By the time he was ready to go home after h,s travels in the steppe m the spring of 1887, Chekhov felt that he had filled h;mself up with enough poetry to last five years. Now it was time to start distilling the experiences of his childhood, refracting them through the impressions of his recent visit n the hope of inspiring in his readers an appreciation for the beauties of the landscape he had grown up in. Spurred on by the success of 'Fortune', he now started planning a much longer story about the steppe. After seven years of publishing short, largely ephemeral pieces in comic journals and newspapers, t was f'me to write something more substantial for submission to a serious literary journal. Aware that whatever he produced would be closely scrutinized by the entire Russian literary establishment, it s not surprising that it took him six months to pluck up the courage to start writing Numerous writers and critics had noticed his potential and urged him to start taking his literary activities seriously; equally, there were many others who did not really know how to deal with his apparently plotless orose and wistful style, resented his success and lowly beginnings, and were primed to find fault. Chekhov had, moreover, chosen a highly unusual subject. In the wake of the great realist novels, with their penetrating psychological analysis and big philosophical ideas, it was hardly fashionable at that time to focus on the natural world, and no Russian writer apart from Gogol had ever thought to champion the steppe, let alone see poetry in it. Deciding to tell the story of the journey of a nine-year-old boy being taken across the steppe in late summer to start at a school in another town was also a courageous decision. The lonely Egorushka, who understands neither where he is going nor why, and unhappy at having to leave his mother, is hardly a conventional literary hero, and the story has no plot as such.
Chekhov might not have been able to smell the hay when he started
i ле Steppe', as he put it, but it is a testament to the strength of his inspiration that he felt as if he were still in the middle of the steppe on a hot summer's day when he had taken command of his material.52 Tor my debut in a literary journal I have chosen the steppe, which people have not written about for a long time,' he wrote to an older writer colleague, when he was hard at work:
I describe the plain, the lilac horizon, sheep farmers, Jews, priests, nighttime storms, coaching inns, steppe birds etc. .. . Maybe it will open people's eyes and show them what riches, what realms of beauty lie still untapped and how much room to breathe Russian artists have. If my story manages to remind my colleagues about the steppe, which they have forgotten about, if just one of the themes I have sketched out in my insignificant and dry way gives a poet somewhere pause for thought I will be happy.S3
Chekhov addresses the unsung beauty of the steppe right in the middle of the story. The sun has gone down on the second day of the journey, and Egorushka has dozed off to sleep in the dilapidated old carriage he is travelling in w th his two chaperones, Ins uncle Ivan, a merchant, and Father Khristofor, both of whom are making the journey across the steppe to sell wool. While Egorushka sleeps, the narrator emerges from the shadows, to reveal himself as a person who has a highly emotional relan'onshi :> to the landscape the young boy is travelling through:
You travel on for an hour or two more . . . You come across a silent old grandfather kurgan or an anoent stone figure, placed there goodness knows when or by whom, a night bird flies noiselessly over the earth, and slowly into your mind come the steppe legends, the stories of people you have met, the tales told by your nanny from the steppe, and everything you have managed to grasp with your soul and see with your own eyes. And then you begin to feel triumphant beauty, youth, strength, and a passionate thirst for life in the chirring of insects, suspicious figures and kurgans, in the deep sky, in the moonlight, the flight of the night birds, in everything you see and hear; your soul responds to this beautiful and severe native landscape, and you wish you could be flying over the steppe with the night bird too. Yet you sense tension and sadness in this triumphant beauty and surfeit of happiness, as if the steppe is aware that it is lonely, that its riches and its inspiration, superfluous and uncelebrated, will be pointlessly wasted on the world, and through the joyous humming you can hear its mournful, hopeless cry: a singer, a singer!54
Chekhov may have retained ambivalent feelings about Taganrog, whose thin patina of European culture concealed an Asiatic town of unpaved streets and squalor, but his love for the steppe rema led unbounded throughout his life as a key source of poetic inspiration. A
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frequent criticism levelled at him was that he never made it clear where he stood on issues and that he remained coolly impartial in his writing. He wore his heart on his sleeve as far as the steppe was concerned, however, as the passage above shows. It was he who alone answerea the steppe's call for a singer. Almost a decade later, as a convalescing consumptive in faraway Nice, he wrote two more stories set m the steppe. 'If I didn't have the bacillus, I would settle in Taganrog for two or three years,' he wrote nostalgically to his Taganrog correspondent Pavel Iordanov soon after finishing them. Remembering all his experiences on the steppe as a young man made him feel sad, he told Iordanov; he was sorry that there were no writers in Taganrog 'and that this valuable and beloved material is not needed by anyone'.55
The beauty of the steppe landscape for Chekhov was always tinged with melancholy, and he was well aware that many Russians found ts boundless expanses oppressive. Responding in February 1888 to a story Dmitry Grigorovich had written about a young man committing suicide, Chekhov argued that, wh-le in <:he West people perished because they suffocated from a lack of space, in Russia "it was because there was an excess of it. The struggle between man and nature in Russia was unique:
On the one hand there ia physical weakness, nervousness, early sexual maturity, a passionate thirst for life and for truth, dreams of work as wide-ranging as the steppe, restless analysis, poverty of knowledge alongside rich flights of thought, while on the other hand there is the boundless plain, the severe climate, a grey, severe populace with a difficult, cold history, the Tatar yoke, the bureaucracy, poverty, ignorance, damp cities, Slavic apathy and so on . . ,56
The last reference Chekhov made to the steppe in his writing was an indirect but highly personal one. During a particularly long pause in the middle of The Cherry Orchard, his last work, we hear the mysterious sound of a breaking string. The sound is distant, 'as if it had come from the sky', and is described as 'dying away, sad'. The play's romantic dreamers typically refuse to believe the practical-minded Lopakhin's rational explanation that 'a bucket must have broken loose in the mines somewhere far away'. The hopeless Gaev thinks it's a heron, the eternal student Trofimov thinks it's an owl, and whatever it is, it gives Ranevskaya the creeps.57 Chekhov had first heard this sound when visiting a coal mine as a teenager, according to his sister. Apart from picturesque gulHes and ravines, the 'Switzerland' of the Don region was famous for its mines, which produced over half of Russia's coal. Chekhov told his family that there were mines near to the farm he stayed on in the spring of 1887, and he first introduced the sound of the breaking string into 'Fortune', the story written immediately following his return home: