is a hundred years since the garden was laid out, on a bare, dry piece of land near a Tatar cemetery. In May, it had a delicious fragrant lushness. Shrubs and flowers spilled out over paths leading through a kind of maze of variegated green shadiness.
The conventional literary association of gardens with love and youth and renewal is a touchstone of Chekhov's art. In his stories and plays, gardens are pervasive, almost insistent, presences. Courtships are regularly conducted in them-in the way (as Robert Alter points out in The Art of Biblical Narrative) that betrothals in the Hebrew Scriptures regularly result from encounters at wells. (Gurov and Anna first meet in a restaurant set in a garden.) Intimations of happiness gleam from them. Nothing bad can happen in a garden-except possibly the melancholy induced by the ending of a long summer afternoon. Bad things can happen to a garden, of course. The most famous example is the chopping down of the trees at the end of The Cherry Orchard. In a less well known work, the story 'The Black Monk' (1894), another great garden is lost, this one through the miscalculation of its owner, an old horticulturist named Yegor Pesotsky. In an attempt to secure his garden's survival after his death, Pesotsky marries off his daughter to precisely the man most likely to hasten its ruin-a deranged student of philosophy named Kovrin, who believes that he is one of 'the chosen of God,' destined to lead mankind into 'the kingdom of eternal truth.' (His lunacy takes the form of a chronic hallucination in which a monk dressed in black emerges from a whirlwind and eggs him on in his grandiosity.) In contrast, Pesotsky is a model of sanity, a kind of horticultural William Morris. 'Look at me,' he says, 'I do everything myself. I work from morning to night: I do all the grafting myself, the pruning myself, the planting myself… The whole secret lies in loving it-that is, in the sharp eye of the master; yes, and in the master's hands, and in the feeling that makes one, when one goes anywhere for an hour's visit, sit ill at ease, with one's heart far way, afraid that something may have happened to the garden.' The worst thing that can happen to a garden, he tells Kovrin, 'is not a hare, not a cockchafer, and not the frost but any outside person'-the stranger who will come along after his death. Like long summer afternoons, gardens are ephemeral. The old man's attempt to give his garden immortality proves to be as vain as Kovrin's megalomaniacal quest for eternal truth. And yet here at Autka was Chekhov's garden intact, and more beautiful with every passing year! Outside persons had not destroyed it but were tenderly caring for it-as if in fulfillment of Chekhov's prophecy (one that he liked to put into the mouths of certain of his weak, appealing characters) that human nature would improve in the future.
In Three Sisters, Vershinin says to Masha, Irina, and Olga: When a little more time has passed-another two or three hundred years-people will look at our present manner of life with horror and derision, and everything of today will seem awkward and heavy, and very strange and uncomfortable. Oh, what a wonderful life that will be- what a wonderful life!… There are only three of your sort in the town now, but in generations to come there will be more and more and more; and the time will come when everything will be changed and be as you would have it; they will live in your way, and later on you too will be out of date-people will be born who will be better than you…' And Astrov in Uncle Vanya: Those who will live a hundred or two hundred years after us, and who will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly-they will, perhaps, find a means of being happy… Astrov is also-and chiefly-known for his concern about the destruction of the Russian forests and for his remarkable grasp of the principles of ecology, decades before the term came into use as we now know it. A. P. Chudakov and Simon Karlinsky have both written of Chekhov as a kind of protoenvironmentalist. 'In the twentieth century the preservation of nature has long been and will be more and more the measure by which the moral potential of each person is tested,' Chudakov writes in Chekhov's Poetics (1971; published in English in 1983). '[Chekhov] was the first in literature who included the relationship of man to nature in his sphere of ethics.' Karlinsky, in the introduction to his invaluable Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (1973), and in an essay entitled 'Huntsmen, Birds, Forests and Three Sisters' (1981), writes of Chekhov's prescient uneasiness about the destruction of ecosystems. In the essay, Karlinsky speculates about the literary and scientific sources of Chekhov's environmentalism, citing Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, the French geographer Elisee Reclus, and the Russian climatologist Alexander Voyeykov. But writing of the nature symbolism in Three Sisters, he makes a telling error: At the end of the play, Natasha intends to consolidate her victory by chopping down the beautiful trees… 'I will order them first of all to chop down this avenue of firs, and then this maple tree here… It is so ugly in the evening.' After destroying the magnificent trees that meant so much to the departing Vershinin and the exterminated Tuzenbach, Natasha plans to replace free nature with a tame variant of it that is acceptable to her: 'And here I will order them to plant little flowers, lots of little flowers, and they'll smell…' Avenues of firs and specimen maples are, of course, no more a part of 'free nature' than are beds of tacky little flowers. They belong to what Michael Pollan has wonderfully called 'second nature'-the sphere of horticulture. In his writings, as in his life, Chekhov was a good deal less involved with trees growing in the forest than with those planted in an orchard. He was a poet of the domesticated landscape rather than of the Sublime, drawn more to the charm of a shady old garden than to the grandiloquence of untouched wilderness. In the story 'Ariadne' (1895), a character named Lubkov 'would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: 'It would be nice to have tea here.' ' Lubkov is an unsympathetic figure, and Chekhov is mocking him; but it is not unlikely that he is satirizing himself as well.
Chekhov hated theatricality and was evidently as uncomfortable with nature's histrionics as with man's. In 'The Duel' (1891), he employs a dramatic Caucasian landscape of craggy mountains and steep gorges to objectify the Romantic posturings of his hero, Ivan Andreitch Laevsky, the most fully developed of his redeemable cads. Before Laevsky can undergo his transformation from a hysterically miserable man who hasn't fully grown up into an ordinarily unhappy adult, he must be brought low. He must come down from the high places of Byronic self- involvement to the sea level of Chekhovian compassion. ('The Duel' could be described as a Hamlet that turns into a Lear.) Laevsky has run off to the Caucasus with a young married woman named Nadezhda Fyodorovna, of whom he has predictably tired and whom he callously plans to abandon. Laevsky's adversary, Nicholas von Koren, is a rigidly upright young scientist who believes that people like Laevsky ought to be eliminated, and who puts his chilly philosophy into effect by almost killing Laevsky in a duel. However, it is not von Koren who teaches Laevsky the transformative lesson, but Nadezhda. She is one of Chekhov's most striking and subtle portraits of women. Like Anna Sergeyevna-like all the women who fall in love with Chekhov's flawed heroes-she is a rather oathetic fieure. Chekhov does not condemn married women who take up with men like Gurov and Laevsky, but he has no illusions about what they have let themselves in for. ('It was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning,' he writes of Anna and Gurov at the end of his story but not of theirs.) Unlike the delicate, almost virginal Anna, the assertive, plumply pretty Nadezhda has sex on her mind all the time: The long, insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and stifling nights, and the whole manner of living, when from morning to night one is at a loss to fill up the useless hours, and the persistent thought that she was the prettiest young woman in the town, and that her youth was passing and being wasted, and Laevsky himself, though honest and idealistic, always the same, always lounging about in his slippers, biting his nails, and wearing her out with his caprices, led by degrees to her becoming possessed by desire, and as though she were mad, she thought of nothing else night and day. Breathing, looking, walking, she felt nothing but desire. The sound of the sea told her she must love; the darkness of evening said the same; the mountains the same… At a picnic among the craggy mountains and steep gorges, Nadezhda 'wanted to skip and jump, to laugh, to shout, to tease, to flirt. In her cheap cotton dress with blue pansies on it, in her red shoes and… straw hat, she seemed to herself, little, simple, light, ethereal as a butterfly.' She cavorts among the rocks with two of the men at the picnic. Later, she realizes 'she had gone too far, had been too free and easy in her behavior, and, overcome with misery, feeling herself heavy, stout, coarse, and drunk, she got into the first empty carriage.'
Chekhov has been called a misogynist, but in the face of such an acutely sensitive and sympathetic portrait as that of Nadezhda, the characterization does not hold up. 'The Duel,' as its title suggests, is about the struggle between the ideologies and temperaments represented by Laevsky and von Koren and is apparently a work about men; but its driving force is what can only be called a kind of feminism. The fulcrum of Laevsky's transformation is his realization that Nadezhda is a human being like him. He has found her in bed with one of the men she flirted with at the picnic, having been led to the place of assignation by the other: He was in an insufferable anguish of loathing and misery. Kirilin and Atchmianov were loathsome, but they were only continuing what he had begun; they were his accomplices and his disciples. This young, weak woman had trusted him more than a brother, and he had deprived her of her husband, of her friends and of her country, and had brought her here-to the heat, to fever, and to boredom; and from day to day she was bound to reflect, like a mirror, his idleness, his vicious-ness and falsity-and that was all she had had to fill her weak, listless, pitiable life. Laevsky has these thoughts sitting at a
