The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91

by Anton Chekhov

  Katya’s views were completely different. She assured me that even in its present state the theatre was superior to lecture-rooms, books – superior to anything in this world. The stage was a force that united all the arts, the actors were missionaries. No art or science on its own could have such a strong, beneficial influence on the human soul as the stage and it was no surprise that third-rate actors enjoyed greater popularity in Russia than the finest scholar or artist. And no public activity could give so much pleasure and satisfaction as the stage.

  So one fine day Katya joined a theatrical troupe and went off – to Ufa15 I think – taking a great deal of money with her, a host of rainbow-hued hopes and grandiose notions about the venture.

  Her first letters written on the journey were marvellous. I read them and was simply amazed that those small sheets of paper could contain so much youth, spiritual purity, heavenly innocence and at the same time such subtle and business-like judgements as would have done credit to a keen male intellect. The Volga, the countryside, the towns she visited, her colleagues, her successes and failures – these she did not so much describe as glorify in song. Every line breathed that trustfulness which I was used to seeing on her face – and with all this there were masses of grammatical mistakes and practically no punctuation.

  Barely six months passed when I received a highly romantic, rapturous letter beginning: ‘I’m in love.’ In it was enclosed a photograph of a young man with clean-shaven face, broad-brimmed hat and a plaid draped over one shoulder. The following letters were just as splendid, but now punctuation marks made an appearance, there were no more grammatical mistakes and there was a strong masculine flavour to them. What a wonderful idea it would be, wrote Katya, to build a large theatre somewhere on the Volga. It had to be a limited company and rich businessmen and shipowners must be brought in to invest in it. There would be lots of money, the takings would be tremendous and the actors would perform on a partnership basis. This was all very well in theory, but I feel such schemes can only originate in a male head.

  Anyway, everything clearly went well for eighteen months or two years: Katya was in love, she had faith in her work and she was happy. But then I began to notice in her letters unmistakable signs of decline. It began with complaints about her colleagues – the first and most ominous symptom. If a young scholar or literary man embarks on his career bitterly complaining about other scholars or literary men it’s a sure sign he is already worn out and unfit for the work. Katya wrote that her companions skipped rehearsals and never knew their parts. By the absurd plays they put on, by their behaviour on stage, every one of them showed utter contempt for the public. For the sake of box-office receipts – which was all they could talk about – serious actresses sank to singing music-hall songs, while tragic actors performed in sketches satirizing deceived husbands, the pregnancies of unfaithful wives and so on. The amazing thing is – generally speaking – that the provincial stage hasn’t folded up to now and that it can still hang on by such a rotten, tenuous thread.

  In reply I wrote Katya a long and admittedly very boring letter. Amongst other things I wrote: ‘I’ve often chatted with elderly actors – the nicest of people and very well-disposed towards me. From my conversations with them I learned that in their work they were guided less by their own intelligence and freedom of choice than by fashion and society’s mood. The best of them in their time had happened to act in tragedies, operettas, Parisian farces and in pantomimes, and in whatever they performed they felt they were on the right road and were doing something useful. So, as you can see, you mustn’t look for the reason for this evil in the actors themselves but somewhere deeper, in the art itself and the whole of society’s attitude to it.’ My letter only irritated Katya. ‘We’re talking at cross purposes,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t mean those exceedingly worthy people who are well-disposed towards you, but a gang of rogues who have absolutely no sense of decency. They are a pack of savages who went onto the stage only because no one else would employ them – these people call themselves artists only because they have the cheek to. Not one genuine talent among them, but plenty of mediocrities, drunkards, schemers and scandalmongers. I just cannot tell you how bitter it makes one feel that the art I love so dearly has fallen into the clutches of those who are loathsome to me. Bitter, because even the best of men only observe evil from the distance, don’t wish to come any nearer and instead of taking a stand write platitudes and pointless sermons in the most ponderous style…’ – and so on, in the same vein.

  Shortly afterwards I received the following letter: ‘I have been cruelly deceived. I cannot go on living. Dispose of my money as you think best. I loved you as a father and as my only friend. Farewell!’

  He too belonged to the ‘pack of savages’, so it turned out. Later on I was able to guess from certain hints that she attempted suicide: apparently she tried to poison herself. I could only suppose she must have been seriously ill after that, since the next letter was from Yalta, where the doctors had most probably sent her. In her last letter she asked me to send her (in Yalta) one thousand roubles as soon as possible and it finished with these words: ‘I’m sorry this letter’s so depressing. Yesterday I buried my baby.’ After living for about a year in Yalta she came home.

  She travelled for about four years and I must confess that throughout those four years I played a pretty unenviable and strange part as far as she was concerned. Earlier, when she announced that she was going on the stage and then wrote about her love affair; when she was overcome by sporadic fits of extravagance; when time and again I had to respond to her demands by sending one thousand, two thousand roubles; when she wrote that she intended taking her life and then about the death of her child – on each occasion I became flustered and all my concern for her fate amounted to was a great deal of reflection and the penning of long, boring letters which I needn’t have written at all. And yet, all said and done, I was like a father to her and loved her as my own daughter!

  Now Katya lives about a quarter of a mile from me. She has taken a five-roomed flat and installed herself quite comfortably and in her own distinctive taste. If someone were to make a sketch of her surroundings the predominant mood would be one of indolence. For indolent bodies there are soft couches and soft stools; for indolent legs soft carpets; for indolent eyes faded, dull or matt colours; for the indolent spirit an abundance of cheap fans and trifling pictures on the walls, where originality of execution prevails over content, an excessive number of small tables and shelves crammed with absolutely worthless, useless junk, amorphous rags instead of curtains… All this, together with a phobia of bright colours, proportion and space – not to mention spiritual sloth – shows a perversion of natural taste into the bargain. For days on end Katya lies on her couch reading – mostly novels and short stories. She leaves the house only once a day, in the afternoon, to come and see me.

  I am at my work, while Katya sits silently on a nearby sofa, wrapped up in her shawl as if she’s feeling the cold. Whether it’s because I’m so fond of her or because I’ve grown used to her frequent visits since she was a little girl, her presence doesn’t stop me concentrating. Now and then I mechanically ask her something and I get a sharp rejoinder; or when I want a moment’s relaxation I turn towards her and watch her pensively browsing through some medical journal or the newspaper. It is then that I notice she has lost that earlier trusting look. Now her expression is cold, apathetic, vacant, the kind you find with passengers who have to wait a long time for their train. She still dresses beautifully and simply, but carelessly. Her dress and hair have taken a great deal of punishment from lying for days on end on sofas and rocking-chairs – that is plain to see. No longer is she inquisitive, which she was before. No longer does she ask me questions – it’s as if she has sampled everything in life and does not expect to hear anything new.

  Towards four o’clock there are sounds of movement in the hall and drawing-room: Liza is back from the Conservatoire, bringing some of her female friends
home with her. I can hear them playing the piano, trying out their voices and laughing out loud. Yegor is laying the table, making the crockery rattle.

  ‘Goodbye,’ says Katya. ‘I won’t drop in on your family today – I hope they’ll forgive me. I don’t have the time. Come and see me.’

  As I see her into the hall she looks me up and down sternly and says irritably, ‘You’re getting even thinner! Why don’t you go and see a doctor? I’ll drive over to Sergey Fyodorovich’s and get him to come and have a look at you.’

  ‘It’s not necessary, Katya.’

  ‘I don’t understand why your family does nothing about it. A fine lot, I must say!’

  Impulsively she puts on her fur coat and two or three hairpins invariably fall to the floor from her carelessly arranged hair. She is too lazy and in too much of a hurry to tidy it. She clumsily hides the straggling locks under her hat and leaves.

  When I enter the dining-room my wife asks, ‘Was that Katya just now? Why didn’t she come and see me? It’s really most odd!’

  ‘Mama!’ Liza says reproachfully. ‘If she doesn’t want to – then blow her! It’s not for us to go down on our knees!’

  ‘As you like, but it shows total disregard. Sitting in the study for three hours without a thought for us! Well, she can do as she likes.’

  Varya and Liza both hate Katya. This hatred is beyond my comprehension and one must probably be a woman to understand it. I would stake my life that out of the hundred and fifty young men whom I see almost every day in my lecture-room, and out of the hundred elderly ones I happen to meet every week, you would be hard put to find even one capable of understanding this hatred and revulsion for Katya’s past – I mean her extra-marital pregnancy and illegitimate child. On the other hand I can’t remember a single woman or young girl of my acquaintance who would not have nurtured these feelings, whether consciously or instinctively. And that’s not because women are more virtuous or any purer than men. After all, virtue and chastity aren’t very different from vice if they are not free of malice. I explain this simply as women’s backwardness. That dreary feeling of compassion and those pangs of conscience that modern men experience at the sight of misfortune tell me far more about culture and moral development than hatred and revulsion. Modern women are just as given to tears and are as insensitive as they were in the Middle Ages. And I think that those who advise them to be educated like men are completely in the right.

  The other reasons why my wife doesn’t like Katya are for having been an actress, for her ingratitude, pride, weird behaviour and for all those innumerable vices that one woman always manages to find in another.

  Besides myself and my family two or three of my daughter’s friends, together with Aleksandr Adolfovich Gnekker, Liza’s admirer and suitor, are dining with us. Gnekker is a young, fair-haired man, no more than thirty, of medium height, very stout, broad-shouldered, with reddish sideburns around his ears and a dyed moustache, which makes his podgy, smooth face look like a toy. He is wearing a very short jacket, an embroidered waistcoat, trousers with a large check pattern – very wide at the top and narrow at the bottom – and yellow, flat-heeled shoes. His eyes protrude like a crab’s, his tie resembles a crab’s neck and I even think that young man’s whole body smells of crab soup. He calls every day, but no one in my family knows anything about his background, where he was educated or what his income is. He neither plays nor sings, but he has some sort of connection with music and singing, sells pianos for someone somewhere, is frequently at the Conservatoire, knows all the celebrities and arranges concerts. He criticizes music with an air of great authority and I’ve noticed that everyone is keen to agree with him.

  Rich people always have their parasites around them and it’s the same with the arts and sciences. It seems that there is no art or science in this world which is free of ‘foreign bodies’ such as this Mr Gnekker. I am no musician and perhaps I may be wrong about Gnekker – whom I hardly know, as it happens. But the air of authority and dignity with which he stands by the piano and listens when someone sings or plays strikes me as all too suspicious.

  You may be a fine gentleman or person of high distinction a hundred times over, but if you have a daughter you can never be secure from the petty bourgeois atmosphere that match-making, courtship and weddings often bring into your house and into your state of mind. I, for example, can never reconcile myself to that triumphant expression on my wife’s face whenever Gnekker is dining with us, nor can I reconcile myself to those bottles of Lafite, port and sherry which are brought out especially for him, so that he can see with his own eyes how grandly and sumptuously we live. Nor can I stomach that erratic laughter of Liza’s, a habit she picked up at the Conservatoire, and the way she screws up her eyes whenever we have male visitors. But above all I just cannot understand why a person who is so utterly alien to my habits, my academic interests, to the whole tenor of my life and who is so completely different from those I love, should come and dine with me every day. My wife and the servants whisper mysteriously that he is the ‘fiancé’, but I still cannot understand the reason for his presence: it fills me with as much bewilderment as if they’d seated a Zulu next to me at the table. Also, I find it strange that my daughter, whom I look upon as a child, should like that tie, those eyes, those soft cheeks…

  Previously I either enjoyed my dinner or felt indifferent towards it, but now it only arouses boredom or irritation. Ever since I became a professor and started hob-nobbing with the Faculty deans, for some reason my family has considered it necessary to make drastic changes in our diet and dining habits. Instead of those simple dishes to which I was used in my student days and as an ordinary doctor they now feed me with a kind of thick soup with objects resembling white icicles floating around in it, and kidneys in madeira. My civil rank (equivalent to a general’s) and my fame have robbed me forever of cabbage soup, savoury pies, goose with apple sauce and bream with buckwheat. And they have also deprived me of Agasha my maid, a chatty, amusing old woman in whose place Yegor, a dull-witted arrogant young fellow, now serves dinner with a white glove in his right hand. The intervals between courses are short, but they seem excruciatingly long because there is nothing to fill them. Gone are the former gaiety, spontaneous conversation, the jokes and the laughter; gone are those mutual endearments and the joy which used to infect the children, my wife and myself when we gathered at the dinner-table. For a busy man like myself dinner was a time of relaxation and happy reunion: for my wife and children it was like a holiday – admittedly very brief – but bright and joyful, since they knew that for half an hour I didn’t belong to science, nor to my students, but to them alone and no one else. No more getting tipsy from one glass of wine, no more Agasha, no more bream with buckwheat, no more of those commotions which always accompanied every little dinner-time incident – for example, the cat and the dog fighting under the table or Katya’s bandage falling from her cheek into her soup.

  To describe the dinners we have now is just an unappetizing as eating them. My wife’s face wears a look of solemnity, of affected seriousness and that habitual worried expression of hers as she anxiously inspects our plates and says, ‘I see you don’t like the roast… Tell me, you don’t really like it, do you?’ And I have to reply, ‘You’re worrying for nothing, dear, it’s very tasty…’ And to this she retorts, ‘You always stand up for me, Nikolay, you never tell the truth. Why is Mr Gnekker eating so little?’ – and so it goes on throughout the entire meal. Liza laughs her staccato laugh and screws up her eyes. I look at both women and only now over dinner do I clearly see that the inner lives of the two of them have long escaped my field of vision. I have the feeling that once I lived in a house with a real family, but that now I’m dining as a guest of someone who isn’t really my wife and that what I’m seeing is not my real daughter Liza. Both have undergone a marked change and I’ve failed to notice the long process which brought about this change. So it’s no wonder that I can’t make anything of it. How did this change come a
bout? I don’t know. Perhaps the whole trouble is that God gave my wife and daughter less strength than he gave me. From childhood I’ve been used to withstanding external pressure and have steeled myself pretty well. Such disasters in life as fame, becoming a professor, moving from modest comfort to living beyond one’s means, mixing with celebrities and so on have scarcely touched me and I have remained immune to them, unscathed. But all of this has fallen on my unsteeled wife and daughter like a great pile of snow and crushed them.

  Gnekker and the young ladies talk of fugues, counterpoint, singers and pianists, Bach and Brahms, while my wife, afraid of being suspected of musical ignorance, gives them a responsive smile and murmurs, ‘Charming!… Really?… Go on!…’ Gnekker eats solidly, jokes solidly and lends a condescending ear to the young ladies’ remarks. From time to time he has the urge to talk bad French and then – for some mysterious reason – he finds it necessary to address me as votre excellence.

  But I feel glum. It’s obvious I inhibit all of them as much as they inhibit me. I have never been closely acquainted with class antagonism before, but something exactly like that bedevils me now. I seek only bad qualities in Gnekker, in no time do I find them and I’m tormented by the thought that a man who is outside my circle should aspire to my daughter’s hand. His presence affects me badly in yet another way. Usually when I’m on my own or with people I like, I never ponder my own merits – and if I do they strike me as footling, as though I had become a scholar only yesterday. But with people like Gnekker around my merits strike me as the loftiest mountain, whose summit is lost in the clouds and around whose foothills slither Gnekkers barely visible to the naked eye.