His response to Pleshcheev exuded the highest spirits. To receive more such letters, he declared, he would give up smoking and drinking for the rest of his life. Pleshcheev and Korolenko must accompany him on a Volga trip in the spring. There would be plenty of wine and music. Already the itch was upon him, he added, to undertake something big again. There was the noveclass="underline" "What marvelous women! What funerals and what weddings!" (February 9, 1888.) And to Alexander he jubilantly announced: "I'll probably not return to the newspapers! Farewell, pastl I'll occasionally write for Suvorin, but the remainder I'll probably drop." (February 15-17, 1888.)
Early in March The Steppe appeared in the Northern Herald. Reactions quickly followed. "I hear so much praise of The Steppe," wrote Pleshcheev. "Garshin is out of his mind over it. He read it through twice at a sitting." This must have deeply impressed Chekhov, for along with
Korolenko he placed at the very top of the list of contemporary young prose writers the brilliant, pessimistically sensitive V. M. Garshin, whom he had met on his last visit to Petersburg. Indeed, a mutual friend reported Garshin as saying during a calclass="underline" "I've come to tell you some remarkable news. A new, first-class writer has appeared in Russia ... it is as though an abscess has broken and I now feel so fine, better than I have felt for a long time." And the various published reviews that soon appeared in the periodical press lauded Chekhov's latest effort as a highly talented and original work, although some of the critics had reservations about one aspect or another. Suvorin forgot his tea while reading the tale, wrote Alexander from Petersburg, and he reported Burenin as saying that all of Korolenko and Garshin paled before it. Only in Gogol and Tolstoy could you find such writing, declared this feared pundit of New Times.
As Chekhov himself sensed, in The Steppe he had contributed something fresh and new to Russian literature, and this novelty no doubt accounted for some of the extravagant praise. For the tale is a kind of lyrical hymn to the endless expanse of the Russian steppe, a theme only Gogol before him had treated, in Taras Bulba, but with a different artistic purpose and less effectively. The story is the simple account of a boy of nine, Yegorushka, whose uncle, bent on trading, takes him along in a cart across the steppe to deliver him to a family friend in a distant town where he is to go to school. A series of adventures occur which break up into several short stories, an obvious concession to Chekhov's difficulty in writing a lengthy, sustained, sequential narrative. The steppe and the boy provide the essential unity, but what color and life and characters Chekhov packs into these pages! The whole is a tone poem of nature, in which the sights and sounds and smells of all living things of the steppe are caught in their ebb and flow from the dewy fresh dawn through the merciless heat of the day to sunset and the cooling darkness of night. Then the gathering forces of the storm, transformed like so much else in the narrative by the wondering imagination of a child, assume strange and striking shapes and colors and meaning: "To the left someone seemed to strike a match in the sky—a pale phosphorescent streak gleamed and went out. There was a distant sound as though someone were walking barefoot over a metal roof which gave off a hollow rumble."
Brief encounters, incidents, and snatches of conversation define and perfectly etch the peasants, traders, and drivers who people the broad steppe road steeped in the mystery of ancient legends, fearsome bandits, .and deeds of violence. There are the brilliant characterizations of the innkeeper Moses and his brother Solomon, inspired by figures from Chekhov's youth, as are many other features of the tale; the wonderfully human priest who accompanies Yegorushka and his uncle; the harsh, whip-wielding steppe entrepeneur Varlamov; and the fascinatingly evil and dominating peasant Dymov, whose further adventures, Pleshcheev thought, would make excellent material for a play. Chekhov surprisingly answered: "You wrote that you liked Dymov as a subject. Such natures as that of the insolent Dymov are created by life not for heresy, hoboing, or for leading asinine lives, but for out-and-out revolution. But there will never be a revolution in Russia, and Dymov will end by drinking himself to death or landing in prison." (February 9, 1888.)
However, the character who worms his way into the hearts of readers is little Yegorushka, the quiet, reflective, and rather sad child. His experiences during this journey across the steppe, so thrilling for him, seem to mature and develop his personality. One part of his life is over, and Chekhov characteristically ends his tale with a picture of little Yegorushka sitting on a bench, alone, far from home, and weeping. Anxiously he anticipates the new, strange fate that awaits him in school, and he wonders: "What sort of life will it be?" . . . The question was an invitation to continue the story, and Chekhov affirmed his intention of making Yegorushka the central figure of a novel. But like all his plans in this respect, it was never fulfilled.
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Chekhov felt lazy and sucked dry after finishing The Steppe. He wanted simply "to lie in bed and spit at the ceiling." Would he ever do any serious writing again? he asked. Meanwhile, the fifteen hundred roubles which he had so far earned that year had already been "scattered"— household expenses, debts, entertainment. Creditors were an importunate breed, he said, worse than mosquitoes. There was not even enough money left to pay Kiselev the hundred roubles owed him — Chekhov ought to have married wealth, he plaintively told his friend. Nor did the spare time he now devoted to medicine help much. He received only three roubles for healing the servant of a countess, he ironically explained, but at least he had the pleasure of talking with his patient's mistress. Though he was proud to point out that Ivanov was being performed at various provincial theaters, he received no further income from it. And his one-act play, Swan Song, which was finally staged at the Korsh Theater on February 19, 1888, brought in very little.
Three days later, he informed Leontiev-Shcheglov: "For lack of something to do, I sat down and wrote a vaudeville entitled The Bear." The idea had occurred to him after seeing his friend, N. N. Solovtsov, play the part of a swashbuckling sailor tamed by a society woman in a Russian version of Pierre Berton's vaudeville, Les Jiwns de Cadillac. This giant actor with his roaring voice suggested to Chekhov the behavior of a "Russian bear" in a similar situation. Lazarev-Gruzinsky tells of visiting Chekhov at this time and hearing him read the manuscript with all the perfection of a practiced actor — Chekhov rarely agreed to read any of his writings in public because he thought it undignified, but he thoroughly enjoyed such home performances. The sophisticated Northern Herald, he conjectured in mock seriousness, would now anathematize him for writing such trivial things, but The Bear, when it was produced six months later (October 28), turned out to be the most successful of his one-act plays. Over the years it became a constant source of income — a milch cow, he said, instead of a bear. "A gypsy," he later wrote Suvorin, "would not have got so much from a real bear as I got from an imaginary one." (March 6, 1889.) Curiously enough, it was the only dramatic work of Chekhov that Tolstoy admitted liking; he roared with laughter when he saw it on the stage.