Seymour, a rugged young British traveller who came to these parts in the early 1850s, had mixed feelings about the attractions of a landscape in which kurgans were one of the few chaiacteristic features:
For a short pel od, ш Api ll and May, the Steppes present a beautiful appearance. The brilliant green of the rising crops of corn, and the fresh grass, intermingled with flowers of the most lively colours, are pleasing to the eye, and give a charm to the monotony of the scenery. A hot scorching sun, .however, so<Dn withers the grass, wh'ch assumes a brownish hue, and clouds of dust increase the dreariness and parched appearance of the Steppes. During the winter the ground is covered with snow, which at times lies several feet deep. Un' npeded by mountains, forests, or rising ground, the winds from the north-east, passing over many hundred miies of frozen ground, blow with restless violence, and often uninterruptedly for several weeks.38
Yet chese ooundless plains of waving grasses, streams and gullies were an endless source of fascination for Chekhov, and m ght partly account for his lifelong restlessness: skuchno - I'm bored - was a frequent refrain in his letters. 'It's a fantastic region,' he declared in a letter at the end of the 1890s. 'I love the Don steppe and used to feel at home in it as if it was my own house; I Knew every liHf ravine.'39 Despite having visited exotic places like Ceylon, and stayed in cities like Venice, Rome and Paris, Chekhov never lost his enthralment with the steope. In the summer of 1894, he began drearring about travelling througn the steppe again, and sleeping under the stars at least for a few days. 'I used to live in the steppe for months at a time, I lovea the steppe, and now it seems quite enchanting in my memory,' he wrote nostalgically five years later.40
Chekhov's enchantment had begun with the wondrous tales about the steppe told to him by his nanny Agafya Kumskaya, who was kept on by his parents until his youngest brother was eleven. Agafya Alexandrovna had spent most of her life as a serf on an estate in the middle of the steppe north of Taganrog, and told the Chekhov children legends that had been passed oown to her about the battles of local heroes against the Tatars and Turks in ages past, and about all kinds of treasures and magic hats hidden in the kurgans.41 Like most people at that time, she had no idea of the ornate burial customs of the Scythians, so memorably described by Herodotus, or the riches of their artistic treasures. The kurgans had begun to be excavated only in the late eighteenth century, after the southern territories finally became part of the Russian Emp;te. Knowledge of the Scythians themselves was s ill relatively scant even in learned circles. But the local people in the steppe had nevertheless always known there was treasure of some sort in the kurgans: they had been looted repeatedly over the centuries for the exquisite gold ewellery buried in them. Agafya Alexandrovna's heroes dated from a much later period than the Scythians, their exploits mytholog'zed by generations of peasant families in order to explam the existence of the mysterious mounds in the landscape around them, not to ment'on the strange names some of them had, such as Saur-Mogi a - 'Saur's Grave'. Many popular legends had been spun about this particular kurgan, which had acted as a kind of frontier between the Russians and the Turks ard Tatars .n the mediaeval period; Saur appears in them either as an evil Turkish khan or a Cossack hero.
Тле atmosphere of the stories that entranced Chekhov as a small boy is reflected in 'Fortune', the first story he wrote after returning from his travels n the south n 1887. As he expla'ned in a letter, it was about 'the steppe: the pla;,i, right-time, a pale dawn in the east, a Rock of sheep, and three human figures talking about treasure'.42 Panteley, a passing ranger who has stopped to get a light for his pipe, starts telling cwo shepherds, watclvng then sheep one summer l ight by the highway, about the buried treasure supposed to be hidden irj the kurgans:
Stroking his long whiskers, wh :h were covered with dew, he c) imbed heavily on to his horse and narrowed his eyes as he gazed into the distance, looking as if he had forgotten to say something or had somehow not finished what he had to say. Nothing stirred in the blueish distance, where the last vis;ble hill merged v .th the mist: the kurgans which towered here and there above the horizon and the endless steppe, looked severe and lifeless; in the r mute -'mmobility one could sense past centuries and complete indifference to human beings; another thousand years would go by, millions of people would die and they would still be standing there, as they did now, neither sorry for those who had died, nor interested in the living, and not one soul would know why they stood there and what secrets of the steppe they contained."'
'Fortune' is set in the district north of Taganrog, and Chekhov not only mentions Saur's Grave by name, but also refers to the mixed population of the steppe, which included German colonists, relig ous sectarians called Molokans ('m.lk drinkers'), Tatars, Kalmyks, Jews and Armenians:
The sun had not yet risen, but distant Saur's Grave, with its pointed top which looked ..ke a cloud, and all the other kurgans were already visible. If you climbed to the top of Saur's Grave, you could look out and see a plain that was'as flat and boundless as the sky, manor houses and estates, German and Molokan farms, villages; a far-sighted Kalmyk would even be able to see the town and railway trains. Only from up here was it possible to see that there was another life in the world beyond the silent steppe and ancient kurgans, a life which was not concerned with buried treasure and the thoughts of sheep.44
Chekhov was not given to false boasting, nor to praise of his own work in general, but he proclaimed 'Fortune' to be the best story he had written at that time,4 and it was to remain one of his favourite pieces of prose. It certainly scored an immediate success with his readers: his brother in St Petersburg told hnn that issues of the newspaper which published t were still bei ig read in the city's cafes a week later and getting very worn; this was highly unusual, he pointed out, because cafes usually changed their papers daily.46
The very first travelling Chekhov had done as a boy was into the steppe, and it had been a major event: his family went on a trip together only once while he was growing up, and even then his father had stayed behind to look after the shop. One only has to look at an old map of Russia to realize how sparsely populated the southern regions were in the nineteenth century. The steppe began right where the town ended, just beyond the cemetery, and Chekhov clearly longed for the chance to go off on adventures when he went there in the summer to go hunting for tarantulas with his friends. The opportunity finally came when he was twelve years old, and he was allowed to visit his grandparents wr h his eldest brother Alexander. Egor Mikhailovich and Efrosinya Emelyanova lived on Count Platov's estate, about forty miles north of Taganrog. It was a journey of two days by cart (there was no railway), which seemed a huge distance, and as a consequence they barely saw their grandchildren when they were growing up. The Chekhov family had no summer dacha to go to back then, and finances never permitted them to take a holiday. Not surprisingly, Chekhov was wildly excited at the thought of going on a journey - so much so that he could barely sleep the night before departure. His father had idealized the steppe landscape in which his parents lived to such an extent that the impressionable young Chekhov boys thought they were visiting an earthly paradise.