‘There is treasure out there, but what use is it if it is buried in the ground?’ Chekhov’s old shepherd asks in ‘Fortune’; ‘it will just be lost, without any use, like chaff or sheep’s droppings … not a soul can see it.’ The shepherd believes that the treasure belongs to the peasants (‘it’s our treasure’), not to the landowners or the authorities. Full of new impressions of the Don steppe, which he loved and where he had once ‘felt at home and known every butterfly’, Chekhov wrote ‘Fortune’ (whose title, ‘Schast’e’, also means ‘happiness’) as soon as he returned from the south in June 1887. The story became his favourite. He considered it the best thing he had written, ‘quasi a symphony’, dedicating it to his friend, the poet Yakov Polonsky, ‘with particular love’. ‘Fortune’ is filled with glancing references to the great historical events that touched the landscape of the Don steppe and the north shores of the Azov: the building of Peter the Great’s navy; the fortress of Taganrog; the return of the Cossacks with silver and gold stolen from the French after the defeat of Napoleon; the sudden death of Tsar Alexander I in a palace in Taganrog; the liberation of the serfs in 1861. Yet the idle dialogue of the simple men standing like columns on the plain, and Chekhov’s evocation of the landscape (which moved his friend Levitan to praise him as a ‘paysagiste’), drop these events on to the great expanse of time, archaeological time. Recorded history diminishes to a few specks, clearly outlined on a vast horizon. As well as enchanted treasure, the shepherds believe in pike that laugh, watermelons that whistle, rocks that hum and a hare that stops in its path and says in a human voice, ‘Hullo, muzhiki!’ The steppe itself breathes, thinks, sings; human thought moves across the brown land, among plants, rocks and animals, faint among other elements, unheard. The last words of the story are: ‘the sheep were also thinking …’
If cities of stone transform time into rigid space in which we can try to orient ourselves within history, the unbounded steppe loosens time again, diminishing historical particularity to a whisper in the grass. In the spring of 1887 Chekhov absorbed again the unique time-patterning of the steppe. His acute perception of the way in which vast open space unshapes human time reshaped his own writing as he transformed himself in the course of that year from ‘A. Chekhonte’, scribbler of comic sketches for newspapers, into Anton Chekhov, writer of assured ‘artistic’ prose for literary ‘thick journals’. There is so much space in Russia that ‘a little human being does not have the strength to orient himself’, Chekhov remarked in a letter to the older writer Dmitri Grigorovich two days after he finished his long plotless story ‘The Steppe’. For Chekhov, Russian landscape creates a particular human plight, whose ardours are more spiritual than physical; the plight is in essence tragic. All the energies of the artist must be turned towards two distinct forces, man and nature, Chekhov told Grigorovich. In Russia, uniquely, these two forces are engaged in a terrifying struggle. Whereas in western Europe people perish because their living space is cramped and stuffy, in Russia people perish from an excess of space.
In the weeks of what he called his ‘Kalmyk life’ of nomadic travel on the steppe (which he crossed by train, looking out at the changing scene with a gentler eye than the machine-loving Lef writer Kushner), Chekhov collected a mass of material, filling himself ‘to the gorge’ on the poetry of the landscape. The train has its own poetry, the poetry of the fleeting apparition, and in Chekhov’s letters there are lists of sights that blink past in the train window. ‘Topknots, oxen, kites, white huts, southern streams, the branches of the Donetsk road with one telegraph wire … rust-coloured dogs, greenery … everything flashes past like a dream … it’s hot,’ Chekhov wrote. He had found a place, he said, as rich in seams of untouched beauty as it was rich in coal; a place that would show the Russian artist that ‘it is still not crowded’. He was animated by the steppe, and in his turn he animated it so vividly that critics talked of his prose as ‘pantheist’. He gave nature the power of mood, intention and play. A poplar tree is lonely, uprooted plants are frightened by a storm cloud, the grass sings and sorrows, a storm rages around a Cossack inn, trying to get inside the building with the unassuaged hatred of the once powerful, birds laugh and weep hysterically, the steppe sighs and smiles, and the sheep are stunned and depressed to the point of numbness by their own slow, drawn-out thoughts.
Chekhov’s reflections on geographical space were imbricated with his fretful self-questioning about just how much space, and how much time, his own writing should occupy. He wrote to Polonsky about the difficulty of longer forms, and to Grigorovich about his inexperience at writing at length, his ‘constant and ingrained fear of writing too much’ (duly apologising at the end of his letter for its wearying length). Writing in longer form was something he said he simply ‘did not know how to do’. His motifs, he knew, were light and dry; pages turned out ‘so laconic as to appear positively compressed, impressions piling up against each other in a great heap’. He was in two minds. ‘All in all it’s better to write small things than big things, they are less pretentious and the public likes them,’ he wrote in a letter; three days later, he was talking again of his contempt for ‘trivial pieces’ and his desire to work ‘on a bigger scale or not at all’. The year before Chekhov’s return to the south, Grigorovich had told him to take more time over his writing, to find a different decorum, for he had ‘real talent’ and should not write about dirty feet, twisted toenails and the deacon’s navel, as he had in his bathhouse sketches. But to Chekhov the medic, nothing was unclean, and he carried on writing freely to his family from the south about the effects of travel on his gut and the ever-changing condition of the varicose vein in his leg.
From Taganrog, he continued to write small pieces as Chekhonte, sending them back to the Petersburg Gazette for money, which was short. ‘The Cossack’, a moral fable set on the steppe, in which one act of uncharity determines the course of a whole life, he found too ‘Tolstoyish’ for his liking. ‘The Inhabitants’ evokes the absolute laziness of a southern provincial town, and in ‘Volodya’ he addressed the recent spate of suicides among students at the Taganrog gymnasium, a strange epidemic that was read as a sign of ‘sick times’, for the political malaise that Dostoevsky diagnosed had reached the Russian south.