was not, to be honest, exactly like the Swiss Alps, which, of course, Chekhov had never seen (nor ever would), but it was certainly picturesque. The earthen-floored house was not much like a chocolate box Swiss chalet either. Inside, the walls were covered with rifles, pistols, sabres and whips, he wrote, and each morning he was woken by the sounds of a gun being fired through a window at chickens and geese and the yelping of disobedient dogs being punished. There were no ashtrays, lavatories or other mod cons, for miles around, and Chekhov explained that in order to respond to the call of nature it was necessary to go down into the gully and choose a bush, first making sure there was no viper or other such creature underneath it. And to do that it was necessary to run the gauntlet of the huge number of vicious dogs the family owned. 'I have to walk in convoy otherwise there will be one less writer in Russia,' he quipped.49 He did not get much sleep as there were dogs outside howling all night, and the setter under the hard wooden divan on which he slept liked to bark in reply.
A favourite occupation was shooting at bustards, the largest game bird in Europe, a native of the steppe. Maybe it is because Chekhov's friends shot so many of them that the great bustard, Otis tarda, is now a globally threatened species. They were a sitting target really: these turkey-like birds are not that good at flying, particularly in poor weather, and are prone to collide with overhead cables due to their lack of manoeuvrability when airborne. Chekhov's hosts engaged in an unending cycle of slaughter: they shot sparrows, swallows, magpies and crows so they could not eat the bees, they killed the bees so they did not ruin the fruit trees, and they cut down the trees so they did not drain the soil. It was not exactly refined living. The goose soup he was fed at lunch time reminded Chekhov of bathwater left behind by tubby marketwomen, and the after-dinner coffee looked and tasted as though it was made of roasted dung. Nevertheless he had a glorious time. When he was not making bonfires and picnicking outdoors, going shooting, talking about politics, or being chased by rabid dogs, he obviously enjoyed being left to his own devices. And it was healthy living. Chekhov claimed you could cure yourself of fifteen con-
sumptions and twenty-two rheumatisms by staying in the depths of the steppe at his friends' house.
After a repressive childhood in which he was cooped up either at school, in a church or in his father's shop for long periods at a time, it was not surprising that the teenage Chekhov felt an overwhelming sense of liberation in this sort of environment when he came to spend his summers on the steppe. Nor is it surprising that he came to associate the steppe's boundless open spaces with freedom. Pyotr, the son of the retired officer who owned the farm where Chekhov stayed (and who had been tutored by Chekhov back in Taganrog), wore the red-striped uniform of a Don Cossack regiment, like his father had, and it is tempting to think that some of the full-blooded Cossack ways rubbed off on their guest. The Cossacks were descended from peasants who had run away in the late Middle Ages in order to escape enslavement as serfs, and had settled in the Ukrainian and southern Russian steppe after an initially nomadic existence on horse-back like their Scythian forebears. By the nineteenth century, they had developed a distinct ethnic identity of their own through intermarrying with the local Tatar population. They retained a fierce independence, while at the same time remaining loyal to Russia. Riding a horse and shooting a gun were second nature to these macho defenders of Russia's southern frontier. This is not an image we associate with the bespectacled Chekhov of later years, certainly, and it is interesting that he spent two days staying at a nearby monastery after leaving his gun-toting friends in 1887. Having tasted a little of the Cossack way of life, however, he surely admired their down-to-earth, uninhibited ways, which were so different from those he had grown up with.
It is worth remembering that Chekhov was not always short of breath and racked by coughing. He loved the outdoors (what person would choose to spend several months travelling overland to Siberia?) and freedom became increasingly important to him, both personally and artistically. His ideal as a writer was 'to be a free artist and nothing more'. 'My holiest of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom, freedom from violence and lies, in whatever form,' he wrote famously in a letter in October 1888.50 It must have been unbearably painful for him to find the sphere of his activities become increasingly restricted with the onset of his illness. Chekhov also seems to have associated the wide open spaces of the
steppe with love. During a conversation about love at first sight with a close friend, he confided a memory of a hot summer's day during his late teens when he was standing by a well looking at his reflection, out in the middle of the steppe somewhere. A girl of about fifteen came to fetch water, and he was so captivated by her that he could not stop himself from kissing her, after which they both stood for a long time looking silently into the well: he did not want to go, and she had completely forgotten about the water. This first experience of love at first sight may have something to do with the way in which the natural world, and the steppe in particular, is poeticized in Chekhov's work as a sacred place.51 By the time he was ready to go home after his travels in the steppe in the spring of 1887, Chekhov felt that he had filled himself up with enough poetry to last five years. Now it was time to start distilling the experiences of his childhood, refracting them through the impressions of his recent visit in the hope of inspiring in his readers an appreciation for the beauties of the landscape he had grown up in. Spurred on by the success of 'Fortune', he now started planning a much longer story about the steppe. After seven years of publishing short, largely ephemeral pieces in comic journals and newspapers, it was time to write something more substantial for submission to a serious literary journal. Aware that whatever he produced would be closely scrutinized by the entire Russian literary establishment, it is not surprising that it took him six months to pluck up the courage to start writing. Numerous writers and critics had noticed his potential and urged him to start taking his literary activities seriously; equally, there were many others who did not really know how to deal with his apparently plotless prose and wistful style, resented his success and lowly beginnings, and were primed to find fault. Chekhov had, moreover, chosen a highly unusual subject. In the wake of the great realist novels, with their penetrating psychological analysis and big philosophical ideas, it was hardly fashionable at that time to focus on the natural world, and no Russian writer apart from Gogol had ever thought to champion the steppe, let alone see poetry in it. Deciding to tell the story of the journey of a nine-year-old boy being taken across the steppe in late summer to start at a school in another town was also a courageous decision. The lonely Egorushka, who understands neither where he is going nor why, and is unhappy at having to leave his mother, is hardly a conventional literary hero, and the story has no plot as such. Chekhov might not have been able to smell the hay when he started
'The Steppe', as he put it, but it is a testament to the strength of his inspiration that he felt as if he were still in the middle of the steppe on a hot summer's day when he had taken command of his material.52 'For my debut in a literary journal I have chosen the steppe, which people have not written about for a long time,' he wrote to an older writer colleague, when he was hard at work:
I describe the plain, the lilac horizon, sheep farmers, Jews, priests, nighttime storms, coaching inns, steppe birds etc.. . . Maybe it will open people's eyes and show them what riches, what realms of beauty lie still untapped and how much room to breathe Russian artists have. If my story manages to remind my colleagues about the steppe, which they have forgotten about, if just one of the themes I have sketched out in my insignificant and dry way gives a poet somewhere pause for thought I will be happy.53
Chekhov addresses the unsung beauty of the steppe right in the middle of the story. The sun has gone down on the second day of the journey, and Egorushka has dozed off to sleep in the dilapidated old carriage he is travelling in with his two chaperones, his uncle Ivan, a merchant, and Father Khristofor, both of whom are making the journey across the steppe to sell wool. While Egorushka sleeps, the narrator emerges from the shadows, to reveal himself as a person who has a highly emotional relationship to the landscape the young boy is travelling through:
You travel on for an hour or two more . .. You come across a silent old grandfather kurgan or an ancient stone figure, placed there goodness knows when or by whom, a night bird flies noiselessly over the earth, and slowly into your mind come the steppe legends, the stories of people you have met, the tales told by your nanny from the steppe, and everything you have managed to grasp with your soul and see with your own eyes. And then you begin to feel triumphant beauty, youth, strength, and a passionate thirst for life in the chirring of insects,
