The Steppe, Anton Chekhov from The
Chekhov Omnibus, Translated by Constance Garnett, Everyman Publishers
Nothing could be seen near the house,
and nothing could be heard but the Steppe.
If Anton Chekhov is the undisputable father of
the modern drama whose unintended revolution in theatre produced Beckett,
Pinter, Ionesco and an array of intellectual successors; in Russia, his
reputation as a playwright was once taken as a misunderstanding of incompetence
for genius. The key to the Chekhovian world is his short stories and his
contribution to narrative prose is thought of as unassailable. The understated narration, the economy of
words, the refusal to preach- all the virtues of a style that is in
Maupaussant’s vein is undoubtedly Chekhovian and was outrageously modern for
his time. As an observation goes, ‘What Tolstoy took nine hundred pages to
resolve in Annan Karenina is distilled into twenty pages in The Lady with the
Dog.’ Maybe, it is unfair to compare
the rambling prose of Tolstoy with the epigrammatic style of Chekhov, but the
contrast appears remarkable to a student of literature since, to found a
formidable style variant in the same age as that of Tolstoy or Turgenev is
nothing less than revolutionary.
Chekhov was a medical man by profession and a
conscience keeper of his time and his country; indeed his very circumstance
seemed to have conspired to produce the artist as he metamorphosed. A family in
perpetual turbulence, loss of brothers and friends to disease or suicide, the
untimely deaths and unhappy love life produced in him a morality daringly
modern and a world view refreshingly subversive. The three most important
themes of his fiction--family, disease, love-- were the connecting link between
the fast changing real world where he worked and the incorruptible inner life
from which his prose originated. He did not read systematically as Tolstoy did,
but he did read exhaustively, the major French writers of his time. He did not
cultivate any intellectual godfather, but he studied the prose of his preferred
writers laboriously. In his work, he deftly combines the brevity of Guy de
Maupaussant with a journalistic pithiness, never breaches the sceptical
objectivity and allows the reader to face the full ambiguity of human thoughts
that defy a sturdy conclusion. His stories often end at a blank point in the
middle of the narration; the assault on human curiosity is complete and
forceful. Yet his languid sentences linger and limp, falter and crack, the
complications and reservations of a complex mind is presented without
hesitation. This is the endearing quality about his narrative prose filled with
his dual attitude to human beings- one of impatience at human follies and a
deep sympathy at their vulnerability to exploitation.
The Steppe is a story that rumbles like
the moors in the Wuthering Heights. Young Yegorushka is being taken to the
city, where he would board with his mother’s old friend and continue school.
His uncle and Father Khristopher accompany him in a cart all the way across the
steppe to negotiate business and in the end, bring Yegorushka to his new home.
What the young boy sees as he steps out of his home from the arms of his
mother, her sweet poppy cakes and lazy evening tea, to a world dominated by the
endless steppe where men negotiate their place and positions, forms the story. The dull monotony of the journey is relieved
by a beautiful sunrise where the first green rays of the sun sends a warmth
through the boy’s entire being. A black kite flies, a swarm of petrels pass
through the sky, a lone horseman arrives and the two adults argue pointlessly.
Yegor finds a moment of epiphany in a peasant woman’s song in the oppressive
heat when all the adults take a nap. He is taken to a dull miser’s house where
he becomes sensitive to an aristocratic presence for the first time. He is then
traded to continue his journey with a cart of young rough boys. The terror of a
thunderstorm coincides with the culmination of a favourable business deal in
the adult world. Yegor understands and experiences slowly, the politics of the
world around, the place of men in the scheme of things, the unpredictability of
life in the vast steppe, love and lovely women, their warm kindness. A beautiful read filled with the rich imagery
of an unseen land through the uncorrupted eyes of a helpless child.
