Yet these boundless plains of waving grasses, streams and gullies were an endless source of fascination for Chekhov, and might partly account for his lifelong restlessness: skuchno - I'm bored – was a frequent refrain in his letters. 'It's a fantastic region,' he declared in a letter at the end of the 1890s. T love the Don steppe and used to feel at home in it as if it was my own house; I knew every little ravine.'39 Despite having visited exotic places like Ceylon, and stayed in cities like Venice, Rome and Paris, Chekhov never lost his enthralment with the steppe. In the summer of 1894, he began dreaming about travelling through the steppe again, and sleeping under the stars at least for a few days. T used to live in the steppe for months at a time, I loved the steppe, and now it seems quite enchanting in my memory,' he wrote nostalgically five years later.40
Chekhov's enchantment had begun with the wondrous tales about the steppe told to him by his nanny Agafya Kumskaya, who was kept on by his parents until his youngest brother was eleven. Agafya Alexandrovna had spent most of her life as a serf on an estate in the middle of the steppe north of Taganrog, and told the Chekhov children legends that had been passed down to her about the battles of local heroes against the Tatars and Turks in ages past, and about all kinds of treasures and magic hats hidden in the kurgans.41 Like most people at that time, she had no idea of the ornate burial customs of the Scythians,
so memorably described by Herodotus, or the riches of their artistic treasures. The kurgans had begun to be excavated only in the late eighteenth century, after the southern territories finally became part of the Russian Empire. Knowledge of the Scythians themselves was still relatively scant even in learned circles. But the local people in the steppe had nevertheless always known there was treasure of some sort in the kurgans: they had been looted repeatedly over the centuries for the exquisite gold jewellery buried in them. Agafya Alexandrovna's heroes dated from a much later period than the Scythians, their exploits mythologized by generations of peasant families in order to explain the existence of the mysterious mounds in the landscape around them, not to mention the strange names some of them had, such as Saur-Mogila -'Saur's Grave'. Many popular legends had been spun about this particular kurgan, which had acted as a kind of frontier between the Russians and the Turks and Tatars in the mediaeval period; Saur appears in them either as an evil Turkish khan or a Cossack hero.
The atmosphere of the stories that entranced Chekhov as a small boy is reflected in 'Fortune', the first story he wrote after returning from his travels in the south in 1887. As he explained in a letter, it was about 'the steppe: the plain, night-time, a pale dawn in the east, a flock of sheep, and three human figures talking about treasure'.42 Panteley, a passing ranger who has stopped to get a light for his pipe, starts telling two shepherds, watching their sheep one summer night by the highway, about the buried treasure supposed to be hidden in the kurgans:
Stroking his long whiskers, which were covered with dew, he climbed heavily on to his horse and narrowed his eyes as he gazed into the distance, looking as if he had forgotten to say something or had somehow not finished what he had to say. Nothing stirred in the blueish distance, where the last visible hill merged with the mist; the kurgans which towered here and there above the horizon and the endless steppe, looked severe and lifeless; in their mute immobility one could sense past centuries and complete indifference to human beings; another thousand years would go by, millions of people would die and they would still be standing there, as they did now, neither sorry for those who had died, nor interested in the living, and not one soul would know why they stood there and what secrets of the steppe they contained.43
'Fortune' is set in the district north of Taganrog, and Chekhov not only mentions Saur's Grave by name, but also refers to the mixed population of the steppe, which included German colonists, religious sectarians called Molokans ('milk drinkers'), Tatars, Kalmyks, Jews and Armenians:
The sun had not yet risen, but distant Saur's Grave, with its pointed top which looked like a cloud, and all the other kurgans were already visible. If you climbed to the top of Saur's Grave, you could look out and see a plain that was as flat and boundless as the sky, manor houses and estates, German and Molokan farms, villages; a far-sighted Kalmyk would even be able to see the town and railway trains. Only from up here was it possible to see that there was another life in the world beyond the silent steppe and ancient kurgans, a life which was not concerned with buried treasure and the thoughts of sheep.44
Chekhov was not given to false boasting, nor to praise of his own work in general, but he proclaimed 'Fortune' to be the best story he had written at that time,45 and it was to remain one of his favourite pieces of prose. It certainly scored an immediate success with his readers: his brother in St Petersburg told him that issues of the newspaper which published it were still being read in the city's cafes a week later and getting very worn; this was highly unusual, he pointed out, because cafes usually changed their papers daily.46
The very first travelling Chekhov had done as a boy was into the steppe, and it had been a major event: his family went on a trip together only once while he was growing up, and even then his father had stayed behind to look after the shop. One only has to look at an old map of Russia to realize how sparsely populated the southern regions were in the nineteenth century. The steppe began right where the town ended, just beyond the cemetery, and Chekhov clearly longed for the chance to go off on adventures when he went there in the summer to go hunting for tarantulas with his friends. The opportunity finally came when he was twelve years old, and he was allowed to visit his grandparents with his eldest brother Alexander. Egor Mikhailovich and Efrosinya Emelyanova lived on Count Platov's estate, about forty miles north of Taganrog. It was a journey of two days by cart (there was no railway), which seemed a huge distance, and as a consequence they
barely saw their grandchildren when they were growing up. The Chekhov family had no summer dacha to go to back then, and finances never permitted them to take a holiday. Not surprisingly, Chekhov was wildly excited at the thought of going on a journey – so much so that he could barely sleep the night before departure. His father had idealized the steppe landscape in which his parents lived to such an extent that the impressionable young Chekhov boys thought they were visiting an earthly paradise.
On the hot July day of their departure they were up soon after five, and after being taken by their father to the front room to bow to the ground three times and say prayers in front of the icon they were ready to leave. Ten minutes after kissing the hands of their mother and father, Alexander and Anton were out of the confined space of the town and in the wide open expanses of the steppe, among butterflies, kites and larks. But disappointment came even before they reached their destination: the two men driving the cart back to the Platov estate fell asleep and the horse meandered off the route, causing the boys a lot of unease, particularly when it grew dark. The estate village, when they arrived, was quite pretty with its white church, straw-roofed huts, poppies and sunflowers, but it was not exactly the idyll they had been led to expect. And their grandparents were not particularly friendly. It was threshing time and Chekhov was soon bored with the job he was given of sitting by the windmill for days on end writing down endless measures of grain. But he was not bored with travelling. The following year his mother took him and his brothers and sister (in a cart drawn by oxen) back to the deserted manor house by the river that he and Alexander had stayed in the previous summer, and they once again roamed past the dovecotes and through its neglected gardens and orchards.47
Chekhov's first real adventures came when he was in his last years at school, by which time the rest of his family was in Moscow. He spent those summers in Taganrog, staying with friends who had a farm out in the wilds and a lifestyle which was the direct opposite of the suffocating atmosphere of religious piety and filial obedience that had characterized his own home. He went back there in 1887 when he was down from Moscow, and his letters home vividly convey its attractions. The little straw-roofed house was situated in what he called the 'Switzerland of the Don region', which is the chain of hills you come
to when travelling north from Taganrog, about sixty miles inland. Chekhov described it as 'hills, little gullies, little woods, little rivers and steppe, steppe, steppe .. .'48 With none of the hills higher than about 500 metres, it
