Yet Chekhov’s modesty could not have been entirely sincere. Unlike Maupassant, he intuits forces in the universe which are not mere chance, and he is not content to limit himself to portrayal and condemnation of human folly. Chekhov’s medical training had given him a deeper, more tragic philosophy than Maupassant’s; his passion for Russia’s harsh nature, too, has a less hedonistic side than Maupassant’s enjoyment of the Côte d’Azur.
Nature, whether in the garden or the wild, dominating and directing the behaviour of the human beings who mistakenly believe they control nature, was what drew the envious attention of older writers to Chekhov’s early work. In 1887 Chekhov revisited nature. Taking a substantial advance from Suvorin, for the first time in several years, he crossed Russia from north to south to revisit not just the town where he had grown up but the steppe and forest landscapes he remembered as a child. (There were, it now transpires, other reasons for the journey: an infatuated woman desperately waiting for him in Taganrog.) If any external experience that transformed Chekhov can be identified, it is this revisiting of childhood landscapes: they had vanished. A Welshman called Hughes had established coal mining in what had been the Switzerland of the Don and built a coal-mining town, Khiuzovka: the forests were put to the axe to make pit-props, slag heaps despoiled the steppes. Lyricism about landscapes is central to Gogol’s and Turgenev’s work. Chekhov is different, for he is the first ‘green’ writer in the modern sense: he mourns the irreversible destruction of nature by man and implies that nature might be better off without man. Of the stories that resulted from this journey south, ‘Panpipes’ is perhaps the most poignant in lamenting the dried-up rivers, the disappearing birds and mammals, the deforestation.
Something of a dream of Eden underlies this sense of an irreversible fall. In Chekhov’s only novel, a half-spoof, half-serious detective story of 1884 known as The Shooting Party, the most striking element is the evocation of an estate run wild in which exotic trees (ignoring the realities of the Russian climate) create a Douanier Rousseau jungle, while human beings degenerate into liars and murderers. The peasants of ‘Panpipes’, dismayed and upset by the disappearance of their environment, are to find their dismay echoed for a long time in Chekhov’s work. He gives their phrases to the forest-loving doctor in his plays The Wood Demon and Uncle Vanya. The chopping down of trees is to be a typical token of the villain: right until the victorious Natasha in Three Sisters, celebrating her victory in driving (by breeding) the sisters out of their house by announcing that she will destroy a maple tree and an avenue of firs. From now on in Chekhov’s work characters are assigned the roles of dendrophiles or dendrophobes: they are to be judged by their effect on the environment. Not to have planted a tree becomes nearly as great a sin as having chopped one down.
For Chekhov’s critics, however, to give a moral and political lead was the prime duty of a conscientious writer. As Chekhov escaped from Suvorin’s zoo to become a self-sufficient writer, nobody reproached him directly for his lowly provincial origins, but it was clear that the public had expectations of an extended prose piece that would have to be structured along a plot and thus express a philosophy and take a stand: Chekhov’s claim to metropolitan nobility (at least of spirit) would be decided by the idealistic nature of the stand he adopted.
The extended piece, for which stories such as ‘Panpipes’ appear to be studies, was ‘The Steppe’. It is not actually Chekhov’s longest work: The Shooting Party is twice as long but, as it appeared in Chekhov’s lifetime only in daily newspaper instalments, it passed unnoticed. ‘The Steppe’ was commissioned for a very different readership from Suvorin’s New Times – the prestigious liberal monthly the Northern Herald. The story was successfully nominated for a prestigious prize; it was literally a masterpiece in that it proved that Chekhov had finished his apprenticeship to other writers and to professional editors. But ‘The Steppe’, for all the wonderment at its evocation of southern landscapes, left critics puzzled.
Where is the plot? A boy leaves his home town (presumably Taganrog), to be taken by strangers to begin his schooling in Kiev, on the other side of the Ukraine. A journey, centred on a carriage, is a conventional enough European and Russian device, from Laurence Sterne and Gogol to Chekhov. But the boy-protagonist is handed over to a convoy of drovers, the purpose of the priest who had taken him is forgotten and then turns out to be unimportant. The boy finally arrives in Kiev and we have no hint of what will happen, just as we have only odd hints of why it has happened in the first place. Delight at the story in Suvorin’s circle turned to frustration: a sequel was suggested – one in which little Yegorushka would become a suicidal adolescent, like Suvorin’s third son. Critics could not see in ‘The Steppe’ the thread holding together a succession of literary pearls – the Jewish innkeeper scene, fishing for crayfish, the thunderstorm – and felt betrayed.
Perhaps it is in response to the strong prejudice in the Russian reader that literature should make him not just happier, but elevated and enlightened, that after ‘The Steppe’ we find the influence of Tolstoy as a writer becoming very marked in Chekhov’s work. Undoubtedly, the success of ‘The Steppe’ made Chekhov secure from poverty or pressure: in the sixteen years left to him he wrote far less than in the previous seven, and he wrote very little comic work, and almost nothing that he did not want to write. But there was a catch in this freedom: public expectations brought his prose closer to the structures and themes that Tolstoy, who was after all the only novelist of genius to have survived into the mid 1880s, had made a norm.
Public recognition also led Chekhov into the theatre – the history of the Russian theatre is made by writers, with the exception only of Griboyedov and Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–86), the almost single-handed creator of the Russian tragic repertoire, who were not professional playwrights but poets or novelists who, after proving themselves masters, then ventured, like fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, into the theatre. Had Chekhov perished in 1890, it is unlikely that there would have been many performances of Ivanov let alone of The Wood Demon. If Ivanov has merit, it is in the way that Chekhov reworks many characters, for example the dispossessed Jew, the morally bankrupt intellectual landowner, from prose fiction into drama, and in the way the play parodies and thus attacks Suvorin’s successful but anti-semitic play Tatyana Repina. The Wood Demon of 1889 is all the more disastrous as a play for taking the material of ‘A Dreary Story’ and of ‘Panpipes’ and failing to make it work as theatre. Two ignoble factors explain Chekhov’s first venture into drama: firstly, a virulent love–hate of the theatre, its repertoire and denizens – he was drawn to actresses yet felt them to be ‘Machiavellis in skirts’; secondly, because through the theatre a Russian writer established an audience and readership in circles, aristocratic and provincial, that did not read the ‘thick monthlies’; thirdly, because of the highly efficient Russian Society of Playwrights and Composers, even a moderately successful play in Russia was a pension – authors collected up to ten per cent of the gross box office for every performance in any town. Over the next two decades, Ivanov thus earned Chekhov more than all the stories he was to write.