Reading Chekhov

You will have noted the word "Uncle." It is Yegorushka who has been observing Varlamov and whose thoughts Chekhov records. The consciousness of the boy-who is not yet either a Kuzmitchov or a Father Christopher, but possesses both the former's hysterical anxiety and the latter's capacity for pleasure-is the lens through which most of the events of "The Steppe" are seen. (Chekhov reserves portions of the text for an omniscient narrator.) It might seem that Chekhov has exceeded the bounds of plausibility in endowing a nine-year-old child with such astuteness and such complexity of thought. But, on rereading the passage, we see dial (lukliov has made no misstep. While a nine-year-old could not write the passage or speak it in those words, he could think it. Chekhov intercepts his thought-as he intercepted that of Ryabovitch in "The Kiss"-but does no violence to it as he turns it into prose. His acute sensitivity to the difference between unexpressed and expressed thought guides him in his risky feat. Two of Yegorushka's other interior monologues reveal more about Chekhov's poetics. The first takes place at the beginning of the story, as the chaise bearing the boy and the merchant and the priest drives out of their village past a cemetery where, amid the white crosses and tombstones, cherry trees grow. Yegorushka remembered that when the cherries were in blossom those white patches melted with the flowers into a sea of white; and that when the cherries were ripe the white tombstones and crosses were dotted with splashes of red like bloodstains. Under the cherry trees in the cemetery Yegorushka's father and granny, Zinaida Danilovna, lay sleeping day and night. When Granny had died she had been put in a long narrow coffin and two pennies had been put upon her eyes, which would not keep shut. Up to the time of her death, she had been brisk, and used to bring soft rolls covered with poppy seeds from the market. Now she did nothing but sleep and sleep… Here-perhaps because he has only just introduced Yegorushka-Chekhov points up the na'vete of his interior monologuist. Later he will not feel the need to remind us so insistently that we are in the mind of a child. But again he performs the tour de force of endowing the boy with thought exceeding his expressive capacities, while never going outside the repertoire of what a child can imagine and feel.

The second example is one of the strangest passages in literature. Chekhov may well have been thinking of it when he worried that "The Steppe" was "much too original." The journey takes place during a time of extreme heat and drought. The travelers have stopped to eat and rest, and while the men are napping, the hot and bored boy tries to amuse himself. Suddenly, in the distance, he hears a woman singing a song that is "subdued, dreary and melancholy, like a dirge and hardly audible." Yegorushka looked about him, and could not make out where the strange song came from. Then, as he listened, he began to fancy that the grass was singing; in its song, withered and half dead, it was without words, but plaintively and passionately, urging that it was not to blame, that the sun was burning it for no fault of its own; it urged that it ardently longed to live, that it was young and might have been beautiful but for the heat and the drought; it was guiltless, but yet it prayed forgiveness and protested that it was in anguish, sad and sorry for itself. There is a kind of anthropomorphism-within-anthropomor-phism here. As the writer attributes words to the boy that the boy would not utter, the boy attributes thoughts to the grass that the grass could not "think." In rendering the boy's excruciating empathy with the grass, it is almost as if Chekhov were mimicking his own act of sympathetic imagination. Echoes of another "much too original" text-the Book of Isaiah, with its images of landscapes cruelly withered by God to teach his stiff-necked people not to cross him and its analogizing of the life of man to the life of grass- may be heard in the passage. We do not know whether Chekhov was intentionally (or even unconsciously) evoking Isaiah, but when the Kuzmitchov party meets a barefoot old shepherd with a loincloth and a crook-"a regular figure from the Old Testament"-or stops at an inn owned by an obsequious Jew named Moisey (Moses), or encounters water coming out of rock, we can hardly avoid the thought that the journey is some kind of latter-day Exodus. The storm that is the real climax of the work seems like one of the more showy magical stunts of the Old Testament deity. It begins with a casual display of power-"someone seemed to strike a match in the sky; a pale phosphorescent streak gleamed and went out"-and mounts to awe-inspiring extremes of violence. The boy, atop one of the wool wagons, is exposed to the storm's fearful wind, rain, lightning, and thunder, and becomes ill with chills and fever; he recovers after the priest rubs (anoints) him with oil and vinegar.