1 pair of black trousers 1 pair to wear 1 knitted coat
1 top hat 1 straw hat 1 warm coat 1 pair of boots 1 pair of galoshes
1pillow with a case
10 pairs of socks
5 shirts
4 shirt-fronts
4 handkerchiefs
towels
sheets30
He was joined soon after by his wife and their two youngest children, but it was agreed that Anton and Ivan should complete their education in Taganrog. They were therefore left behind, boarding initially with the house's new owner Gavriil Selivanov. Chekhov tutored Selivanov's nephew Pyotr Kravtsov, and was later invited to spend time out in the steppe with his family. When Chekhov returned to Taganrog as an adult, it was essentially a dead town, its quiet, deserted streets exuding an atmosphere of sadness and neglect. To one of his contemporaries, visiting Taganrog felt like walking through a quiet cemetery.31
Although Chekhov's merchant background receded in importance as he entered the ranks of Russia's burgeoning professional class, first by acquiring a degree in medicine, then literary celebrity, it remained an essential part of his make-up. It is telling that when he became a student at Moscow University in 1879, he registered with the police as a meshchanin. At the beginning of his second year, however, he registered himself as being of merchant background.32 The plays of Alexander Ostrovsky had reinforced a set of negative stereotypes which had characterized merchants as dishonest, uneducated and narrow-minded people prone to gluttony and cruelty. Chekhov was to play a major role in helping to change their public perception. The young merchant hero of his story 'Three Years' is in many ways a transitional figure -educated but not yet completely liberated. By the time Chekhov came to write The Cherry Orchard a decade later, the suffocatingly closed world which we see in plays like The Storm (best known via Janacek's
opera Katya Kabanova) had finally opened up. Chief beneficiaries of Russia's industrialization, merchants became the new elite -cosmopolitan, educated, and extremely wealthy. Konstantin Stanislavsky, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, the company which championed Chekhov's innovative plays, was an example of the new breed of cultured merchant industrialists from Moscow who had a serious interest in art and a lot of money to invest. Chekhov thought Stanislavsky would be the ideal person to play the hard-working merchant Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, who is portrayed at least as sympathetically as the hapless gentry whose cherry orchard he purchases. But it was precisely because of his own merchant origins that Stanislavsky did not want the part, but that of the nobleman Gaev. Since commercial enterprise had never enjoyed a good reputation in Russia, Stanislavsky wished to play down how he had come by his money. Like many nouveau riche merchants at the turn of the century, he hoped to do that by buying a country estate and adopting the old-world lifestyle of the nobility, a class by then in its death throes. Even Chekhov fulfilled a dream of becoming a landowner when he bought his miniature estate at Melikhovo, but was characteristically ironic when referring to the pleasures of being lord of the manor.
Ill The Don Steppe
. . . but if the traveller in spring or autumn steps off the platfom of any small station and listens in the morning or evening to the calls of birds and the hum of insects, filling the whole steppe with life, he will perhaps understand why to the dweller on the steppe there is no dreariness in its apparent monotony.
Murray's Handbook for Travellers to Russia, 1875
In April 1887, just before he wrote his first story for a serious literary journal, Chekhov took the train back to Taganrog in order to spend several weeks travelling round the steppe. He had not been home in six years, and needed to see southern Russia again, he said, in order not to 'dry out'; he wanted to resurrect in his memory things that had already
grown dim so that his writing might be more vivid.33 So he started taking detailed travel notes to store up as a creative reserve for future stories, and sent them as letters to his family. On the last leg of his two-day train journey from Moscow, a few hours before reaching his destination, his mood suddenly soared: 'The weather is glorious, there is a smell of the steppe and the sound of birds singing. I can see old friends – kites flying over the steppe … The kurgans, the water towers, the buildings – it's all familiar and unforgettable . . .'34
After staying for a while in Taganrog, where he caught up with relatives and old friends, he set off travelling once more and was again intoxicated by 'bare steppe, kurgans, kites, larks, blue horizon .. ?35 He had to spend one night during his travels at a remote station, waiting for his connection, and managed to find a second-class carriage to sleep in that was parked in a siding. Stepping out in the small hours to relieve himself, he was awestruck by the beauty of the nocturnal steppe landscape and described it in a letter to his family: '… outside it was utter magic: the moon, the vast steppe with its kurgans and wilderness; deathly silence, the railway carriages and rails standing out sharply in the shadows – it seemed like the world had become extinct… It was a scene I won't forget in a million years.'36
The old Russian word steppe, meaning 'lowland', has no equivalent in other languages, but the word combination used by the Japanese, 'ocean of land', conveys well the fundamental features of the vast treeless plain that extends all the way from the Danube in the west, through Central Asia to Mongolia and China.37 A halfway house between forest and desert, the steppe, with its temperate climate, was the perfect natural environment for the pastoral way of life of the Scythian horsemen. They were among the first inhabitants of the land of southern Russia and the Ukraine to benefit from its fertile 'black earth' soil which, when uncultivated, produces a profusion of wild flowers, herbs and grasses, some of them more than six feet tall. The Scythians lived in the saddle (inspiring the Greeks to create the mythical half-man, half-horse beast they called a centaur), and when their kings died, their horses were buried along with them, laid out in concentric rings. Kurgans, the vast burial mounds raised over their tattooed bodies, have for centuries been an intrinsic and indeed fundamental part of the steppe landscape of southern Russia, and a key ingredient of one of Chekhov's most important sources of lyrical inspiration. Henry
Seymour, a rugged young British traveller who came to these parts in the early 1850s, had mixed feelings about the attractions of a landscape in which kurgans were one of the few characteristic features:
For a short period, in April and May, the Steppes present a beautiful appearance. The brilliant green of the rising crops of corn, and the fresh grass, intermingled with flowers of the most lively colours, are pleasing to the eye, and give a charm to the monotony of the scenery. A hot scorching sun, however, soon withers the grass, which assumes a brownish hue, and clouds of dust increase the dreariness and parched appearance of the Steppes. During the winter the ground is covered with snow, which at times lies several feet deep. Unimpeded by mountains, forests, or rising ground, the winds from the north-east, passing over many hundred miles of frozen ground, blow with restless violence, and often uninterruptedly for several weeks.38
