Reading Chekhov

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when everything will be changed and be as you would have it; they will live in your way, and later on you too will be out of date-people will be born who will be better than you…" And Astrov in Uncle Vanya: Those who will live a hundred or two hundred years after us, and who will despise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.