The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91

INTRODUCTION

An interesting game (invented by the drama specialist Harai Golomb) can be played with Chekhov’s plays: leave one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and so on, before the curtain falls on the last act and see how completely you change your understanding of the play with each exit. We can play the game with Chekhov’s work. Imagine that tuberculosis had killed him not in 1904, but in 1897, 1891 or 1884, and how differently we would view him. A Chekhov who had died in the Moscow clinic in April 1897, leaving no Three Sisters or Cherry Orchard, would not be seen as a dramatist (despite the existence of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya), but almost solely as the progenitor of the modern short story, a prose poet who relegates plot, characterization and moral argument to equal or even lesser status than atmospheric mood. A Chekhov who had stopped with this volume (after all, his journey across Siberia to Sakhalin might very well have killed him in 1890 or 1891), leaving no Ward No. 6, Black Monk or Ariadna, might appear as a gifted disciple of Russia’s elder generation of great novelists, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Leskov, refining, miniaturizing their techniques, but as yet unable to match their cosmic vision or moral authority, or to devise a narrative language of his own.

Had Chekhov died at the age of twenty-four, of the haemorrhage that he suffered in 1884, only a very perceptive critic would have been able to discern the embryonic genius in a dozen or so of the two hundred five-page stories he had published ever since he had started medical school in 1879. (And, three years later, if Chekhov had not taken down his doctor’s brass plate, his desertion of literature for medicine might still have passed unlamented.)

There are no sharp breaks or blinding lights in Chekhov’s development; nevertheless, it was a development. The works of this volume are in no way juvenilia – we have excluded from this collection, however interesting, anything written before the end of 1886, when Chekhov had qualified, both as a doctor and as a writer. But the stories in this volume represent a Chekhov who is more self-conscious and more conventional – more dependent on the opinions of editors, critics and readers – than in his later work. The level of genius in ‘A Dreary Story’ or ‘The Steppe’ is not demonstrably lower than in the late work, but we can hear the author thinking, we can see the ties to the texts of the masters – to Tolstoy or Gogol – and the view of the world that emerges is not yet as hauntingly ambiguous as it is to become. Good and evil, heroes and villains still loom large in Chekhov’s fiction; the author can still justify the ways of art, science, morality and logic to his reader.

In his twenties, and in the supposedly stagnant eighties of Russia’s nineteenth century, Chekhov the writer was still an unusual phenomenon. Forty years ago the cliché of the nineteenth-century Russian writer was evoked by Russia’s wittiest dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–97), in a satirical monologue, a short story called ‘The Graphomaniacs’: ‘They lived on country estates, they knew a foreign language from birth and, in between balls and duels, wrote their novels which were immediately published in all languages of the globe.’ Chekhov had no country estate (until 1892), he was not a member of the gentry, he was nearly forty before he had learnt enough French to read a newspaper, he attended neither balls nor duels and in his lifetime was virtually unknown in most of Western Europe. His life was more like that of the Soviet writer as Sinyavsky portrayed it: ‘the problem of three meals a day, paying for the gas, your shoes have worn out and you owe the typist for two hundred pages at a rouble a page… was this mind of genius really brought up on rotten hamburgers?’

Anton Chekhov and his elder brothers, looking back at how far sheer talent had brought them, used to exclaim: ‘Did such genius really come out of an earth closet?’ True, their origins were humble: but Chekhov’s father had the qualifications to produce genius; like Dickens’ and Ibsen’s fathers, he was a bankrupt shopkeeper. Taganrog, down south, on the Sea of Azov, may have had no sewerage or piped water, but it did have an opera house and an enterprising theatre, not to mention a good grammar school. Some of Chekhov’s teachers were alcoholics, sadists (among them the father of the ‘iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky who was to lead Lenin’s secret police) and police informers. Others, however, were original minds, even published writers. Taganrog gave Chekhov and his brothers a disrespectful, anti-metropolitan and multi-ethnic ethos which no amount of Moscow and St Petersburg sophistication could efface. It also provided the scheme of a southern provincial town to infuse much of Chekhov’s work: its cherry orchards and cemetery statuary are to recur right until Chekhov’s valedictory work, The Cherry Orchard. Its heterogeneous population of merchants, officials, vagabonds, its unhappy provincial heroines were also to populate – sometimes recognizably for themselves – much of Chekhov’s early prose.

Taganrog’s churches played an important, even oppressive, part in Chekhov’s formative years. His father’s tyrannical reign as a cantor gave Chekhov a knowledge and love of the Russian liturgy and its music unparalleled in any other major writer, except Nikolay Leskov. The rhythms of his prose are infused with the psalmodic periods of the Russian akathistos (a psalm improvised by the priest) and the Byzantine hymns for each event in the church calendar, the troparia. At the same time, as he was soon to admit, kneeling on frozen church floors in the early hours of the morning, a torture that alternated with parental thrashings, gave Chekhov an insuperable aversion to religion – in fact to any ideological system. This forced him as a writer to embrace doubt and uncertainty, and prevented him from adopting any of the mantles, Christian or secular, that so many Russian prose-writers felt compelled to don.

The education Chekhov received was like an English public school, minus sport, homosexuality and corporal punishment, strongly oriented towards the classics and to Orthodox Christianity. True, he read most of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and modern European literature when he had already become a writer himself, but lacking the culture of Russia’s gentry literati was not altogether a disadvantage, since it led him to seek his own literary paths.

Chekhov’s first writing was controlled by the strict formulas of the editors of the comic, satirical and didactic weekly magazines who first bought his work when he became an indigent medical student in Moscow. Their demands for simplicity, precision, topicality, exactness and conformity to a sometimes paranoiac censorship were not entirely inhibiting factors for a writer’s development. Like many writers, Chekhov also learnt economy, dispassionate observation and irony from his medical training. Writing a historia morbi for each new case in hospital gave him a new technique for story-writing: ‘A Dreary Story’, ‘Ward No. 6’, ‘The Black Monk’, ‘The Bishop’ are all stories built on the progress of a disease – angina, paranoia, tuberculosis, typhoid – and the parallel disintegration of a persona. As a doctor, Chekhov may not have been particularly distinguished, but what survives of his medical essays are terse models of autopsies that served as kernels for fictional stories. Perhaps it is significant that, though mediocre in surgery, Chekhov had high marks for gynaecology and psychiatry; he had an almost numinous gift for diagnosing fatal illness in colleagues, literary or medical, and he had the patient listening ear which marks off the best psychiatrists and best novelists. Though he deserted medicine as a career (treating first only friends and relatives, then afterwards only peasants), medicine did not desert Chekhov. The doctor as saint in countless stories and the doctor as observer, god, villain or clown in all the plays but the last testify to the parallels that Chekhov, wittingly or not, drew between his ‘mistress’, literature, and his ‘legitimate wife’, medicine.

Medicine had other values for the writer: the medical profession was the stratum in society that the Russian state feared. Its publications were uncensored, its political defiance respected. To be a doctor gave Chekhov a pride that none of the privations and humiliations of Grub Street could break.

A stubborn independence distinguishes Anton Chekhov from his elder brothers. One, Alexander, was a polyglot and polymath, whose letters show a Boswellian talent for self-parody; but dependence on alcohol and sex reduced him from leader of the family to clown. Nikolay, an artist with the talent of a Daumier, was destroyed spiritually, even before he collapsed physically, by similar factors – plus tuberculosis. Chekhov’s defining feature is a refusal to be dependent, on other human beings, their money or their opinions, on drugs, on sex. His brothers’ disastrous lives furnish material for many of his stories: they also served as a horrible warning.

If Anton Chekhov had a need, it was for a replacement father-figure. This is what saved him from remaining a gifted, productive – even prolific – hack. He admired, first of all, that most underestimated of the major Russian novelists, Nikolay Leskov: in Chekhov’s prose the elusiveness of the narrator, the tendency to infuse a narrative with lyricism, the indifference to the preoccupations of Western European writers stems from Leskov’s influence. (Leskov was the only prose fiction writer whom Chekhov’s father read.) Leskov was a cantankerous, isolated figure. Their initial encounter, when Leskov poured salad oil over the young Chekhov’s head to anoint him, was followed by mutual estrangement. By the mid 1880s, a deep but qualified admiration for Tolstoy’s morality, lapidary prose technique and sceptical analysis of all abstractions and received ideas had aroused in Chekhov a deeper admiration: some years were to pass before a personal encounter with Tolstoy (and a doctor’s refusal to accept Tolstoy’s more extreme pontifications on sex, science and the cosmos) led Chekhov to distinguish between Tolstoy the heroic man, the writer of genius and the preacher of absurdities – but the influence, however moderated, remains in Chekhov’s work.

The third of these senior influences was decisive: it was Aleksey Sergeyevich Suvorin, the St Petersburg newspaper magnate, publisher, political éminence grise, who had marked out Anton Chekhov’s potential. The Russian intelligentsia preferred, if they could afford to do so, to stay clear of Suvorin: they were horrified by Suvorin’s tragic aura (his family was beset by suicide and sudden death), Mephistophelean personality and apparent lack of political or moral principle (he was a consistent nationalist conservative anti-semitic radical, with pronounced private anarchic tendencies). Suvorin was twenty-six years older than Chekhov, but they had much in common: Suvorin too came from the provincial peasantry, was exploited by indigent relatives, and had, like Anton Chekhov, a fondness for the company of actresses and for wandering round cemeteries.

Suvorin paid three times as much and gave twice as much space as the Moscow editors to the writers who filled his paper’s Wednesday and Saturday supplements. His readers were more sophisticated, too: they, like their editor, had a salacious streak, they wanted dangerous women and wicked Jews in their stories; but they were prepared to have ambiguity and lyricism and to do without mockery and flippancy. Suvorin’s newspaper was once compared to a zoo whose animals were fed and watered by a kindly keeper: Chekhov was the elephant in this zoo, and the only animal encouraged to take walks abroad.

Many Russian writers, especially the radical left, regarded with distaste Chekhov’s alliance with the Suvorin family – the alliance weakened only at the end of the 1890s, when Suvorin and his heir’s anti-semitism became embarrassing. Quips flew through St Petersburg: ‘Suvorin the father, Suvorin the son and Chekhov the Holy Ghost.’ But from Suvorin’s paper it was possible for Chekhov to graduate, belatedly, to the conventional avenue for a novice Russian writer: the thick monthly journals to which the intelligentsia and gentry subscribed. Only then, from 1888 with the publication of ‘The Steppe’ could Chekhov have the freedom to write at as much length as he chose, for a fee which allowed him to write at his own pace. To survive as a writer for the Moscow weeklies, Chekhov would have had to go on writing two or three stories a week under various pseudonyms. Under Suvorin he could live like a bourgeois on a story a week; on the monthly journals, two or three longer tales a year were sufficient to raise the writer’s income to that of a gentleman.

Suvorin was not only a deus ex machina who found work and pensions for Chekhov as well as his parents and siblings; he was a friend who for several years tried to persuade Chekhov to marry his daughter (at first as a child of eleven) and share the family fortune. Here Chekhov began to show his mettle, what Suvorin called his flint, against what Chekhov called Suvorin’s ‘weak character’. Never was a Dr Faust better defended against a Mephistopheles: one of Chekhov’s mistresses had happened to be a certain Lily Markova, who had been the Suvorin family governess: Chekhov knew all Suvorin’s terrible secrets. Because he understood – and shared – Suvorin’s depression, this was a basis for a friendship almost unique between publisher and writer. Suvorin was also an influence – if only by reaction, for his salacious stories and anti-semitic plays evoked in Chekhov a powerful retort. Furthermore, Suvorin and his family served as material to Chekhov, to the amusement of Suvorin’s second wife, to the indignation of his sons and hangers-on. The lonely professor of ‘A Dreary Story’, like Professor Serebryakov of Uncle Vanya tormenting his young wife, is only one example of the use to which Chekhov could put his friends: the most extreme, perhaps, was the suicide of Suvorin’s young son, Volodya, in 1887, which Chekhov reworked in a story of that name and again in The Seagull.

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 writer. 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.

The depression of 1889 that found expression in this morbidly ironic if heroic work was only deepened by the increasing boldness of Russia’s critical rabble, who disapproved of Chekhov’s distancing himself from Tolstoyan certainties while adopting a Tolstoyan type of plot. Some critics talked of plagiarism, others of ‘unprincipledness’. The more understandable failure of The Wood Demon added humiliation: Chekhov was told by the distinguished actor Lensky to abandon the theatre since he did not even know the alphabet of drama composition.

The old conflict between the doctor and the writer was renewed, and Chekhov decided on a response which might have been suicidal, both literally and artistically: in spring 1890 he set off on a journey across the freezing damp of Siberia to the penal colony of the island of Sakhalin, Russia’s Devil’s Island and Botany Bay all in one, to investigate the conditions of the prisoners there. The primary motive was certainly to demonstrate that he had more compassion for suffering humanity than any of the critics who accused him of indifference, of refusing solutions to the problems raised; the journey was also a flight from the inordinate demands of relatives, friends and mistresses; lastly, it was an emulation of heroism, notably of the conquistador–explorer, discoverer of the wild horse, Nikolay Przhevalsky, who had died in Central Asia and whose obituary Chekhov had just written, in the form of an anonymous panegyric.

The dividing line between Chekhov’s early and mature work is not a neat fracture point: ‘A Dreary Story’ has features of the mature work, just as the very last pieces take up themes, scenery and mood of the early work. If there is a temporal and spatial cut-off point, then the journey to Sakhalin marks it. Some elements disappear for ever from Chekhov’s works. First, there are now very few saints, heroes, villains, monsters. Evil resides not in single human beings, or even in families, but in a system. It was the prison colony, prisoners and guards, who made a collective evil: the most horrific psychopath, murderer or hangman was as an individual the usual mix of the sympathetic and horrible. The reluctance to judge and categorize becomes absolute in Chekhov’s work after Sakhalin. Secondly, a poetic element that reminded Russian readers of the elegies of Pushkin and the metaphysical lyrics of Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–73), Russia’s most powerful if least prolific lyrical poet, enters Chekhov’s works. The absolute certainty of death forces characters to look at life with disbelief and even with renewed capacity for enjoyment.

A year spent abroad also gave Chekhov the benefits of a sabbatical. Very little of his work refers to, let alone is set in, Siberia or Sakhalin. (Likewise, for all his frequent and prolonged visits to St Petersburg, Chekhov only once set a story there.) On his return to Russia Chekhov did not settle down; the following spring he set off with the Suvorins on his first visit to Western Europe (another setting which he uses very rarely, despite four further visits, including almost an entire year spent in Nice). Not until summer 1891 did he suddenly revert to frenzied work, simultaneously writing The Island of Sakhalin, his largely unrecognized magnum opus, one of his longest, most ambitious stories, ‘The Duel’, and a number of explosive shorter stories.

The obsession with death in Chekhov’s work reaches its apogee in a story which appears at first sight to be just a fictionalized account of observations on his long sea journey, as he returned with a pet mongoose from Sakhalin to Odessa. The ship was carrying largely soldiers and guards returning from duty in the prison colony. One of them dies and the body is thrown to the sharks in the Indian Ocean. The tubercular man’s last moments and the extraordinary green light that suffuses the sky as his body goes overboard, however, makes ‘Gusev’ a work that, once read, cannot be forgotten. The green light (in fact, the colour green) is to permeate all Chekhov’s work, right until Natasha’s dress in Three Sisters, as a horrible omen of death.

The frantic summer spent in a magnificent country house at Bogimovo is perpetuated in many later Chekhov stories (for example, ‘The House with the Mezzanine’). The mansion still stands but is now a mental hospital for survivors of shellshock in World War II – as though Ward No. 6 had come back into reality – and its gardens are now a pig farm. It is as though Chekhov had determined to recover all critical reputation that he had lost during his absence over the previous year and a half. The result, ‘The Duel’, was the last major work he published in Suvorin’s New Times; over the autumn and winter of 1891 the story took up all the space that Suvorin had reserved for fiction, thus earning the resentment of those writers who now had no outlet.

‘The Duel’ is Chekhov’s most conventional work: it has two heroes who represent opposing sets of opinions, one precise, scientific and western, the other vague, intuitive and Slavonic; their ideological and moral enmity is crystallized in a duel which ends farcically. What clearer reminiscence of Turgenev could there be? It is hard to think of a major Russian writer of the nineteenth century who did not write a story that could have been entitled ‘The Duel’. Likewise, Chekhov has placed his characters in the claustrophobic setting of a Black Sea garrison town (suspiciously like Sukhumi), a Wild West setting (one might sometimes think) that lends itself to the taut plotting. The build-up to the duel (and even its apparently salutary consequences for both parties) also follows classical lines. The differences, however, are more important than the similarities to conventional duelling novels. For one thing, neither party’s views command much respect: they are rationalizations on the one hand of the aesthete (Layevsky) and his incurable idleness and on the other hand of the scientist (von Koren) and his involuntary hyperactivity. What distinguishes this ideological battle from those in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Turgenev is Chekhov’s subtle authorial preference for a third way, the way of the inarticulate or uncomprehending non-combatants. The absurd mediator Dr Samoylenko declares that if he stopped loving a woman he would make it his life’s work to hide the fact, unlike the ‘honest’ cad Layevsky or the ‘honest’ bluff Przhevalsky-like conquistador von Koren. The Tatar innkeeper does not care whether people worship Allah or Jehovah, as long as they respect God. The naïve deacon interrupts the duel (over which an ominous green light is falling) and prevents a clear resolution of conflict. And not least, a group of indigenous Caucasians sit in a circle on the other side of a river by which the querulous Russians are picnicking and tell each other stories in a language which none of the colonists can understand. Doctor, deacon, Tatar and Abkhaz natives have an instinctive talent for peace and harmony which no proponent of any ideology can achieve – in this lies the novel and powerful import of ‘The Duel’ and it is thus that Layevsky’s absurd self-justification seems to accuse Tolstoy of hypocrisy and misogyny and scientific rationalism of brutal destructiveness. Above all, like Maupassant’s best prose, so the narrative of ‘The Duel’ is dominated by the sea: it drowns out soliloquies, it drives back the travellers. As in Chekhov’s mature work – ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, for example – the sea represents a natural force not just more powerful but more significant than us, and those that recognize natural forces (the Tatar, the deacon, the doctor, the Abkhaz) have the advantage over the articulate intellectuals who occupy the foreground of the narrative.

If Sakhalin was the greatest trauma in Chekhov’s life, its consequences took time to make their mark. ‘Ward No. 6’, perhaps the most pessimistic work that Russian literature has ever produced, was not written until Chekhov himself had prepared what he hoped would be his own idyllic interlude, a refuge in the country. ‘The Duel’ with its reconciliation, even partial redemption, with its cast all alive at the end of the story, is a deceptively happy conclusion to the first period of Chekhov’s development.