’m not used to writing anything long and am constantly, as is my wont, afraid of writing too much, I’ve gone to the other extreme. All the pages come out compact, as if they had been condensed, and impressions keep crowding each other, piling up, and pushing one another out of the way. The short scenes . . . are squeezed tightly together; they move in an unbroken chain and are therefore fatiguing; instead of a scene I end up with a dry, detailed list of impressions, very much like an outline; instead of an artistically integrated depiction of the steppe, I offer the reader an encyclopedia of the steppe.

Chekhov sounds as if he could not quite come to terms with his own originality. He is like a resistant reader of an avant-garde work. The compression about which he frets is, of course, the compression that is the signature of his mature work. The writing that is “very much like an outline” is precisely the writing that demands “the attention accorded poetry.” It is prose as pared down—and as charged—as poetry.

Early in “The Steppe” (subtitled “The Story of a Journey ”) Chekhov draws a crucial contrast—one that will hover over the story—between the merchant and the priest as travelers. Kuzmitchov is like the businessmen one sees today on planes and trains working on laptops and talking on cell phones. He is oblivious of his surroundings. He only wants to get there. “Fanatically devoted to his work, Kuzmitchov always, even in his sleep and at church when they were singing ‘Like the cherubim,’ thought about his business and could never forget it for a moment; and now”—the men are taking a nap—“he was probably dreaming about bales of wool, wagons, prices, Varlamov.” Father Christopher, in contrast,

had never in all his life been conscious of anything which could, like a boa constrictor, coil about his soul and hold it tight. In all the numerous enterprises he had undertaken in his day, what attracted him was not so much the business itself, but the bustle and the contact with other people involved in every undertaking. Thus in the present expedition, he was not so much interested in wool, in Varlamov, or in prices, as in the long journey, the conversations on the way, the sleeping under a chaise, and the meals at odd times. . . . He must have been dreaming of . . . all sorts of things that Kuzmitchov could not possibly dream of.

How should one live? Like a Kuzmitchov or a Father Christopher? The story is borne like a canopy on these two poles of possibility. Kuzmitchov is desperate to find Varlamov, who has always just left the place at which the travelers have arrived. He searches for him the way we search in dreams for someone we will never find. Father Christopher is calm: “A man isn’t a needle—we shall find him.” As Kuzmitchov looks at him “almost with hatred,” the priest faces east and for a quarter of an hour Kuzmitchov must wait while he recites his psalms for the day. The quest for Varlamov threads its way through the pages of “The Steppe” with a similar lack of urgency, as though Chekhov were reluctant to allow a conventional plot device to coil about his narrative. But when Varlamov finally comes into view—a short, gray older man on a small horse, showing his displeasure to a subordinate who has not followed orders—he is a figure of electrifying authority. “It’s people like that the earth rests upon,” a peasant says of him. Varlamov’s face has:

the same expression of businesslike coldness as Ivan Ivanitch’s face, the same look of fanatical zeal for business. But yet what a difference could be felt between him and Kuzmitchov! Uncle Ivan Ivanitch always had on his face, together with his businesslike reserve, a look of anxiety and apprehension that he would not find Varlamov, that he would be late, that he would miss a good price; nothing of that sort, so characteristic of small and dependent persons, could be seen in the face or figure of Varlamov. This man made the price himself, was not looking for anyone, and did not depend on anyone; however ordinary his exterior, yet in everything, even in the manner of holding his whip, there was a sense of power and habitual authority over the steppe.

You will have noted the word “Uncle.” It is Yegorushka who has been observing Varlamov and whose thoughts Chekhov records. The consciousness of the boy—who is not yet either a Kuzmitchov or a Father Christopher, but possesses both the former’s hysterical anxiety and the latter’s capacity for pleasure—is the lens through which most of the events of “The Steppe” are seen. (Chekhov reserves portions of the text for an omniscient narrator.) It might seem that Chekhov has exceeded the bounds of plausibility in endowing a nine-year-old child with such astuteness and such complexity of thought. But, on rereading the passage, we see that Chekhov has made no misstep. While a nine-year-old could not write the passage or speak it in those words, he could think it. Chekhov intercepts his thought—as he intercepted that of Ryabovitch in “The Kiss”—but does no violence to it as he turns it into prose. His acute sensitivity to the difference between unexpressed and expressed thought guides him in his risky feat. Two of Yegorushka’s other interior monologues reveal more about Chekhov’s poetics. The first takes place at the beginning of the story, as the chaise bearing the boy and the merchant and the priest drives out of their village past a cemetery where, amid the white crosses and tombstones, cherry trees grow.

Yegorushka remembered that when the cherries were in blossom those white patches melted with the flowers into a sea of white; and that when the cherries were ripe the white tombstones and crosses were dotted with splashes of red like bloodstains. Under the cherry trees in the cemetery Yegorushka’s father and granny, Zinaida Danilovna, lay sleeping day and night. When Granny had died she had been put in a long narrow coffin and two pennies had been put upon her eyes, which would not keep shut. Up to the time of her death, she had been brisk, and used to bring soft rolls covered with poppy seeds from the market. Now she did nothing but sleep and sleep. . . .

Here—perhaps because he has only just introduced Yegorushka—Chekhov points up the naïveté of his interior monologuist. Later he will not feel the need to remind us so insistently that we are in the mind of a child. But again he performs the tour de force of endowing the boy with thought exceeding his expressive capacities, while never going outside the repertoire of what a child can imagine and feel.

The second example is one of the strangest passages in literature. Chekhov may well have been thinking of it when he worried that “The Steppe” was “much too original.” The journey takes place during a time of extreme heat and drought. The travelers have stopped to eat and rest, and while the men are napping, the hot and bored boy tries to amuse himself. Suddenly, in the distance, he hears a woman singing a song that is “subdued, dreary and melancholy, like a dirge and hardly audible.”

Yegorushka looked about him, and could not make out where the strange song came from. Then, as he listened, he began to fancy that the grass was singing; in its song, withered and half dead, it was without words, but plaintively and passionately, urging that it was not to blame, that the sun was burning it for no fault of its own; it urged that it ardently longed to live, that it was young and might have been beautiful but for the heat and the drought; it was guiltless, but yet it prayed forgiveness and protested that it was in anguish, sad and sorry for itself.

There is a kind of anthropomorphism-within-anthropomorphism here. As the writer attributes words to the boy that the boy would not utter, the boy attributes thoughts to the grass that the grass could not “think.” In rendering the boy’s excruciating empathy with the grass, it is almost as if Chekhov were mimicking his own act of sympathetic imagination. Echoes of another “much too original” text—the Book of Isaiah, with its images of landscapes cruelly withered by God to teach his stiff-necked people not to cross him and its analogizing of the life of man to the life of grass— may be heard in the passage. We do not know whether Chekhov was intentionally (or even unconsciously) evoking Isaiah, but when the Kuzmitchov party meets a barefoot old shepherd with a loincloth and a crook—“a regular figure from the Old Testament”—or stops at an inn owned by an obsequious Jew named Moisey (Moses), or encounters water coming out of rock, we can hardly avoid the thought that the journey is some kind of latter-day Exodus. The storm that is the real climax of the work seems like one of the more showy magical stunts of the Old Testament deity. It begins with a casual display of power—“someone seemed to strike a match in the sky; a pale phosphorescent streak gleamed and went out”—and mounts to awe-inspiring extremes of violence. The boy, atop one of the wool wagons, is exposed to the storm’s fearful wind, rain, lightning, and thunder, and becomes ill with chills and fever; he recovers after the priest rubs (anoints) him with oil and vinegar.

The boy is a rather characterless character, a kind of generic child, expressing the passivity and sadness of childhood, and recording impressions in something of the way a camera does. (The melancholy of photography has been noted by several of its practitioners.) When he is at the inn of the obsequious Moisey, he notes its gloominess and ugliness and the “disgusting smell of kerosene and sour apples” that permeates it. Like the boy at the stifling house of the Armenian in “The Beauties” (which Chekhov wrote later in the year), Yegorushka has an unexpected brush with beauty at the horrible inn. He is lying half asleep on a sofa when a beautiful young noblewoman, dressed in black and sending forth “a glorious scent,” appears and kisses him on the cheeks. She is the Polish Countess Dranitsky, a rich local landowner, about whose semiannual balls (at which tea is made in silver samovars, and strawberries and raspberries are served in winter) the boy had already heard at home, and about whom he will now entertain pleasurable fantasies. She, too, is looking for Varlamov (neither the boy nor we ever learn why). When the boy first sees her, the image of a graceful poplar he had seen standing alone on the steppe comes into his mind “for some reason.” The reason is clear enough. The Countess, too, stands alone in the story—its only aristocrat and emblem of the culture and gentility that the boy’s mother is sending him away from home to acquire. The boy has also heard about the extraordinary table clock in the Countess’s drawing room: a golden rider on a rearing golden horse with diamond eyes brandishes his sword to right and left as the clock strikes. When we meet Varlamov he rides a small nonrearing horse and brandishes a whip. He is the self-made New Man whom we will meet again in Chekhov’s writings, most memorably as Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard. Neither is unsympathetic; Chekhov had no illusions about the days of rearing golden horses and riders with slashing swords. Another typical character is Dymov, one of the drivers of the wool wagons, an obnoxious young bully, under whose provocation Yegorushka’s passivity gives way to fury and loathing. Dymov is a relatively mild version of the helplessly violent man we will meet again in later works—Solyny in Three Sisters, and Matvey Savich in “Peasant Wives,” for the two worst examples—and for whom Chekhov retained a child’s pure hatred. A character who has no successors—who is a kind of flash of unrepeatable inspiration—is a driver named Vassia, who has been horrifyingly mutilated by his earlier work in a match factory—his jaw is being eaten away—but who has a remarkable and wonderful power:

His sight was extraordinarily keen. He was so long-sighted that the brown steppe was for him always full of life and interest. He had only to look into the distance to see a fox, a hare, a bustard, or some other animal keeping a distance from men. There was nothing strange in seeing a hare running away or a flying bustard—everyone crossing the steppes could see them; but it was not vouchsafed to everyone to see wild animals in their own haunts when they were not running nor hiding, nor looking about them in alarm. Yet Vassia saw foxes playing, hares washing themselves with their paws, bustards preening their wings and hammering out their hollow nests. Thanks to this keenness of sight, Vassia had, besides the world seen by everyone, another world of his own, accessible to no one else, and probably a very beautiful one, for when he saw something and was in raptures over it it was impossible not to envy him.

“There are many places that will be understood by neither critics nor the public; they will seem trifling to both, not meriting attention, but I anticipate with pleasure the two or three literary epicureans who will understand and value these same places, and that is enough for me,” Chekhov wrote to Y. P. Polonsky in January 1888, in another of the defensive letters he felt impelled to write to friends while working on the most ambitious project he had yet undertaken. In an essay entitled “Chekhov’s ‘Steppe’: A Metapoetic Journey” (1987), a literary epicurean named Michael Finke fulfills Chekhov’s expectations of being understood with an almost Vassia-like perspicacity. He sees what no previous critic has seen—motifs and allusions tucked into “places” of no apparent significance (such as the floor of a shop marked with kabbalistic symbols or two peculiar pictures on the wall of the reception room in Moisey’s inn)— and his essay permanently changes our view of the story as an inspired but inchoate effort, written before Chekhov was in full possession of his artistic powers. Conventional criticism of “The Steppe” has taken Chekhov’s self-criticism at face value (almost always a mistake), and missed the figure in the carpet that Finke’s reading reveals. The story, as it appears under Finke’s high-powered lens, proves to be a work of breathtaking artistic unity. Details that seemed random and incoherent fall into place as elements of an intricate design—but one so cleverly hidden it is small wonder that no one saw it for a hundred years. “If a story is to seem at all original,” Finke writes, “its order must somehow be disguised, known only in retrospect, and those laws of necessity governing the function of detail must be masked.” “The Steppe,” as Finke suggests, is “a sort of dictionary of Chekhov’s poetics,” a kind of sample case of the concealed literary weapons Chekhov would deploy in his work to come.

In the short story “The Schoolmistress,” written ten years later, we see how the compression that made Chekhov so uneasy in 1888 was now his modus operandi. It is another emblematic story of a journey, but this one is the mere return day trip of a spinster schoolteacher, Marya Vassilyevna, from the town where she goes to get her monthly salary. The teacher is one of the pathetic drudges who (as Chekhov learned at Melikhovo) taught in Russia’s district schools in the nineteenth century (and may still do so in the twenty-first). The life of a schoolteacher

is a hardworking, an uninteresting, life, and only silent, patient cart horses like Marya Vassilyevna could put up with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked about a vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and gave up the work.

The teacher is traveling in a horse-drawn cart, driven by an old coachman named Semyon. It is April, with traces of winter, “dark, long, and spiteful,” still on the ground, but with delicious signs of spring in the air—to which, however, Marya Vassilyevna is impervious. She has taken this trip monthly for thirteen years and “whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her.” Like Kuzmitchov obsessively thinking about wool and prices and Varlamov, Marya obsessively thinks about the examinations she must prepare her students for, about the brutality of the school watchman, about the indifference of Zemstvo officials, about the difficulty of obtaining firewood for the schoolroom. Chekhov pauses to tell us that Marya Vassilyevna was orphaned at ten, and can remember almost nothing of her early life, in a large flat in Moscow, near the Red Gate. Then he gives us an unforgettable image: Marya’s one relic from her childhood is a photograph of her mother, but it has faded so badly that nothing remains visible but the hair and the eyebrows. We feel we have seen such photographs, but have never before thought of them as metaphors for fading memory.

As the teacher and the coachman travel through an increasingly mired terrain, they meet a landowner named Hanov, driving a carriage with four horses. Marya Vassilyevna is acquainted with Hanov, and so are we: he is our old friend the good man who cannot make good, cousin to Ivanov, Laevsky, Astrov, Vershinin. In this version, he is “a man of forty with a listless expression and a face that showed signs of wear, who was beginning to look old, but was still handsome and admired by women. He lived in his big homestead alone, and was not in the service; and people used to say of him that he did nothing at home but walk up and down the room whistling, or play chess with his old footman. People said, too, that he drank heavily.”

After greeting Hanov, the schoolteacher goes back to her obsessions. But the thought floats into her mind that Hanov is attractive. When the road grows so muddy that Semyon and Hanov have to get down and lead their horses, she watches Hanov and thinks, “In his walk there was something, just perceptible, that betrayed in him a being already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin.” She gets a whiff of alcohol, and goes on to feel “dread and pity for this man going to ruin for no visible cause or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin.” She pursues the fantasy—and quickly dismisses it.

The mere thought that he and she might be close to one another and equals seemed impossible and absurd. In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding, that when one thought about it one felt uncanny, and one’s heart sank. “And it is beyond all understanding,” she thought, “why God gives beauty, this graciousness, and sad, sweet eyes to weak, unlucky, useless people— why they are so charming.”

Hanov turns off and Marya’s obsessions again take over her thoughts. Her bare life, Chekhov notes, “was making her grow old and coarse, making her ugly, angular, and awkward, as though she were made of lead. . . . No one thought her attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances.” The journey itself is as vexing as the life:

Semyon kept picking out the driest and shortest way, first by a meadow, then by the backs of the village huts; but in one place the peasants would not let them pass, in another, it was the priest’s land and they could not cross it, in another, Ivan Ivonov had bought a plot from the landowner and had dug a ditch around it. They kept having to turn back.

Eventually, they stop at a rough tavern; outside, wagons filled with large bottles of crude sulfuric acid stand on ground covered with snow and dung. The peasants drinking within show small respect for the schoolteacher. She is practically one of them. On the last leg of the journey the travelers have to cross a river. Semyon chooses to go through the water rather than over a bridge a few miles away. When they enter the river, the horse goes in up to his belly, and Marya’s skirt and sleeve get soaked, and so do the sugar and flour she bought in town. On the other side, at a railway crossing, they find the barrier down. The schoolmistress gets out of the cart and stands shivering on the ground. The end of the story is less than a page away. Chekhov writes:

[The village] was in sight now, and the school with its green roof, and the church with its crosses flashing in the evening sun; and the station windows flashed too, and a pink smoke rose from the engine . . . and it seemed to her that everything was trembling with cold.

Here was the train; the windows reflected the gleaming light like the crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. On the little platform between two first-class carriages a lady was standing, and Marya Vassilyevna glanced at her as she passed. Her mother! What a resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a brow and bend of the head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first time in those thirteen years, there rose before her mind a vivid picture of her mother, her father, her brother, their flat in Moscow, the aquarium with little fish, everything to the tiniest detail; she heard the sound of the piano, her father’s voice; she felt as she had been then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstasy, and called softly, beseechingly:

“Mother!”

At this moment Hanov and his carriage arrive at the crossing, “and seeing him she imagined happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as an equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her triumph, was flowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a schoolmistress, it had been a long, tedious, strange dream and now she had awakened . . .”

The vision abruptly vanishes, like the sun going down in winter. Marya gets back into the cart and proceeds to the village and to her dismal life. The long, tedious, strange dream goes on.

The previous year, Chekhov had written Uncle Vanya. (Or probably had; he was extremely secretive about its composition, perhaps because of its relationship to The Wood Demon, a bizarrely poor play he wrote in 1889 and wished to disown but from which Uncle Vanya unquestionably derives.) The schoolmistress’s brief fantasy about marriage to the handsome, depressed, alcoholic Hanov is a kind of shorthand version of Sonya’s deep, hopeless love for the handsome, depressed, alcoholic Astrov. At the end of the play, after the professor and Elena and Astrov have gone and Sonya and Vanya are left to live out their lives as silent, patient cart horses, Sonya, too, has an ecstatic vision. She has abandoned hope of earthly happiness, but imagines an afterlife “that is bright, lovely, beautiful. We shall rejoice and look back at these troubles of ours with tenderness, with a smile—and we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle; I have fervent, passionate faith.” We do not know whether Marya Vassilyevna has faith, but the church, with its crosses flashing in the setting sunlight, is the fulcrum of her ecstasy. (Chekhov used this image in several other stories, including “Three Years” and “Lights.”) A Finkean or perhaps a Jacksonian reading of “The Schoolmistress” would also take note of Marya’s baptism in the river and of the fish in the Moscow apartment. As always, Chekhov’s allusions to religion are inconclusive. They mark important moments, but they are written in pencil. As always, and unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov leaves the question of what it all means unanswered. He raises it, but then—as if remembering that he is a man of science and a rationalist—seems to shrug and walk out of the room.