The Steppe

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.