Some critics thought The Steppe was no more than a string of disconnected incidents; but the discerning saw it as a superb and sustained prose poem. If his reputation had been uncertain, now Chekhov is seen to be a master. The story at once appeared in one of the “thick journals”; he was awarded the Pushkin prize.
Chekhov also wrote other, shorter stories on comparable themes. One of these is Happiness (sometimes called Fortune). We are in the longer, secretive minds of the peasants and the shepherds. We can point to the exact incident in The Steppe from which Happiness was conjured. We see a shepherd sitting with others in the evening while the sheep are asleep and the dogs are quiet. The only sound is the talking of the men. Another figure (whom we have also briefly seen before) is a superior man, in fact the landowner’s overseer, who stands listening with condescension to the folkish fancies of the shepherds, saying little beyond “Yes, it could happen.” They are gossiping about a man called Yefim who was possessed of the Deviclass="underline" it is claimed he had “whistling melons” in his “market garden” and a pike has been heard to laugh when it was caught by him; a shepherd says he has seem Yefim diguised as a “talking bullock.” It is agreed that the Devil can make a rock whistle, for this was heard on the Day of Freedom when the serfs were liberated. And now the talkers are cunning enough to reveal other preoccupations with hearsay. Pretending to be stupid, they are testing the overseer. Is it true that there is treasure hidden in the steppe? Yefim had said so. He also said he had discovered it. They tell the dramatic story of the find and of how this clever man died without revealing where the treasure was hidden. We see the dream of Fortune—nevertheless, they ask, Is this happiness?—brought into the open. There is profit for everyone, but not for the peasants—is that not so?
The overseer gets on his horse and evades the question. He says, “Your elbow is near, but you can’t bite it,” and gallops off, leaving something in their minds never spoken of in the boundless steppe:
The ancient barrows … had a sullen and death-like look; there was a feeling of endless time and utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence.
They know tales of all the treasure buried by generation after generation of robbers and Cossack invaders: Is that the real treasure?
The night goes on, the dawn begins. There is a sudden menacing sound racing over the steppe: “Tah! Tah! Tah! Tah!”—the sound of a bucket falling down a mine shaft. (We shall hear it years later in The Cherry Orchard, pronouncing the new industrial order that will ruin that feckless family.) The mines—they are the buried treasure! The industrial revolution is already destroying the grace and fertility of Nature. And who has the treasure? The gentry, the foreign immigrant miners, the government, all have it; not the shepherds.
Happiness has the note of fable, and its merit lies in the exact rendering of the shepherds’ sly, wondering, legend-consuming talk as they interpret a new aspect of human fate. The ancient burial mounds of the steppe are monuments to races of men who have died, as all men and dispensations the. The drollery of the shepherds is a mask for longheaded thoughts. And one thing is historically important: Chekhov knows that shepherds are not peasants. As shepherds they are the last survivors of a nomadic culture and have an inherited earlier precivilized apprehension of human fate.
Chapter Six
In May 1888 Chekhov sent his brother Mikhail to the south to find a cottage which would house the “abnormal family” for the summer. Hearing their son’s talk of the steppe, his parents longed for the scenes of their early years. The first reports were gloomy, but at last Mikhail found a place that was miraculously beautiful near Sumy on the Psyol River on the edge of the Ukraine. Anton wrote to Suvorin that it was delectable. Nightingales sang all day, he wrote. The countryside was a paradise of neglected gardens, sad and poetical estates shut up and deserted, where lived the souls of beautiful women, old footmen on the brink of the grave, young ladies longing for the most conventional love. It was a place that made one think of old novels and fairy tales. You could swim and fish in the river and angle for crayfish. A man for mysterious sounds, Chekhov heard the cry of the bittern for the first time, a cry that every Little Russian knew but none described the same way. It was partly the echoing blow on an empty barrel, partly the moo of a cow; but no one had even seen the bird!
The cottage was on the estate of the Lintvaryov family.
They were cultivated liberals in an old-fashioned way and gently reproved Chekhov for his ties with the conservative Suvorin. They were strict teetotalers. The mother was a kind, if flabby, old lady who adored old-fashioned poets and read Schopenhauer. Two of the daughters were doctors, one of them blind, epileptic and dying of a brain tumor, who laughed when Chekhov read some of his stories to her. Chekhov wrote:
What seems strange to me is not that she is about to die, but that we do not feel our own death and write [stories] as though we would never die.
He went with the second daughter on her rounds to see her patients. She also managed the house and estate and knew all about horses. She was a tender doctor who suffered with her patients and Chekhov said he believed she had never hurt anyone, and “it seems to me that she never has been nor ever will be happy for a single minute.” The third daughter was a vigorous girl with a loud voice, always laughing and singing, a passionate Little Russian patriot who had started schools in the village and taught the children there. There were two sons, one modest and hardworking—he had been sent down from the university for political reasons, “but of that he doesn’t boast.” The second son was mad about Tchaikovsky but had no talent. He admired the teachings of Tolstoy, though he could not stand Tolstoy’s disciples. There were exploring trips in an ancestral four-in-hand carriage into the province of Poltava:
If you had only seen the place where we stayed the night and the villages stretching eight or ten versts through which we drove! What weddings we met on the road, what lovely music we heard in the evening stillness, and what a heavy smell of fresh hay there was!
He stayed for a night with a friend of the Lintvaryovs called Alexander Smagin, whom they nicknamed the Shah of Persia, in a crumbling and neglected house. The suckers of cherry and plum trees grew through the floorboards, and one night he saw a nightingale nesting between the window and the shutter and saw “little naked nightingales, looking like undressed Jew babies, hatched out from the eggs.”
Chekhov went on to a literary pilgrimage through Gogol’s country and came back with the astonishing idea of raising money for the founding of what he called a “climatic station” for writers. It would free them from the wasteful political quarrels of Moscow and Petersburg. Nothing came of this. On his return to Sumy there was trouble. Alexander’s wife had died and he arrived with his children at the cottage. Alexander celebrated his arrival by escaping to the little town of Sumy and, in the public park, “assisting the performance of the local conjuror and hypnotist” by drinking and shouting foul language. He had to be dragged away. Worse, he had fallen in love with Yelena, one of the Lintvaryov sisters, and wanted to marry her. The girl might very well have been longing to marry but Chekhov sternly saw disaster. He knew his uncontrollable brother. After a serious row Alexander was packed off, protesting, to Petersburg: later he admitted he had been stupid to think of marrying her; he had got used to living alone. In fact he found another lady and married her.