Reading Chekhov

The boy is a rather characterless character, a kind of generic child, expressing the passivity and sadness of childhood, and recording impressions in something of the way a camera does. (The melancholy of photography has been noted by several of its practitioners.) When he is at the inn of the obsequious Moisey, he notes its gloominess and ugliness and the "disgusting smell of kerosene and sour apples" that permeates it. Like the boy at the stifling house of the Armenian in "The Beauties" (which Chekhov wrote later in the year), Yegorushka has an unexpected brush with beauty at the horrible inn. He is lying half asleep on a sofa when a beautiful young noblewoman, dressed in black and sending forth "a glorious scent," appears and kisses him on the cheeks. She is the Polish Countess Dranitsky, a rich local landowner, about whose semiannual balls (at which tea is made in silver samovars, and strawberries and raspberries are served in winter) the boy had already heard at home, and about whom he will now entertain pleasurable fantasies. She, too, is looking for Varlamov (neither the boy nor we ever learn why). When the boy first sees her, the image of a graceful poplar he had seen standing alone on the steppe coraes into his mind "for some reason." The reason is clear enough. The Countess, too, stands alone in the story-its only aristocrat and emblem of the culture and gentility that the boy's mother is sending him away from home to acquire. The boy has also heard about the extraordinary table clock in the Countess's drawing room: a golden rider on a rearing golden horse with diamond eyes brandishes his sword to right and left as the clock strikes. When we meet Varlamov he rides a small nonrearing horse and brandishes a whip. He is the self-made New Man whom we will meet again in Chekhov's writings, most memorably as Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard. Neither is unsympathetic; Chekhov had no illusions about the days of rearing golden horses and riders with slashing swords. Another typical character is Dymov, one of the drivers of the wool wagons, an obnoxious young bully, under whose provocation Yegorushka's passivity gives way to fury and loathing. Dymov is a relatively mild version of the helplessly violent man we will meet again in later works-Solyny in Three Sisters, and Matvey Savich in "Peasant Wives," for the two worst examples-and for whom Chekhov retained a child's pure hatred. A character who has no successors-who is a kind of flash of unrepeatable inspiration-is a driver named Vassia, who has been horrifyingly mutilated by his earlier work in a match factory-his jaw is being eaten away-but who has a remarkable and wonderful power: His sight was extraordinarily keen. He was so longsighted that the brown steppe was for him always full of life and interest. He had only to look into the distance to see a fox, a hare, a bustard, or some other animal keeping a distance from men. There was nothing strange in seeing a hare running away or a flying bustard-everyone crossing the steppes could see them; but it was not vouchsafed to everyone to see wild animals in their own haunts when they were not running nor hiding, nor looking about them in alarm. Yet Vassia saw foxes playing, hares washing themselves with their paws, bustards preening their wings and hammering out their hollow nests. Thanks to this keenness of sight, Vassia had, besides the world seen by everyone, another world of his own, accessible to no one else, and probably a very beautiful one, for when he saw something and was in raptures over it it was impossible not to envy him. "There are many places that will be understood by neither critics nor the public; they will seem trifling to both, not meriting attention, but I anticipate with pleasure the two or three literary epicureans who will understand and value these same places, and that is enough for me," Chekhov wrote to Y. P. Polonsky in January 1888, in another of the defensive letters he felt impelled to write to friends while working on the most ambitious project he had yet undertaken. In an essay entitled "Chekhov's 'Steppe': A Metapo-etic Journey" (1987), a literary epicurean named Michael Finke fulfills Chekhov's expectations of being understood with an almost Vassia-like perspicacity. He sees what no previous critic has seen-motifs and allusions tucked into "places" of no apparent significance (such as the floor of a shop marked with kabbalistic symbols or two peculiar pictures on the wall of the reception room in Moisey's inn)- and his essay permanently changes our view of the story as an inspired but inchoate effort, written before Chekhov was in full possession of his artistic powers. Conventional criticism of "The Steppe" has taken Chekhov's self-criticism at face value (almost always a mistake), and missed the figure in the carpet that Finke's reading reveals. The story, as it appears under Finke's high-powered lens, proves to be a work of breathtaking artistic unity. Details that seemed random and incoherent fall into place as elements of an intricate design-but one so cleverly hidden it is small wonder that no one saw it for a hundred years. "If a story is to seem at all original," Finke writes, "its order must somehow be disguised, known only in retrospect, and those laws of necessity governing the function of detail must be masked." "The Steppe," as Finke suggests, is "a sort of dictionary oi Chekhov's poetics," a kind of sample case of the concealed literary weapons Chekhov would deploy in his work to come.