Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91. Translated from the Russian by Ronald Wilks. Penguin Classics pb, 2001, 369 pp.
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) had published many short commercial stories in popular periodicals before ‘The Steppe’, which was one of the first he produced for a more serious publication that allowed for more expansive and literary fiction.
More of a novella, at around 100 pages, it sets the tone for the selection of his early work that follows. It’s an impressionistic, atmospheric account of a journey by cart across the vast Russian steppe to Ukraine. A young boy is being taken by his uncle and the local priest to attend school in Kiev. The adults are on a mission to sell wool, and pass the boy on before their destination to a group of peasants who also have piles of wool to sell. They encounter various people en route, fish for crayfish in a river, and endure a range of weather conditions, including a heavy storm.
All is narrated from the point of view of the boy, and it’s his rite of passage that is embodied in this journey. He’s frightened to be leaving his home and his widowed mother, and apprehensive about the unknown future. Chekhov is brilliant at tapping into and conveying these elemental feelings that we’ve all experienced but rarely have the capacity of inclination to articulate, or talk about with others.
It’s that tendency to talk with other people without really communicating, or clarifying what is dominating our feelings, that recurs in most of these stories. In ‘The Kiss’ an army officer stays overnight at a boring retired general’s house with some drunken, even more boring fellow soldiers; when alone in a room a lovely woman enters and kisses him, mistaking him for (presumably) her lover. An unimaginative, socially awkward man, this has a profound erotic effect on him – but he lacks the imagination or confidence to build upon this epiphanic experience.
Epiphanies of a sort also take place in other stories, but of a kind that James Joyce would make use of: they are mysterious, not necessarily understood or built upon constructively by the person undergoing them. In ‘Verochka’ a young woman summons the courage to declare her love to a man on the point of leaving the family home after a visit, but the man’s reaction isn’t what she’d have hoped for.
Unhappy, disappointed or anxious characters abound. A married couple (‘The Name-Day Party’ – which influenced Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’) squabbles and the pair lash out at each other, then something awful happens that could bring about reconciliation – but that doesn’t seem likely. Chekhov doesn’t really go in for neat, predictably conclusive endings.
An ageing professor of medicine is the existentially challenged protagonist of ‘A Dreary Story’ – doctors appear quite often, unsurprisingly, given Chekhov’s medical training – and their forensic/diagnostic approach to people is reflected here and in the rest of this selection. This man has mortality on his mind, and he critically appraises everything in his life, from family and friends to his students and the wider cultural and philosophical world, but he’s incapable of showing insight into his own feelings and emotions.
This story is translated elsewhere as ‘A Boring Story’ – and that’s the danger of some of the tales here: they deal with characters and situations that tend to lack energy and dynamism, and this leads to passages that drag. Characters in ‘The Duel’, the last story here, and another of short novella length, argue at length about their conflicting convictions about philosophy, science, evolution and so on, as usual not really communicating. The duel of the title results from one such dispute that turns more acrimonious than usual. What is dealt with in Chekhov’s Russian compatriots’ fiction in dramatic, even tragic terms, is subverted here into comedic anti-climax.
It can take patience and forbearance to get into these stories, as they’re unusually slow-burning and allusive. I recall reading the later stories in ebook form and finding them more varied and rewarding, but this collection is still worth reading for an insight into Chekhov’s early development as a writer of some of the finest short fiction ever produced. He was to influence pretty much every writer of any merit who came after him.
