The Complete Short Novels

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The Complete Short Novels Page 3

by Chekhov, Anton


  Lenin born. Franco-Prussian war. End of Second Empire in France and establishment of Third Republic. Repin paints The Volga Boatmen (to 1873).

  Paris Commune set up and suppressed. Fall of Paris ends war. German Empire established.

  Three Emperors’ League (Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) formed in Berlin. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Narodnik (Populist) ‘‘going to the people’’ campaign gathers momentum: young intellectuals incite peasantry to rebel against autocracy.

  First performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s first opera, The Maid of Pskov.

  Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; first performance of Boris Godunov.

  Bulgarian Atrocities (Bulgarians massacred by Turks). Founding of Land and Freedom, first Russian political party openly to advocate revolution. Death of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Official statute for Women’s Higher Courses, whereby women are able to study at the universities of St. Petersburg,

  Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Kazan. By 1881 there are two thousand female students. Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India.

  Russia declares war on Turkey (conflict inspired by Pan-Slav movement). Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Congress of Berlin ends Russo-Turkish war; other European powers compel Russia to give up many of her territorial gains; partition of Bulgaria between Russia and Turkey. Mass trial of Populist agitators in Russia (‘‘the trial of the 193’’). Shishkin, pioneer of the plein-air study in the 1870s, paints Rye, a classic evocation of Russian countryside.

  Birth of Stalin. The People’s Will, terrorist offshoot of Land and Freedom, founded. Assassination of Prince Kropotkin, governor of Kharkov. Tchaikovsky: Evgeny Onegin. Death of historian S. M. Solovyov, whose history of Russia had been appearing one volume per year since 1851.

  Oil drilling begins in Azerbaidzhan; big program of railway building commences. Borodin: In Central Asia. During 1870s and 1880s the Abramtsevo Colony, drawn together by railway tycoon Mamontov, includes Repin, Serov, Vrubel, and Chekhov’s friend Levitan. Nationalist in outlook, they draw inspiration from Russian folk art and the Russo-Byzantine tradition. Assassination of Alexander II by Ignatius Grinevitsky, a member of the People’s Will, following which the terrorist movement is crushed by the authorities. Revolutionary opposition goes underground until 1900. ‘‘Epoch of small deeds’’: intelligentsia work for reform through existing institutions. The new tsar, Alexander III, is much influenced by his former tutor, the extreme conservative Pobedonostsev, who becomes chief procurator of the Holy Synod. Resignation of Loris-Melikov, architect of the reforms of Alexander II’s reign. Jewish pogroms.

  Censorship laws tightened. Student riots in Kazan and St. Petersburg. Reactionary regime of Alexander III characterized by stagnation in agriculture, retrogression in education, russification of non-Russian section of the population, and narrow bureaucratic paternalism.

  First Russian Marxist revolutionary organization, the Liberation of Labor, founded in Geneva by Georgi Plekhanov. Increased persecution of religious minorities.

  New education minister Delyanov increases powers of inspectors; university appointments made directly by the ministry rather than academic councils; fees increased. Fatherland Notes, edited by Saltykov-Shchedrin, suppressed. During 1880s organizations such as the Moscow Law Society and the Committee for the Advancement of Literacy become centers for the discussion of political and social ideas among the intelligentsia.

  DATE AUTHOR’S LIFE LITERARY CONTEXT

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Students hold a demonstration to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Dobrolyubov. Several of them, disgusted by the brutal way in which the demonstration is suppressed, resolve to assassinate the tsar; the plot is discovered, and among those executed is Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov, whose death he swears to avenge.

  During the late 1880s Russia begins her industrial revolution.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade.

  Introduction of land captains, powerful administrator magnates who increase control of the gentry over the peasants, undermining previous judicial and local government reforms. Shishkin: Morning in a Pine Forest.

  First performance of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades and first (posthumous) performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor. Peasant representation on Zemstva reduced. Bismarck dismissed. During the 1890s growth rate for industrial output averages about 8 percent per annum. Important development of coal mines in southern European Russia. Industrial expansion sustained by growth of banking and joint stock companies, which begin to attract foreign, later native, investment.

  Harvest failure in central Russia causes famine and starvation: up to a million peasants die by the end of the winter. Work commences on Trans-Siberian Railway. Twenty thousand Jews brutally evicted from Moscow. Rigorously enforced residence restrictions, quotas limiting entry of Jews into high schools and universities, and other anti-Jewish measures drive more than a million Russian Jews to emigrate, mainly to North America.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker. Property qualification for franchise raised, reducing number of voters in St. Petersburg from 21,176 to 7,152.

  Armenian massacres begin. As part of the russification of the Balkans, the German University of Dorpat is reopened as the University of Yuryev, with a majority of Russian students. Death of Tchaikovsky.

  Death of Alexander II; accession of Nicholas II. Growth in popularity of Marxist ideas among university students encouraged by appearance of Struve’s Critical Notes and Beltov’s Monistic View.

  A. S. Popov, pioneer of wireless telegraphy, gives demonstration and publishes article on his discoveries, coinciding with Marconi’s independent discoveries in this field. Establishment of Marxist newspaper Samarskii Vestnik . In May, two thousand people crushed to death on Klondynka field when a stand collapses during the coronation ceremony.

  Tsar Nicholas II visits President Faure of France: Russo-French alliance. Lenin deported for three years to Siberia. Only systematic census carried out in Imperial Russia reports a population of 128 million, an increase of three and a half times over the century. The industrial labor force of three million (3 percent) is small compared with the West but shows a fifteen-fold increase over the century. Thirteen percent of the population now urban as opposed to only 4 percent a century earlier.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Russian Social Democratic Labor Party founded. Between 1898 and 1901 Caucasian oil production is higher than that of the rest of the world together. Finns begin to lose their rights as a separate nation within the Empire. Sergey Diaghilev and others found the World of Art society, prominent members of which are Benois and Bakst; its most notable production is Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. The magazine, to which ‘‘decadent’’ writers such as Balmont frequently contribute, opposes the ‘‘provincial naturalism’’ of the Itinerant school, and advocates a philosophy of art for art’s sake.

  Student riots. All universities in Russia temporarily closed. Moscow Law Society also closed. Reactionary Sipyagin becomes minister of the interior. During 1890s the so-called Third Element, consisting of doctors, teachers, statisticians, engineers, and other professionals employed by the Zemstva, becomes a recognized focus of liberal opposition to the tsarist regime. Russian industry enters a period of depression.

  Lenin allowed to leave Russia. Founds paper Iskra in Germany. Russia ends nineteenth century with a total of 17,000 students spread over nine universities: a hundred years before, the Empire had only one university – Moscow. Nevertheless, the proportion of illiterates in the Empire was recorded at this time as 75 percent of persons aged between nine and forty-nine.

  Murder of minister of education Bogolepov by a student marks beginning of wave of political assassinations. For the authorities, the principal menace is the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which looks for support from the peasantry, rather than the Social Democrats, who hope to rouse t
he urban proletariat. First performance of Rachmaninov’s piano concerto No. 2, with the composer as soloist. Death of Queen Victoria.

  HISTORICAL EVENTS

  Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? provides blueprint for future Bolshevik party. Sipyagin assassinated by Socialist Revolutionaries.

  Conflict between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at second Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Assassination of King Alexander and Queen Draga of Serbia.

  Russo-Japanese war (to 1905), both unpopular and unsuccessful from the Russian point of view. Assassination of V. K. Pleve, minister of the interior, and notorious oppressor of minority peoples within the Empire.

  First Russian Revolution.

  THE STEPPE

  The Story of a Journey

  I

  ON AN EARLY July morning a battered, springless britzka— one of those antediluvian britzkas now driven in Russia only by merchants’ agents, herdsmen, and poor priests—rolled out of the district town of N., in Z—— province, and went thundering down the post road. It rattled and shrieked at the slightest movement, glumly seconded by the bucket tied to its rear—and from these sounds alone, and the pitiful leather tatters hanging from its shabby body, one could tell how decrepit it was and ready for the scrap heap.

  In the britzka sat two residents of N.: the merchant Ivan Ivanych Kuzmichov, clean-shaven, in spectacles and a straw hat, looking more like an official than a merchant; and the other, Father Khristofor Siriysky, rector of the church of St. Nicholas in N., a small, long-haired old man in a gray canvas caftan, a broad-brimmed top hat, and a colorfully embroidered belt. The first was thinking intently about something and kept tossing his head to drive away drowsiness; on his face a habitual, businesslike dryness struggled with the good cheer of a man who has just bid farewell to his family and had a stiff drink; the second gazed at God’s world with moist, astonished little eyes and smiled so broadly that his smile even seemed to reach his hat brim; his face was red and had a chilled look. Both of them, Father Khristofor as well as Kuzmichov, were on their way now to sell wool. Taking leave of their households, they had just had a filling snack of doughnuts with sour cream and, despite the early hour, had drunk a little...They were both in excellent spirits.

  Besides the two men just described and the coachman Deniska, who tirelessly whipped up the pair of frisky bay horses, there was one more passenger in the britzka—a boy of about nine whose face was dark with tan and stained with tears. This was Egorushka, Kuzmichov’s nephew. With his uncle’s permission and Father Khristofor’s blessing, he was going somewhere to enroll in school. His mama, Olga Ivanovna, widow of a collegiate secretary 1 and Kuzmichov’s sister, who liked educated people and wellborn society, had entreated her brother, who was going to sell wool, to take Egorushka with him and enroll him in school; and now the boy, not knowing where or why he was going, was sitting on the box beside Deniska, holding on to his elbow so as not to fall off, and bobbing up and down like a kettle on the stove. The quick pace made his red shirt balloon on his back, and his new coachman’s hat with a peacock feather kept slipping down on his neck. He felt himself an unhappy person in the highest degree and wanted to cry.

  When the britzka drove past the prison, Egorushka looked at the sentries quietly pacing by the high white wall, at the small barred windows, at the cross gleaming on the roof, and remembered how, a week ago, on the day of the Kazan Mother of God,2 he had gone with his mama to the prison church for the feast; and earlier still, for Easter, he had gone to the prison with the cook Liudmila and Deniska and brought kulichi, 3 eggs, pies, and roasted beef; the prisoners had thanked them and crossed themselves, and one of them had given Egorushka some tin shirt studs of his own making.

  The boy peered at the familiar places, and the hateful britzka raced past and left it all behind. After the prison flashed the black, sooty smithies, after them the cozy green cemetery surrounded by a stone wall; the white crosses and tombstones hiding among the green of the cherry trees and showing like white blotches from a distance, peeped merrily from behind the wall. Egorushka remembered that when the cherry trees were in bloom, these white spots blended with the blossoms into a white sea; and when the cherries were ripe, the white tombstones and crosses were strewn with blood-red spots. Behind the wall, under the cherries, Egorushka’s father and his grandmother Zinaida Danilovna slept day and night. When the grandmother died, they laid her in a long, narrow coffin and covered her eyes, which refused to close, with two five-kopeck pieces. Before her death she had been alive and had brought soft poppy-seed bagels from the market, but now she sleeps and sleeps...

  And beyond the cemetery the brickworks smoked. Thick black smoke came in big puffs from under the long, thatched roofs flattened to the ground, and lazily rose upwards. The sky above the brickworks and cemetery was swarthy, and big shadows from the puffs of smoke crept over the fields and across the road. In the smoke near the roofs moved people and horses covered with red dust...

  Beyond the brickworks the town ended and the fields began. Egorushka turned to look at the town for the last time, pressed his face against Deniska’s elbow, and wept bitterly...

  ‘‘So you’re not done crying, crybaby!’’ said Kuzmichov. ‘‘Mama’s boy, sniveling again! If you don’t want to go, stay then. Nobody’s forcing you!’’

  ‘‘Never mind, never mind, Egor old boy, never mind...’’ Father Khristofor murmured quickly. ‘‘Never mind, old boy...Call upon God...It’s nothing bad you’re going to, but something good. Learning is light, as they say, and ignorance is darkness...It’s truly so.’’

  ‘‘You want to turn back?’’ asked Kuzmichov.

  ‘‘Ye...yes...’’ answered Egorushka with a sob.

  ‘‘And you should. Anyhow, there’s no point in going, it’s a long way for nothing.’’

  ‘‘Never mind, never mind, old boy...’’ Father Khristofor went on. ‘‘Call upon God... Lomonosov4 traveled the same way with fishermen, yet from him came a man for all Europe. Intelligence, received with faith, yields fruit that is pleasing to God. How does the prayer go? ‘For the glory of the Creator, for the comfort of our parents, for the benefit of the Church and the fatherland’... That’s it.’’

  ‘‘Benefits vary...’’ said Kuzmichov, lighting up a cheap cigar. ‘‘There are some that study for twenty years and nothing comes of it.’’

  ‘‘It happens.’’

  ‘‘Some benefit from learning, but some just have their brains addled. My sister’s a woman of no understanding, tries to have it all in a wellborn way, and wants to turn Egorka into a scholar, and she doesn’t understand that with my affairs I could make Egorka happy forever. I explain this to you because, if everybody becomes scholars and gentlemen, there’ll be nobody to trade or sow grain. We’ll all starve to death.’’

  ‘‘But if everybody trades and sows grain, then nobody will comprehend learning.’’

  And, thinking that they had both said something convincing and weighty, Kuzmichov and Father Khristofor put on serious faces and coughed simultaneously. Deniska, who was listening to their conversation and understood nothing, tossed his head and, rising a little, whipped up the two bays. Silence ensued.

  Meanwhile, before the eyes of the travelers there now spread a wide, endless plain cut across by a chain of hills. Crowding and peeking from behind each other, these hills merge into an elevation that stretches to the right from the road all the way to the horizon and disappears in the purple distance; you go on and on and there is no way to tell where it begins and where it ends...The sun has already peeped out from behind the town and quietly, without fuss, set about its work. At first, far ahead, where the sky meets the earth, near the barrows and a windmill that, from afar, looks like a little man waving his arms, a broad, bright yellow strip crept over the ground; a moment later the same sort of strip lit up somewhat closer, crept to the right, and enveloped the hills; something warm touched Egorushka’s back, a strip of light, sneaking up from behind, darted across the britzka and th
e horses, raced to meet the other strips, and suddenly the whole wide steppe shook off the half-shade of morning, smiled, and sparkled with dew.

  Mowed rye, tall weeds, milkwort, wild hemp—all of it brown from the heat, reddish and half dead, now washed by the dew and caressed by the sun—were reviving to flower again. Martins skimmed over the road with merry cries, gophers called to each other in the grass, somewhere far to the left peewits wept. A covey of partridges, frightened by the britzka, fluttered up and, with its soft ‘‘trrr,’’ flew off towards the hills. Grasshoppers, crickets, capricorn beetles, mole crickets struck up their monotonous chirring music in the grass.

  But a little time passed, the dew evaporated, the air congealed, and the deceived steppe assumed its dismal July look. The grass wilted, life stood still. The sunburnt hills, brown-green, purple in the distance, with their peaceful, shadowy tones, the plain with its distant mistiness, and above them the overturned sky, which, in the steppe, where there are no forests or high mountains, seems terribly deep and transparent, now looked endless, transfixed with anguish ...

  How stifling and dismal! The britzka runs on, but Egorushka sees one and the same thing—the sky, the plain, the hills ... The music in the grass has grown still. The martins have flown away, there are no partridges to be seen. Rooks flit over the faded grass, having nothing else to do; they all look the same and make the steppe still more monotonous.

  A kite flies just above the ground, smoothly flapping its wings, and suddenly stops in the air, as if pondering life’s boredom, then shakes its wings and sweeps away across the steppe like an arrow, and there is no telling why it flies and what it wants. And in the distance the windmill beats its wings ...

  For the sake of diversity, a white skull or a boulder flashes among the weeds; a gray stone idol or a parched willow with a blue roller on its topmost branch rises up for a moment, a gopher scampers across the road, and—again weeds, hills, rooks run past your eyes ...

 

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