suspicious figures and kurgans, in the deep sky, in the moonlight, the flight of the night birds, in everything you see and hear; your soul responds to this beautiful and severe native landscape, and you wish you could be flying over the steppe with the night bird too. Yet you sense tension and sadness in this triumphant beauty and surfeit of happiness, as if the steppe is aware that
it is lonely, that its riches and its inspiration, superfluous and uncelebrated, will be pointlessly wasted on the world, and through the joyous humming you can hear its mournful, hopeless cry: a singer, a singer!54
Chekhov may have retained ambivalent feelings about Taganrog, whose thin patina of European culture concealed an Asiatic town of unpaved streets and squalor, but his love for the steppe remained unbounded throughout his life as a key source of poetic inspiration. A frequent criticism levelled at him was that he never made it clear where he stood on issues and that he remained coolly impartial in his writing. He wore his heart on his sleeve as far as the steppe was concerned, however, as the passage above shows. It was he who alone answered the steppe's call for a singer. Almost a decade later, as a convalescing consumptive in faraway Nice, he wrote two more stories set in the steppe. 'If I didn't have the bacillus, I would settle in Taganrog for two or three years,' he wrote nostalgically to his Taganrog correspondent Pavel Iordanov soon after finishing them. Remembering all his experiences on the steppe as a young man made him feel sad, he told Iordanov; he was sorry that there were no writers in Taganrog 'and that this valuable and beloved material is not needed by anyone'.55
The beauty of the steppe landscape for Chekhov was always tinged with melancholy, and he was well aware that many Russians found its boundless expanses oppressive. Responding in February 1888 to a story Dmitry Grigorovich was thinking of writing about a young man committing suicide, Chekhov argued that, while in the West people perished because they suffocated from a lack of space, in Russia it was because there was an excess of it. The struggle between man and nature in Russia was unique:
On the one hand there is physical weakness, nervousness, early sexual maturity, a passionate thirst for life and for truth, dreams of work as wide-ranging as the steppe, restless analysis, poverty of knowledge alongside rich flights of thought, while on the other hand there is the boundless plain, the severe climate, a grey, severe populace with a difficult, cold history, the Tatar yoke, the bureaucracy, poverty, ignorance, damp cities, Slavic apathy and so on .. .5?
The last reference Chekhov made to the steppe in his writing was an indirect but highly personal one. During a particularly long pause in the middle of The Cherry Orchard, his last work, we hear the mysterious sound of a breaking string. The sound is distant, 'as if it had come from the sky', and is described as 'dying away, sad'. The play's romantic dreamers typically refuse to believe the practical-minded Lopakhin's rational explanation that 'a bucket must have broken loose in the mines somewhere far away'. The hopeless Gaev thinks it's a heron, the eternal student Trofimov thinks it's an owl, and whatever it is, it gives Ranevskaya the creeps.57 Chekhov had first heard this sound when visiting a coal mine as a teenager, according to his sister. Apart from picturesque gullies and ravines, the 'Switzerland' of the Don region was famous for its mines, which produced over half of Russia's coal. Chekhov told his family that there were mines near to the farm he stayed on in the spring of 1887, and he first introduced the sound of the breaking string into 'Fortune', the story written immediately following his return home:
A noise pierced the quiet air and echoed across the steppe. Something far off banged threateningly, hit against rock and carried across the steppe with an echoing 'Takh! Takh! Takh! Takh!' When the sound died away, the old man looked questioningly at the impassive Panteley, who was standing not moving a muscle.
'That was a bucket breaking loose in the mines,' said the young man.58
Recalling that line in The Cherry Orchard, completed less than a year before he died, was Chekhov's subtle and discreet way of alluding to his own life, while also paying homage to the austere landscape which had inspired his first major work of literature and some of his finest, most poetic writing. No wonder the stage directions indicate that the sound is distant, 'as if it had come from the sky', and 'dying away, sad'.
Chapter 3 MOSCOW
I Nomads in the City
As soon as I finish school, I shall fly to Moscow on wings, I like it very much!
Letter to Mikhail Chekhov, 4 November 1877
It was often a shock for the denizens of St Petersburg to leave behind its stately architecture and rectilinear avenues and arrive in Moscow. After the calm order of a geometrically planned city with elegantly proportioned buildings and streets of enormous width came chaos – a mass of cobble-stoned, meandering roads on which crowded together a haphazard collection of stuccoed mansions, onion-domed churches, and tiny wooden houses with iron roofs, in a riot of red, green, yellow, white and gold. Chekhov was probably also shocked by Moscow's irregularity when he made his first visit in 1877 at the age of seventeen: Taganrog, after all, a town of the same vintage as St Petersburg, was also designed according to a grid system. Because of the large number of wooden houses, usually with cows grazing in their grassy backyards, Moscow still had the feel of a country town in the late 1870s, and people from St Petersburg liked to look down on Russia's patriarchal second city as a 'big village'. Some of the capital's more snobbish residents did their best to avoid having to visit Moscow altogether, preferring to mingle with soldiers and uniformed government officials on the streets of Petersburg rather than merchants and muzhiks in bast shoes in Moscow. Chekhov, on the other hand, came from the completely opposite direction. He had barely been anywhere apart from the steppe, and Moscow seemed mesmerizing. To Muscovites, he
would have seemed very provincial, his diction immediately betraying his origins. The Chekhovs all spoke with a distinct southern intonation and Anton was to retain the soft 'g' for the rest of his life, pronouncing Taganrog as 'Takhanrokh', as the locals still do.1
Chekhov's family had been in Moscow since the previous year, when Pavel Egorovich's failed business had forced them to leave Taganrog. Anton's two older brothers were then already students there: Alexander studying mathematics and science at the university, Nikolai studying painting at Moscow's main art school. Perhaps in rebellion at their repressive, harsh childhood, they were both leading dissolute lives. His brother Ivan, who had remained at school in Taganrog with him, was dispatched to Moscow to start teacher training in June 1877, leaving Anton the sole family member remaining in Taganrog. He arrived in Moscow for the first time that Easter, laden down with family possessions that his father had asked him to bring:
Mamasha wants you to try and make sure you bring the brass coffee pot and the two brass bowls . . . and bring the mirror, because we don't have one, all we can do is look at the moon. You won't be able to bring the icon case, I don't suppose, because it weighs nearly forty pounds, so don't bring that, and the glass would break anyway, but don't spend money on having it sent… Bring the icon of St Nicholas, the book with the Regulations for Communion, the big Bible (Mamasha is asking for it), the padlocks, if they are there, pen-knives and Kolya's school coat… 1 pound of olives, 1 pound of halva, 1 pound of ship's biscuits. . .2
Chekhov had come to Moscow on a one-way ticket, and family finances at that stage were so parlous that it took a while to raise the money to buy his return fare to Taganrog. This resulted in him turning up with a spurious sick note to explain his absence at the beginning of the new school term. He had enjoyed his visit to Moscow, having been taken to the theatre and shown round the Kremlin and all the other main tourist attractions by his brothers. But much as he had a good time, Chekhov was clearly very shaken by his mother's frailty. 'Please be so
