The change in Chekhov’s writing came when he was back in Moscow, meditating on the landscape from afar. ‘The Steppe’, which narrates the wagon journey of a nine-year-old boy along the highroad from one provincial town to another, was Chekhov’s debut as a serious writer. The journalist Burenin admired the plotless story, and told Chekhov that his description of a storm that gathered but did not burst was the ‘height of perfection’, adding that, though Chekhov did not know how to write long stories, ‘The Steppe’ was just a harbinger of the great works to follow. In all this anxiety about literary length, one senses the shadows of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky over Chekhov, who was a provincial schoolboy in the years of the two novelists’ greatest fame and creative power. Chekhov told his publisher Suvorin that he had bought some Dostoevsky in a bookshop and found it ‘good, but very long and immodest’, with ‘many pretensions’.
The superfluity of unbounded space summoned Chekhov to modesty. He sensed that to be laconic is ethically correct, that brevity in the temporal art of writing fits our place in the world, for we are small creatures and should not try to be bigger than we are, nor tire one another, for time and space are tiring enough. Yet his writing is full of time and space. His art is the art of making things rise in clear form out of flat space. As one critic said of his story ‘On the Road’ (which was greeted in the capital with a ‘furore’ of enthusiasm), the characters come out ‘in relief’; their romance arises and is extinguished in the course of half a page. On his native steppe, a journey, however long and monotonous, traces only a negligible fraction of the map; the sound of a bucket breaking off in a coal mine resonates over miles of empty space; the cobweb railway route of his journey though Rostov to a Cossack wedding in Novocherkassk (a roundabout route which Chekhov drew humourously in a letter) involved nine-hour waits for connections, and every apathetic town and station looked like every other. In his short form, however, Chekhov magically created a sense of long duration. (Writing is ‘just a conjuring trick’, he told his brother, the essence of nonsense, prestidigitation pretending to be magic; ‘you can write about coffee grounds and surprise the reader by conjury,’ he said.)
In ‘On the Road’, Chekhov creates a vast character in a few pages. Likharyov is ‘a giant rock’, a Russian Don Quixote who has spent his life pursuing ideas. (The story, whose epigraph, from Lermontov, is ‘a little golden storm cloud [tuchka] spent the night / On the breast of a giant rock’, inspired Rachmaninov’s symphonic fantasy ‘The Rock’.) His voice is a deep bass, but Likharyov speaks in tenor from fear of his own loudness. Faith is a capacity of the spirit, inborn, like talent, he says; it is a capacity which Russians ‘possess in the highest degree’, living out their lives in an endless sequence of beliefs and passions. Likharyov first became a slave to science, then turned to nihilism, populism, a Slavophile passion for ancient Rus, Ukrainian nationalism, archaeology, folk crafts, and finally the renunciation of private property and Tolstoyan non-resistance to evil. His spirit is larger than all his intellectual passions; his eyes are constantly searching for something in the snowclouds. Now he is on his way to dig for coal in the mines on the bare steppe.
In Dostoevsky’s novels (in which, as Shalamov noted, there is no landscape at all) ideas fill the scene, people talk endlessly, coiled and struggling inside thought. In Chekhov’s steppe stories, people talk about ideas, but nature takes their words and muffles them, or diffuses them into the landscape, of which they are an incidental part. In ‘The Steppe’, even chauvinistic polemic of the kind that filled the pages of Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary during the war of faith between Russia and Turkey in the Balkans (which excited fierce patriotism in Chekhov’s home town during his final years at school) is carried away, diminished. ‘Our Mother Russia is he-ad of all the world!’ the traveller Kiruha sings out, and the echo catches his words, and carries them onwards, ‘and it seemed as though stupidity itself were rolling away on heavy wheels over the steppe’.
After Tanais, we came to Taganrog. The tree-lined streets were empty, the late morning sun warmed the dusty pavements between clean-edged shadows, and everything was still. All the same, time, which had loosened on the steppe, immediately seemed to have twisted back into a raveclass="underline" taut, baroque and self-aware. Though Taganrog’s name (taken from the headland on which it stands) is ancient, and no one is certain what it means, the city arose in an age which took history seriously. It quickly turned itself into a showcase of its own proud cosmopolitan past. The memorial museum to Tsar Alexander I (who died here, spirit-sore and weary, in 1825) was the first of its kind in Russia. Ever since then, Taganrog has been a town in which local history has been cherished with particular attention. A memorial museum to Chekhov opened just over a hundred years later. At a time when Stalin’s secret police were going through the pre-revolutionary collections of caricatures of local personalities in the town museum in the Alferaki Palace as they drew up lists of local aristocrats and bourgeoisie in the hunt for class enemies, Chekhov was still easy to love, lightly accommodating Russia’s new historical disposition. He was Molotov’s favourite Russian writer. Molotov told Chuev that Chekhov was ‘for socialism’, which, ‘as he expressed through one of his characters, he thought would occur in two hundred years’ time’. Yet, Molotov added, there were times when he could not bear to read Chekhov, because for all the ‘precision’ of his writing, there was ‘no optimism in him’.
Founded by Peter the Great as a base for his fleet five years before St Petersburg, Taganrog stands on a curving promontory where the steppe meets the sea. It was one of the first Russian towns to be laid out to a premeditated street plan. With his Cossack troops, Peter had at last taken the Turkish fort at Azov across the water. Taganrog’s first mayor was Cornelis Cruys, a Dutch-Norwegian sailor and geographer, whom Peter had recruited on his self-improving visit to the Netherlands. Cruys made the first maps of the Don river and the coast, and, in collaboration with the Tsar, produced the first Russian atlas, published in Amsterdam. A fortress, named for the Holy Trinity, was built at Taganrog with its own stone-walled harbour. With its pentagonal geometry, the plan of the fortress resembles a military medal emblazoned on the soft flow of the shoreline.
Russia only held the headland for twelve years before another defeat by Turkey, which forced Peter to return the Azov fort and demolish his new town. Taganrog lay desolate for almost six decades, until Russia was victorious again, and mapped the place anew, drawing up administrative boundaries and dividing and distributing the steppe to landowners. This was wild frontier territory, virgin land that had never felt the plough, attracting ruffians, outlaws and rebels. No attempt was made to track down fugitives who fled south, and they settled on the fertile grassland, tilling and sowing for its new Russian owners. Meanwhile the empire’s military frontier moved south. With the conquest of the Crimea, Taganrog lost its strategic significance and became a place of peaceful trade. Catherine the Great, who cherished the talented and enterprising of every nation, invited Greeks and Italians to colonise the city. The beneficence, high-living sociability and easy-going corruption of the Mediterranean merchants gave Taganrog its style of ostentatious bonhomie, which even communism could not quite erase.