On the hot July day of their departure they were up soon after five, and after being taken by then: father to the front room to bow to the ground three times and say prayers in front of the icon they were ready to leave. Ten minutes atter kissing the hands of their mother and father, Alexander and Anton were out of the confined space of the town and in the wide open expanses of the steppe, among butterflies, kites and larks. But disappointment came even before they reached their destination: the two men driving the cart back to the Platov estate fell asleep and the horse meandered off the route, causing the boys a Jot of unease, particularly when it grew dark. The estate village, when they arrived, was quite pretty with its white church, straw-roofed huts, poppies and sunflowers, but it was not exactly the idyll they had been led to expect. And their grandparents were not particularly friendly. It was threshing time and Chekhov was soon bored with the job he was given of sittmg by the w indmill for davs on end writing down endless measures of grain. But he was not bored with travelling. The following year Ins mother took him and his brothers and sister (in a cart drawn by oxen) back to the deserted manor house by the river that he and Alexander had stayed in the previous summer, and they once again roamed past the dovecotes and through its neglected gardens and orchards.47
Chekhov's first real adventures came when he was in his last years at school, by which .ime the rest of his family was in Moscow. He spent those summers in Taganrog, sta ;ng with friends who had a farm out in the wilds and a lifestyle which was the direct opposite of the suffocating atmosphere of religious piety and filial obedience that had characterized his own home. He went back there in 1887 when he was down from Moscow, and h.; letters home vividly convey ts attractions. The little straw-roofed house was situated in what he called the 'Switzerland of the Don reg. >n', which is the chain of hills you come to when travelling north from Taganrog, about sixty miles inland. Chekhov described it as 'hills, little gullies, little woods, little rivers and steppe, steppe, steppe . . .'48 With none of the hills higher than about 500 metres, it was not, to be honest, exactly Hke the Sw'ss Alps, which, of course, Chekhov had never seen (nor ever would), but it was certainly picturesque. The earthen-floored house was not much like a chocolate box Swiss chalet either. Ins de, the walls were covered with rifies, pistols, sabres and whips, he wrote, and each morning he was woken by the sounds of a gun being fired through a window at chickens ,and geese and the yelping of disobedient dogs being punished. There were no ashtrays, lavatories or other mod cons, for miles around, and Chekhov explained that :n order to respond to the call of nature it was necessary to go down into the gully and choose a bush, first making sure there was no viper or other such creature underneath it. And to do that it was necessary to run the gauntlet of the huge number of vicious dogs the family owned. 'I have to walk in convoy ocherwise there w.'ll be one less wr ter in Russ'a,' he quipped/ ' He did not get much sleep as there were dogs outs.de howling all njght, and the setter under the hard wooden divan on which he slept1 ked to bark in reply.
A favourite occupation was shooting at bustards, the largest game bird in Europe, a native of the steppe. Maybe it is because Chekhov's friends shot so many of them that the gr jat bustard, Otis tarda, is now a globally threatened species. They were a sitti ng target really: these turkey-like birds are not that good at flying, particularly in poor weather, and are prone to collide with overhead cables due to their lack of manoeuvrability when airDorne. Chekhov's hosts "engaged in an unending cycle of slaughter: they shot sparrows, swallows, magpies and crows so they could not eat the bees, they killed the bees so they did not ruin the fruit trees, and they cut down the trees so they did not drain the soil. It was not exactly refined 'vmg. The goose soup he was fed at lunch time reminded Chekhov of bathwater left behind by tubby marketwomen, and the after-dinner coffee looked and tasted as though it was made of roasted dung Nevertheless he had a glorious time. When he was not making bonfires and picnicking outdoors, going shooting, talking about politics, or being chased by rabid dogs, he obviously enjoyed being left to his own devices. And it was healthy living. Chekhov claimed you could cure yourself of fifteen consumptions and twenty-two rheumatisms by staying in the depths of the steppe at his friends' house.
After a repressive childhood in which he was cooped up either at school, m a church or in his father's shop for long periods at a time, it was not surprising that the teenage Chekhov felt an overwhelming sense of liberation in this sort of environment when he came to spend his summers on the steppe. Nor is it surprising that he came to associate the steppe's boundless open spaces with freedom. Pyotr, the son of the retired officer who owned the farm where Chekhov stayed (and who had been tutored by Chekhov back in Taganrog), wore the red-striped uniform of a Don Cossack regiment, like his father had, and it is tempting to think that some of the full-blooded Cossack ways rubbed off on their guest. The Cossacks were descended from peasants who had run away in the late Middle Ages in order to escape enslavement as serfs, and had settled in the Ukraii. an and southern Russian steppe after an initially nomadic existence on horse-back like their Scythian forebears. By the nineteenth century, they had developed a distinct ethnic identity of their own through intermarrying with the local Tatar population. They retained a fierce independence, wh'le at the same cime remaining loyal to Russia. Rding a horse and shooting a gun were second nature to these macho defenders of Russia's southern frontier. This is not an image we associate with the bespectacled Chekhov of later years, certainly, and it is interesting that he spent two days staying at a nearby monastery after leaving his gun-toting friends in 1887. Having tasted a little of the Cossack way of life, however, he surely admired their down-to-earth, ur;nhibned ways, which were so different from those he had grown up wi h.
It is worth remembering that Chekhov was not always short of breath and racked by coughing. He loved the outdoors (what person would choose to spend several months travelling overland to Siberia?) and freedom became increasingly important to him, both personally and artistically. His ideal as a witer was 'to be a free artist and nothing more'. My holiest of hoJ-es is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom, freedom from violence and lies, in whatever form,' he wrote famously irf a letter n Ociobcr 1888.51 It must have been unbearably painful for him to find the sphere of his activities become increasingly restricted with the onset of his illness. Chekhov al?o seems to have associated the wide open spaces of the steppe with love. During a conversation about love at first sight with a close fnend. he confided a memory of a hot summer's day during his late teens when he was standing by a well looking at his reflection, out in the middle of the steppe somewhere. A girl of about fifteen came to fetch water, and he was so captivated by her that he could not stop himself from k'ssmg her, after which they both stood for a long time look' ig silently into the welclass="underline" he did not want to go, and she had completely forgotten about the water. Tb's first experience of love at first right may have something to о о with the way in which the natural world, and the steppe in particular, is poeticized in Chekhov's work as a sacred place.51