of the events of 'The Steppe' are seen. (Chekhov reserves portions of the text for an omniscient narrator.) It might seem that Chekhov has exceeded the bounds of plausibility in endowing a nine-year-old child with such astuteness and such complexity of thought. But, on rereading the passage, we see dial (lukliov has made no misstep. While a nine-year-old could not write the passage or speak it in those words, he could think it. Chekhov intercepts his thought-as he intercepted that of Ryabovitch in 'The Kiss'-but does no violence to it as he turns it into prose. His acute sensitivity to the difference between unexpressed and expressed thought guides him in his risky feat. Two of Yegorushka's other interior monologues reveal more about Chekhov's poetics. The first takes place at the beginning of the story, as the chaise bearing the boy and the merchant and the priest drives out of their village past a cemetery where, amid the white crosses and tombstones, cherry trees grow. Yegorushka remembered that when the cherries were in blossom those white patches melted with the flowers into a sea of white; and that when the cherries were ripe the white tombstones and crosses were dotted with splashes of red like bloodstains. Under the cherry trees in the cemetery Yegorushka's father and granny, Zinaida Danilovna, lay sleeping day and night. When Granny had died she had been put in a long narrow coffin and two pennies had been put upon her eyes, which would not keep shut. Up to the time of her death, she had been brisk, and used to bring soft rolls covered with poppy seeds from the market. Now she did nothing but sleep and sleep… Here-perhaps because he has only just introduced Yegorushka-Chekhov points up the na'vete of his interior monologuist. Later he will not feel the need to remind us so insistently that we are in the mind of a child. But again he performs the tour de force of endowing the boy with thought exceeding his expressive capacities, while never going outside the repertoire of what a child can imagine and feel.
The second example is one of the strangest passages in literature. Chekhov may well have been thinking of it when he worried that 'The Steppe' was 'much too original.' The journey takes place during a time of extreme heat and drought. The travelers have stopped to eat and rest, and while the men are napping, the hot and bored boy tries to amuse himself. Suddenly, in the distance, he hears a woman singing a song that is 'subdued, dreary and melancholy, like a dirge and hardly audible.' Yegorushka looked about him, and could not make out where the strange song came from. Then, as he listened, he began to fancy that the grass was singing; in its song, withered and half dead, it was without words, but plaintively and passionately, urging that it was not to blame, that the sun was burning it for no fault of its own; it urged that it ardently longed to live, that it was young and might have been beautiful but for the heat and the drought; it was guiltless, but yet it prayed forgiveness and protested that it was in anguish, sad and sorry for itself. There is a kind of anthropomorphism-within-anthropomor-phism here. As the writer attributes words to the boy that the boy would not utter, the boy attributes thoughts to the grass that the grass could not 'think.' In rendering the boy's excruciating empathy with the grass, it is almost as if Chekhov were mimicking his own act of sympathetic imagination. Echoes of another 'much too original' text-the Book of Isaiah, with its images of landscapes cruelly withered by God to teach his stiff-necked people not to cross him and its analogizing of the life of man to the life of grass- may be heard in the passage. We do not know whether Chekhov was intentionally (or even unconsciously) evoking Isaiah, but when the Kuzmitchov party meets a barefoot old shepherd with a loincloth and a crook-'a regular figure from the Old Testament'-or stops at an inn owned by an obsequious Jew named Moisey (Moses), or encounters water coming out of rock, we can hardly avoid the thought that the journey is some kind of latter-day Exodus. The storm that is the real climax of the work seems like one of the more showy magical stunts of the Old Testament deity. It begins with a casual display of power-'someone seemed to strike a match in the sky; a pale phosphorescent streak gleamed and went out'-and mounts to awe- inspiring extremes of violence. The boy, atop one of the wool wagons, is exposed to the storm's fearful wind, rain, lightning, and thunder, and becomes ill with chills and fever; he recovers after the priest rubs (anoints) him with oil and vinegar.
The boy is a rather characterless character, a kind of generic child, expressing the passivity and sadness of childhood, and recording impressions in something of the way a camera does. (The melancholy of photography has been noted by several of its practitioners.) When he is at the inn of the obsequious Moisey, he notes its gloominess and ugliness and the 'disgusting smell of kerosene and sour apples' that permeates it. Like the boy at the stifling house of the Armenian in 'The Beauties' (which Chekhov wrote later in the year), Yegorushka has an unexpected brush with beauty at the horrible inn. He is lying half asleep on a sofa when a beautiful young noblewoman, dressed in black and sending forth 'a glorious scent,' appears and kisses him on the cheeks. She is the Polish Countess Dranitsky, a rich local landowner, about whose semiannual balls (at which tea is made in silver samovars, and strawberries and raspberries are served in winter) the boy had already heard at home, and about whom he will now entertain pleasurable fantasies. She, too, is looking for Varlamov (neither the boy nor we ever learn why). When the boy first sees her, the image of a graceful poplar he had seen standing alone on the steppe coraes into his mind 'for some reason.' The reason is clear enough. The Countess, too, stands alone in the story-its only aristocrat and emblem of the culture and gentility that the boy's mother is sending him away from home to acquire. The boy has also heard about the extraordinary table clock in the Countess's drawing room: a golden rider on a rearing golden horse with diamond eyes brandishes his sword to right and left as the clock strikes. When we meet Varlamov he rides a small nonrearing horse and brandishes a whip. He is the self-made New Man whom we will meet again in Chekhov's writings, most memorably as Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard. Neither is unsympathetic; Chekhov had no illusions about the days of rearing golden horses and riders with slashing swords. Another typical character is Dymov, one of the drivers of the wool wagons, an obnoxious young bully, under whose provocation Yegorushka's passivity gives way to fury and loathing. Dymov is a relatively mild version of the helplessly violent man we will meet again in later works-Solyny in Three Sisters, and Matvey Savich in 'Peasant Wives,' for the two worst examples-and for whom Chekhov retained a child's pure hatred. A character who has no successors-who is a kind of flash of unrepeatable inspiration-is a driver named Vassia, who has been horrifyingly mutilated by his earlier work in a match factory-his jaw is being eaten away-but who has a remarkable and wonderful power: His sight was extraordinarily keen. He was so longsighted that the brown steppe was for him always full of life and interest. He had only to look into the distance to see a fox, a hare, a bustard, or some other animal keeping a distance from men. There was nothing strange in seeing a hare running away or a flying bustard-everyone crossing the steppes could see them; but it was not vouchsafed to everyone to see wild animals in their own haunts when they were not running nor hiding, nor looking about them in alarm. Yet Vassia saw foxes playing, hares washing themselves with their paws, bustards preening their wings and hammering out their hollow nests. Thanks to this keenness of sight, Vassia had, besides the world seen by everyone, another world of his own, accessible to no one else, and probably a very beautiful one, for when he saw something and was in raptures over it it was impossible not to envy him. 'There are many places that will be understood by neither critics nor the public; they will seem trifling to both, not meriting attention, but I anticipate with pleasure the two or three literary epicureans who will understand and value these same places, and that is enough for me,' Chekhov wrote to Y. P. Polonsky in January 1888, in another of the defensive letters he felt impelled to write to friends while working on the most ambitious project he had yet undertaken. In an essay entitled 'Chekhov's 'Steppe': A Metapo-etic Journey' (1987), a literary epicurean named Michael Finke fulfills Chekhov's expectations of being understood with an almost Vassia-like perspicacity. He sees what no previous critic has seen-motifs and allusions tucked into 'places' of no apparent significance (such as the floor of a shop marked with kabbalistic symbols or two peculiar pictures on the wall of the reception room in Moisey's inn)- and his essay permanently changes our view of the story as an inspired but inchoate effort, written before Chekhov was in full possession of his artistic powers. Conventional criticism of 'The Steppe' has taken Chekhov's self-criticism at face value (almost always a mistake), and missed the figure in the carpet that Finke's reading reveals. The story, as it appears under Finke's high-powered lens, proves to be a work of breathtaking artistic unity. Details that seemed random and incoherent fall into place as elements of an intricate design-but one so cleverly hidden it is small wonder that no one saw it for a hundred years. 'If a story is to seem at all original,' Finke writes, 'its order must somehow be disguised, known only in retrospect, and those laws of necessity governing the function of detail must be masked.' 'The Steppe,' as Finke suggests, is 'a sort of dictionary oi Chekhov's poetics,' a kind of sample case of the concealed literary weapons Chekhov would deploy in his work to come.
In the short story 'The Schoolmistress,' written ten years later, we see how the compression that made Chekhov so uneasy in 1888 was now his modus operandi. It is another emblematic story of a journey, but this one is the mere return day trip of a spinster schoolteacher, Marya Vassilyevna, from the town where she goes to get her monthly salary. The teacher is one of the pathetic drudges who (as Chekhov learned at Melikhovo) taught in Russia's district schools in the nineteenth century (and may still do so in the twenty-first). The life of a schoolteacher is a hardworking, an uninteresting, life, and only silent, patient cart horses like Marya Vassilyevna
