It is especially appropriate that this final selection should begin with, and take its title from, The Steppe, since it was the appearance of that renowned saga of the prairies which marked and brought about Chekhov's elevation from the minor to the major league among Russian writers. Its publication in the St
' The Oxford Chekhov (London and Oxford, 1965—80), vols. iv-ix.
2 See pp. 239-46.
Petersburg monthly Scverny vestnik ('The Northern Herald') in March 1888 remains the most important single landmark in the crcativc evolution of its author, then 28 years old.
Chekhov had begun his literary career in 1880 as the author of short comic items possessing little artistic merit. They were written for money (but then, all Chekhov's work was written for money) and published in various humorous magazines of the pcriod. He felt obligcd to maximize such earnings by churning out more and more 'balderdash', as he himself later called it. But a more serious sense of purpose was sometimes dimly discernible even at the outset, and this asserted itself increasingly. The result was that Chekhov, chiefly popular in his early twenties as a lightweight humorist, had nevertheless already begun—during the two or three years preceding the publication of The Steppe—to attract the attention of influen- tial Russian critics and litterateurs. Older writers, of whom D. V. Grigorovich was the best known, began lecturing him on the need to take his talent more scriously, and to write less hasti Iy.
The first fruit of this advice was The Steppe, and particular significance attaches to the status of the publication in which it appeared. Scvcrny vestnik was onc of the revered 'thick journals' in which almost all scrious Russian literary works were first offered to readers. Now, nothing of Chekhov's had ever previously featurcd in any of these august literary monthlies, and so the importance of this promotion — from the pages of sundry despised or scmi-despised weeklies and dailies—could be lost on no one. Everyone knew that if the young man was ever to rival his great predecessors—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and the others—Thick Journal status was indispensable.
Hc now had 'lift-off'. This is at once evident from the quality of the story itsclf—written, curiously, enough, at high speed despite the insistcnce of Chekhov's seniors that he should pace himself. His reward was the immcdiate ecstatic reception accorded by ordinary rcadcrs, as well as by his self-appointed senior mcntors and various influential reviewers, to a work which so cle.irly surpassed his most promising previous achievements. In the sixteen years of life remaining to him he was indeed to pace himself as he had been advised, becoming only a quarter as prolific—in terms of pages of fiction pub- lished per annum—as he had been during his eight-year-long immature phase. But the main point is that he first hit the highest level of the short-story writer's art with The Steppe, and that he afterwards rarely descended from it—even then for no more than the odd page or two.
Though The Steppe clearly pointed to Chekhov's future it is also important for its links with his past, since the background is that of his boyhood summer holidays—the Ukrainian and South Russian plains. The Chekhovs would camp there en Jamille on their way by horse- or ox-cart to visit the future author's paternal grandfather, Yegor, who had been a serf in youth, but who had since purchased his own and his family's freedom, and who had also become the manager of a vast Ukrainian estate. These details help to explain why Chekhov chose to make the central character of The Steppe a 9-year-old boy, and to present the world through the eyes of this youthful hero who is in many ways the author himself as a child. Here he was repeating on a larger scale the success of such early stories as Boys, Grisha, Volodya, An Incident, and Sleepy, which all centred, with varying degrees of humour and tragedy, on the lives of children. Perhaps Chekhov felt that The Steppe summed up all he had to say in fiction about children, for there were to be no comparable juvenile heroes in the fiction which followed. This is, incidentally, a substantial story by his standards, belonging in bulk as well as quality to a small group of later masterpieces of similar length: The Duel, An Anonymous Story, Three Years, and My Life. It is also remarkable for describing the most extensive journey in Chekhov's fiction. In 1887, some months before writing The Steppe, Chekhov had revived memories of his native prairies by revisiting his birthplace, Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, and by touring the surrounding area so familiar to him from childhood. Hence the echoes in the story of such characteristic features as the archaeologically significant kurgany (ancient burial mounds) and kamennyye baby (menhirs), the buryan (coarse grass and wecds), the oxcn, the water-towers, the windmills, the kites, the Ukrainian peasants, the Cossacks, and above all the im- mense expanse of the seemingly endless plains. No other work of Chekhov's is so saturated with landscape.
Other noteworthy stories in this volume take us back again into southern landscapes familiar to the author. One of them, The Beauties, contains a recognizable portrait of his grandfather Yegor among other colourful locals. Thieves and Peasant Women too have their southern coloration, while The Savage evokes the Don Cossacks of the area in all the picturesque barbarity for which they were notorious—and which is often amusingly portrayed in Chckhov's correspondence.3 Yet more exotic autobiographical resonances echo from ln Exile and Cusev. These draw on the adventurous journey undertaken by Chekhov in 1890 across Siberia (the location of /n Exile) to the Island of Sakhalin, an unsavoury penal colony; he returned by ship via the Indian Ocean, which becomcs the last resting place of the Gusev who givcs his name to the story. Otherwise the settings of the scorics in this volume are somewhat vaguer, in Chckhov's more characteristic manner—rural, for the most part, and evoking the atmosphere of the ccntral Russian countryside south of Moscow where he owned an estate in the 1890S.
Ry that time Chckhov himself had, in effcct, become a member of Russia's social elite through his prowess in two of the libcral profcssions—the medical as wcll as the litcrary, for he was a qualificd and sporadically practising doctor; he also became a landowner on a more than modest scalc. Yet he never formally acquired the lcgal status of dvoryanin (member of the gcntry) normal for a succcssful professional man or country squire. Moreover, a.s thc storics in this volume so richly illustratc, hc nevcr forgot his origins as the son of a failcd provincial grocer and grandson of a onc-time peasant and serf.
In his work as a wholc hc chicfly focuses on thc privileged class which hc himself had joined as an outsidcr—that of thc ' Scu Thi' O.v/iirJ ClieHinv, iv. j; v. 4-5.
landed gentry, officials, and professional people; and also of the 'intelligentsia', a notoriously elusive group overlapping those previously mentioned. Eternal students, ailing university professors, bankrupt landowners, incompetent architects, fuddy-duddy grammar school masters, overworked doctors, conscience-stricken industrialists, self-deprecating, pompous, or ironical higher bureaucrats: for all their pathetic attributes (in much of Chekhov) these were yet members of the upper crust—as one look at the typical Russian peasant would at once make clear.
Typical of Chekhov such upper-crust characters indeed are, but just how far they are from exhausting his social range the present volume richly illustrates. It consists almost exclusively of stories in which the emphasis lies on characters from the less privileged levels of society.