In letters to his sister he chatters on about his fellow passengers, people interested only in the price of flour, on the way to Serpukhov; they were livelier after Kursk. There was a jokey landowner from Kharkov; a lady who had just had an operation in Petersburg; an officer from the Ukraine, a general in uniform whose arguments on social questions were surprisingly “sound, short and liberal”; a police officer who was an old battered sinner who growled like a dog. At Slavyansk a railway inspector got on and told them how the Sevastopol railway company had stolen three hundred carriages from the Azov line and painted them in its own company’s color. (Chekhov used the incident in Cold Blood.) Then comes the wild scent of the steppe. He hears the birds singing and sees his “old friends” the ravens flying over the barrows. At one station, “at an upper window sits a young girl in a white blouse, beautiful and languid.” Chekhov puts on his pince-nez; she puts on hers; the two gaze at each other. That will be evoked in a remarkable prose poem, The Beauties. He is in “devilishly, revoltingly fine form”; there are more Ukrainians, oxen, ravens, white huts, telegraph wires, daughters of landowners, farmers, red dogs; trees flit by as he drinks his vodka and eats rissoles and pies. At eight in the evening he is at last in Taganrog. A shock: all the houses look ruinous and flattened. It’s a town “like Her-culaneum and Pompeii”—where he had never been—and when he finds his uncle, the family, even the rats in the storehouse, are fast asleep. He has to sleep on a short sofa and his long legs hang down on the floor. At five in the morning he wakes up. The family are still asleep.
The house pretends to luxury but there are no cuspidors and there is no water closet. He hates Taganrog; still, the Grand Street smells of Europe. The upper-class people, all Greek and Polish, walk on one side of the street, the Russian poor on the other. Now he is suffering from diarrhea (caused by his aunt’s rich cooking) and inflammation of his leg— “my infirmities are counless.” He is drinking more than he should. The young ladies of the town are not bad-looking, but they move abruptly and behave frivolously with him. In general, he says, they fall in love and elope with actors, guffaw and whistle for their dogs. Taganrog is still plagued by dogs. He goes on to Morskaya Stantsiya and he eats caviar for breakfast at seventy kopecks a pound, and marvelous butter. But sleeping? ‘The devil only knows what I haven’t spent the night on: on beds with bugs, on sofas, settees, boxes.” Then he is off by train to a Cossack wedding; everyone drinks, including himself Millions of girls rush about in a crowd like sheep. “One … kept striking me … with her fan and saying ‘Oh you naughty man!’ while at the same time her face wore an expression of fear.” Chekhov, the Moscow worldling, teaches her to say to her swains, “How naive you are!”
Another train, and from the siding he sees the boundless steppe and its ancient grave mounds by moonlight. At Ra-gozina Balka he stays with a large wild Cossack family—the one his pupil took him to stay with in his teens. The tedious father is still running his farm on “scientific” principles, i.e., by a new book he has picked up. This has led to a Cossack war on all wild life.
They kill sparrows, swallows, … magpies, ravens so that they should not eat the bees; they kill the bees so that they should not damage the blossoms of the fruit trees, and fell trees so that they should not impoverish the soil…. [At night] my hosts fire rifles at some animal that is damaging the economy.
And once more there is no water closet. You go out to the hills. This is more material for The Pecheneg—his story about the greatest rural, demented, speculative bore in Russia.
Chekhov has gone lame. More trains. In agony he reaches the monastery at Svyatyye Gory. Here the dogs bark, the frogs croak, the nightingales sing, there are pilgrims. He meets a converted Jew. Back again to Taganrog, and he writes to a friend who is an architect: “If I were as gifted an architect as you I would raze it.” The Taganrog that seriously remained in his mind was “stark” Asia,
such an Asia that I cannot believe my eyes. The sixty thousand inhabitants busy themselves with eating, drinking, procreating, but no newspapers and no books…. the fruits of the earth abound, but everyone is apathetic. Yet they are musical, they have fantasy and wit; they are high-strung and sensitive, but all is wasted.
What about the masterpiece? He goes back to Moscow to write it. The theme of the child suicides is scrapped: will the book simply be a work of travel, an “encyclopaedia of the Steppe”? Some words of Camus come to one’s mind: “one of our contemporaries is cured of his torment by contemplating a landscape.” Chekhov is recovering his childhood imagination.
The Steppe is the account of a journey seen through the eyes of a very young boy, a memory conjured out of himself. If the long book seems to be no more than a series of interlocking incidents, it is really a sustained prose poem and the longest “story” Chekhov ever wrote. Above all, it evokes the mysterious, fated feeling that Russians felt and still feel about the vast empty distances of central Russia and their outlying parts on the edge of the Ukraine in the south, just as the tableland, or steppe, of Castile, with its isolated flat-topped hills and the wide empty distances, haunts the Spaniards. Spain and Russia: they echo each other. From the Russian steppe something has passed permanently into the Russian mind and Russian literature: the sensation of endless time, mysterious in its primitive beginnings. It was natural for Russian writers of Chekhov’s time to think of the steppe as the country of Don Quixote, and Chekhov had been deep in Cervantes from his boyhood. There was also for him the romantic Russian counterpart in Gogol’s story of Taras Bulba. Literature grows out of literature as well as out of life: the difference between The Steppe and Gogol’s magnificent book is that Gogol was glorifying Cossack history, whereas Chekhov stuck to a young boy’s response to the sights and tales of the road.
So we see the boy, Yegorushka, who is the hero, taken on a long journey from Taganrog to boarding school in far-off Kiev. He is whimpering in misery, in a springless carriage, in the company of his uncle Kuzmichov, a stern wool merchant, and the pious Father Christopher, who tries to teach the boy history and religion. The boy sits on the box and clings to the arm of the coachman, who does not stop whipping up his pair of bay horses. They drive out of Taganrog past the brickfields and the town prison, where, because it is Easter, the boy had been to give Easter eggs to the convicts. A prisoner had given him “a pewter buckle of his own making.” A small comfort. The uncle is mostly silent, except when he is arguing with the delightful chattering priest—Chekhov’s Sancho Panza—who is on to an illegal deal in wool himself for dubious “family reasons,” but really for the amusement of gossiping with any passing strangers. The sun rises. The boy fixes his eyes on a distant windmill, which seems to wave to him. He is puzzled because, at the turns of the road, the windmill appears on the left instead of the right. The day is hot and sullen.
The low hills were still plunged in the lilac distance, and no end could be seen to them…. But at last, when the sun was beginning to sink into the west, the steppe, the hills and the air could bear the oppression no longer, and, driven out of all patience, exhausted, tried to fling off the yoke. A fleecy ashen-grey cloud unexpectedly appeared behind the hills. It exchanged glances with the steppe, as though to say, “Here I am,” and frowned. Suddenly something burst in the stagnant air; there was a violent squall of wind which whirled round and round, roaring and whistling over the steppe. At once a murmur rose from the grass and last year’s dry herbage, the dust curled in spiral eddies over the road, raced over the steppe, and carrying with it straws, dragonflies and feathers, rose up in a whirling track column towards the sky and darkened the sun. Prickly uprooted plants ran stumbling and leaping in all directions over the steppe, and one of them got caught in the whirlwind, turned round and round like a bird, flew towards the sky, and turning into a little black speck, vanished from sight.