His sight was extraordinarily keen. He was so long-sighted that the brown steppe was for him always full of life and interest. He had only to look into the distance to see a fox, a hare, a bustard, or some other animal keeping a distance from men. There was nothing strange in seeing a hare running away or a flying bustard—everyone crossing the steppes could see them; but it was not vouchsafed to everyone to see wild animals in their own haunts when they were not running nor hiding, nor looking about them in alarm. Yet Vassia saw foxes playing, hares washing themselves with their paws, bustards preening their wings and hammering out their hollow nests. Thanks to this keenness of sight, Vassia had, besides the world seen by everyone, another world of his own, accessible to no one else, and probably a very beautiful one, for when he saw something and was in raptures over it it was impossible not to envy him.
“There are many places that will be understood by neither critics nor the public; they will seem trifling to both, not meriting attention, but I anticipate with pleasure the two or three literary epicureans who will understand and value these same places, and that is enough for me,” Chekhov wrote to Y. P. Polonsky in January 1888, in another of the defensive letters he felt impelled to write to friends while working on the most ambitious project he had yet undertaken. In an essay entitled “Chekhov’s ‘Steppe’: A Metapoetic Journey” (1987), a literary epicurean named Michael Finke fulfills Chekhov’s expectations of being understood with an almost Vassia-like perspicacity. He sees what no previous critic has seen—motifs and allusions tucked into “places” of no apparent significance (such as the floor of a shop marked with kabbalistic symbols or two peculiar pictures on the wall of the reception room in Moisey’s inn)— and his essay permanently changes our view of the story as an inspired but inchoate effort, written before Chekhov was in full possession of his artistic powers. Conventional criticism of “The Steppe” has taken Chekhov’s self-criticism at face value (almost always a mistake), and missed the figure in the carpet that Finke’s reading reveals. The story, as it appears under Finke’s high-powered lens, proves to be a work of breathtaking artistic unity. Details that seemed random and incoherent fall into place as elements of an intricate design—but one so cleverly hidden it is small wonder that no one saw it for a hundred years. “If a story is to seem at all original,” Finke writes, “its order must somehow be disguised, known only in retrospect, and those laws of necessity governing the function of detail must be masked.” “The Steppe,” as Finke suggests, is “a sort of dictionary of Chekhov’s poetics,” a kind of sample case of the concealed literary weapons Chekhov would deploy in his work to come.
In the short story “The Schoolmistress,” written ten years later, we see how the compression that made Chekhov so uneasy in 1888 was now his modus operandi. It is another emblematic story of a journey, but this one is the mere return day trip of a spinster schoolteacher, Marya Vassilyevna, from the town where she goes to get her monthly salary. The teacher is one of the pathetic drudges who (as Chekhov learned at Melikhovo) taught in Russia’s district schools in the nineteenth century (and may still do so in the twenty-first). The life of a schoolteacher
is a hardworking, an uninteresting, life, and only silent, patient cart horses like Marya Vassilyevna could put up with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked about a vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and gave up the work.
The teacher is traveling in a horse-drawn cart, driven by an old coachman named Semyon. It is April, with traces of winter, “dark, long, and spiteful,” still on the ground, but with delicious signs of spring in the air—to which, however, Marya Vassilyevna is impervious. She has taken this trip monthly for thirteen years and “whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her.” Like Kuzmitchov obsessively thinking about wool and prices and Varlamov, Marya obsessively thinks about the examinations she must prepare her students for, about the brutality of the school watchman, about the indifference of Zemstvo officials, about the difficulty of obtaining firewood for the schoolroom. Chekhov pauses to tell us that Marya Vassilyevna was orphaned at ten, and can remember almost nothing of her early life, in a large flat in Moscow, near the Red Gate. Then he gives us an unforgettable image: Marya’s one relic from her childhood is a photograph of her mother, but it has faded so badly that nothing remains visible but the hair and the eyebrows. We feel we have seen such photographs, but have never before thought of them as metaphors for fading memory.
As the teacher and the coachman travel through an increasingly mired terrain, they meet a landowner named Hanov, driving a carriage with four horses. Marya Vassilyevna is acquainted with Hanov, and so are we: he is our old friend the good man who cannot make good, cousin to Ivanov, Laevsky, Astrov, Vershinin. In this version, he is “a man of forty with a listless expression and a face that showed signs of wear, who was beginning to look old, but was still handsome and admired by women. He lived in his big homestead alone, and was not in the service; and people used to say of him that he did nothing at home but walk up and down the room whistling, or play chess with his old footman. People said, too, that he drank heavily.”
After greeting Hanov, the schoolteacher goes back to her obsessions. But the thought floats into her mind that Hanov is attractive. When the road grows so muddy that Semyon and Hanov have to get down and lead their horses, she watches Hanov and thinks, “In his walk there was something, just perceptible, that betrayed in him a being already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin.” She gets a whiff of alcohol, and goes on to feel “dread and pity for this man going to ruin for no visible cause or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin.” She pursues the fantasy—and quickly dismisses it.