The consecration was more meaningful than the circumstances might suggest. Chekhov was indeed Leskov’s successor in important ways, not least in his knowledge of Russia. The critic Boris Eichenbaum wrote: ‘‘One of the basic principles of Chekhov’s artistic work is the endeavor to embrace all of Russian life in its various manifestations, and not to describe selected spheres, as was customary before him.’’ Dostoevsky was an urban intellectual in excelsis, Turgenev and Tolstoy belonged to the landed gentry, but Chekhov was the son of a former serf, and not only saw things differently but also saw different things than his aristocratic elders. In its breadth of experience and closeness to life, in its linguistic resources – particularly the use of Church Slavonicisms and the rendering of peasant speech – Chekhov’s work continues Leskov’s. Chekhov also has a paradoxical, Leskovian vision of the harshness and beauty of the world that goes beyond correct moral or ideological attitudes, and he has something of Leskov’s deep comic sense. Leskov was an Orthodox Christian, though of a somewhat unorthodox kind, for whom the evil and sin of the world could suddenly be pierced by holiness, and the ‘‘desperate injustice of earthly happening’’ (the words are Erich Auerbach’s, in Dante, Poet of the Secular World) was open to ‘‘the otherworldly character of justice.’’ Chekhov was an agnostic and a man of science; reason imposed greater restraints on him than on Leskov; but there are moments of transcendence, or near-transcendence, in his stories, understated, hedged round with irony, but nevertheless there, when contradiction becomes so intense and unresolvable that the ‘‘veil’’ is almost torn. Donald Rayfield speaks of this ‘‘mystic side of Chekhov – his irrational intuition that there is meaning and beauty in the cosmos,’’ and rightly says that it ‘‘aligns him more to Leskov than to Tolstoy in the Russian literary tradition.’’ It is also what distinguishes him from Maupassant and Zola, whom he greatly admired.
One quality of The Steppe was to prove a constant of Chekhov’s art: his method of composition by means of shifting impressions, the deceptive play of appearances – especially heightened in effect by the naïve incomprehension of the boy Egorushka. The world appears now enticing, now menacing; now good, now evil; now beautiful, now terrible. The picture keeps changing like the weather, and it is the weather that finally predominates: human beings are at its mercy morally as well as physically. Chekhov’s predilection for the pathetic fallacy (surprising in a man whose ideal was scientific objectivity) brings about a peculiar interchange in his work: as nature rises towards spirit, human beings sink into matter.
The Steppe contains all the emotion of Chekhov’s childhood, but hardly recollected in tranquillity. In 1886 he had begun to publish in the most prominent Petersburg newspaper, the conservative New Times, owned and edited by Alexei Suvorin, who was twenty-six years his senior. A close bond developed between the two men, based partly on their similar origins, and, despite stormy disagreements, it lasted for the rest of Chekhov’s life. In 1887, Chekhov felt a need for fresh impressions after eight years of medical study and Grub Street hackwork. He took an advance from Suvorin and headed south to revisit his birthplace and travel around the Donets region. He was away for six weeks. Experiencing again the vast freedom and beauty of the steppe was important for him, but the trip also had its painful effects. He was sickened by the provincial narrowness of his native town, as he wrote in his letters: ‘‘60,000 inhabitants busy only with eating, drinking and reproducing . . . How dirty, empty, idle, illiterate, and boring is Taganrog.’’ (We will hear almost the same lament from the narrator of My Life ten years later.) He was also alarmed by the rapid industrialization of the Donets valley. In fact, though he professed a belief in progress, he portrayed only its negative consequences in his work, its natural and human waste, and when he bought the small estate of Melikhovo, near Moscow, he became a dedicated planter of trees, an activity he continued in his last years when he moved to Yalta.
Chekhov produced The Steppe only eight months after his return from the south. Its lyricism was born of a sense of irrevocable loss. His youth was finished, as he wrote to his brother, and he looked back enviously at his nine-year-old hero. But a more profound change had also taken place in him. It is clearly marked by the distance that separates The Steppe from his next major work, ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ written in 1889, which looks ahead to the spiritual problematics of the twentieth century. Here there is no trace of Gogolian Romanticism, nor of the ‘‘hypnosis’’ (Chekhov’s word) of Tolstoy’s moral influence. The story is quintessential Chekhov, and laid the foundation for all that came after it. ‘‘Perhaps in the future it will be revealed to us in the fullest detail who Chekhov’s tailor was,’’ wrote the philosopher Lev Shestov, ‘‘but we will never know what happened to Chekhov in the time that elapsed between the completion of The Steppe and the appearance of ‘A Boring Story.’ ’’
In 1884, a year after his anointing by Leskov, Chekhov had suffered a first hemorrhage of the lungs, revealing the illness that would bear out Leskov’s prophecy. He never acknowledged that he was consumptive, though as a doctor he could hardly have mistaken the symptoms. They recurred intermittently but more and more alarmingly in the remaining twenty years of his life. His younger brother Nikolai, a gifted artist, was also consumptive. His death in June 1889 deeply shocked Chekhov. Two months later, he began writing ‘‘A Boring Story,’’ the first-person account of a famous professor of medicine faced with the knowledge of his imminent death and an absolute solitude, detached from everything and everyone around him. Shestov considers it ‘‘the most autobiographical of all his works.’’ But Shestov is right to insist that the change in Chekhov reflected something more profound than the shock of his brother’s death and the awareness that the same fate awaited him. We can only learn what it was from the works that followed, among them the four short novels he wrote between 1891 and 1896. In them his impressionism goes from the meteorological to the metaphysical.
By December 1889, Chekhov had decided to make another Russian journey, this time not to the south but across the entire breadth of the continent to Sakhalin Island, off the far eastern coast of Siberia. Given the state of his health, the trip was extremely foolhardy, but he refused to be put off. He was disappointed by the failure of his play The Wood Demon, the first version of Uncle Vanya, which had opened to boos and catcalls on November 27 and closed immediately; he was generally disgusted with literary life and the role of the fashionable writer; he longed to escape his entanglements with women, editors, theater people, and also to answer his critics, who reproached him with social indifference. He wanted, finally, to do something real. Sakhalin Island was the location of the most notorious penal colony in Russia. He planned to make a detailed survey of conditions on the island and write a report that might help to bring about reforms in the penal system.
After a few months of preparation, reading all he could find about Sakhalin and Siberia, obtaining the necessary permissions, as well as tickets for a return by sea to Odessa, he left on April 21, 1890, traveling by train, riverboat, and covered wagon. Eighty-one days later, on July 11, he set foot on the island, where he spent the next three months gathering information about the prisoners, the guards, their families, the native peoples, the climate, the flora and fauna. He interviewed hundreds of men, women, and children, inspected the mines, the farms, the schools and hospitals (he was especially indignant at the treatment of children and the conditions in the hospitals, and later sent shipments of books and medical supplies to the island). On December 2, 1890, having crossed the China Sea, circumnavigated India, and passed through the Suez Canal and the Bosphorus, he landed back in Odessa, bringing with him a pet mongoose and thousands of indexed notecards.