The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91

by Anton Chekhov

  I’m an old man, I’ve been working at the university for thirty years, but I don’t see any degeneracy or lack of ideals and I don’t think things are any worse now than before. My porter Nikolay, whose experience in these matters is not to be underestimated, maintains that the students of today are neither worse nor better than before.

  If I were asked what I dislike about my present students I wouldn’t reply immediately or in much detail, but my answer would be precise enough. I’m aware of their shortcomings, so I don’t need to resort to platitudes. I don’t like their smoking, drinking strong alcohol, marrying late in life, being so devil-may-care and often so heartless that they allow some of their number to starve by not paying their subscription to the students’ aid society. They don’t know modern languages and can’t express themselves correctly in Russian. Only yesterday a hygienist colleague of mine complained that he has had to double the number of lectures, as his students’ physics is so poor and because they are utterly ignorant of meteorology. They gladly succumb to the influence of the most modern writers – and not even the best ones at that – but they are completely indifferent to such classics as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus or Pascal,17 for example. Their lack of experience in worldly matters shows most of all in this inability to distinguish the great from the small. All difficult problems of a more or less social character (for instance, land settlement in unpopulated areas) they decide by organizing public subscriptions, not by scientific research and investigation, although the latter is fully at their disposal and is more in line with their vocation. Eagerly they become house surgeons, registrars, laboratory assistants, house physicians and are ready to carry on doing these jobs until they are forty, although an independent spirit, a feeling of freedom and personal initiative are needed in science for example, as much as in art or commerce. I have my students and my audience – but no assistants or successors. Therefore I like them and am touched by them, but I’m not proud of them. And so on…

  However numerous these shortcomings may be they can generate pessimistic or quarrelsome moods only in the faint-hearted or weak. All of them are accidental and transient and depend entirely on living conditions. A few decades will suffice for them to vanish or give way to other, fresh defects that can’t be avoided and which in turn will frighten the faint-hearted. Students’ transgressions often annoy me, but the annoyance is nothing in comparison with the joy I’ve been having now for thirty years when I talk with my students, lecture to them, note their attitudes and compare them with people from different social circles.

  Mikhail Fyodorovich continues with his muckraking, while Katya listens. Neither notices the deep abyss into which they are gradually being sucked by the apparently innocent diversion of condemning their neighbour. They don’t realize how ordinary conversations can gradually turn into mockery and sneering, and how both of them are beginning to resort to the techniques of outright slander.

  ‘You really do come across some killingly funny types,’ says Mikhail Fyodorovich. ‘Yesterday I dropped in on our dear Yegor Petrovich and whom do I find there but one of your medics – third-year, I think. His face was in Dobrolyubov style,18 with that same stamp of profound thought on his brow. We get talking. “The things you hear about, young man,” I say. “I’ve been reading about a certain German – I forget his name – who’s extracted a new alkaloid from the human brain – idiotin.” And what do you think? He believed it and even assumed a respectful expression. “You have to hand it to us scientists!” he says. And the other day I went to the theatre. I take my seat. Right in front of me, in the very next row, one of our students is sitting – evidently a lawyer – and the other a shaggy medic. The medic’s soused to the gills, not paying a blind bit of attention to what was happening on stage, just dozing away, his head nodding. But the moment an actor embarks on a loud soliloquy or simply raises his voice my medic gives a start, pokes his neighbour in the ribs and asks, “What’s he on about? Are they noble sentiments?”. “Yes, noble sentiments,” replies the lawyer. “Bra-avo!” roars the medic. “Noble sentiments! Bra-avo!” You see, that drunken moron hadn’t gone to the theatre for art’s sake, but for noble sentiments! He wants to be uplifted!’

  Katya listens and laughs. She has the most peculiar sort of guffaw, breathing in and out in a rapid, regular rhythm, just as if she were playing a concertina, so that the only part of her face that seems to be laughing is her nostrils. But I lose heart and don’t know what to say. Then I flare up, lose my temper, leap from my chair.

  ‘Will you please shut up!’ I shout. ‘Why are you sitting there like two toads, poisoning the air with your breath? It’s enough!’

  And without waiting for them to stop their spiteful gossip I prepare to go home. It’s high time anyway – past ten o’clock.

  ‘I think I’ll stay a bit longer,’ says Mikhail Fyodorovich. ‘Do I have your permission, Yekaterina Vladimirovna?’

  ‘You do,’ replies Katya.

  ‘Bene. In that case please ask for another bottle.’

  Both of them see me into the hall with candles and while I’m putting on my fur coat Mikhail Fyodorovich says, ‘You’ve grown terribly thin lately and you’ve aged, Nikolay Stepanovich. What’s wrong? Are you ill?’

  ‘Yes, a little.’

  ‘And he won’t go and see a doctor,’ gloomily interposes Katya.

  ‘Why ever not? You can’t go on like this. God helps those who help themselves, my dear fellow. Remember me to your wife and daughter and my apologies for not calling on them. In a few days I’m going abroad. Before I go I’ll come and say goodbye. I’m leaving next week.’

  I leave Katya’s place feeling irritated and alarmed by all that talk about my illness and dissatisfied with myself. I ask myself whether I shouldn’t after all consult one of my colleagues. And immediately I picture my colleague silently going over to the window after examining me, reflecting for a while and then turning towards me, trying to stop me reading the truth on his face – and then casually saying, ‘Although I can’t see anything much at the moment I would still advise you, my dear colleague, to give up work…’ And that will put paid to my last hope.

  And who among us doesn’t cherish hopes? Now when I make my own diagnosis and treat myself I sometimes hope that I’m the victim of my own ignorance, that I’m mistaken about the albumen and sugar in my urine, about my heart and those oedemas that I’ve already noticed twice in the mornings. When I read through the therapeutic textbooks with a hypochondriac’s zeal and change the medicine every day, I always feel that I will stumble upon something that will be of comfort. It’s all so petty!

  Whether the sky is overcast or if it is filled with the light of the moon and the stars, every time I come home I look at it and reflect that death will soon come to take me. You might think that at these moments my thoughts would be as deep as the sky, bright and striking… But no! I think about myself, about my wife, Liza, Gnekker, the students, about people in general. My thoughts are ineffectual, trifling, I deceive myself– and then my outlook on life might be expressed in words used by the famous Arakcheyev19 in one of his intimate letters: ‘Everything that is good in this world cannot be free of evil – and there is always more bad than good.’ In other words, everything is vile, there’s no point in living and I must consider the sixty-two years of my life as wasted. I catch myself thinking these things and try and convince myself that they are accidental, ephemeral and aren’t deeply ingrained in me. But then I immediately think: ‘If this is so, then why do I have the urge to go and visit those toads every evening?’

  And I solemnly promise myself not to go to Katya’s any more, although I know very well that I’ll go again tomorrow.

  As I ring my front door bell and go upstairs I feel that I have no family any more and I have no desire to get it back. Clearly, those new, Arakcheyevan thoughts within me are neither accidental nor passing, but possess my whole being. With a sick conscience, feeling dejected and sluggish and barely able to move my limbs
– as if a thousand pounds had been added to my weight – I get into bed and soon fall asleep.

  And then – insomnia…

  IV

  Summer comes and life changes.

  One fine morning Liza comes to see me and says jokingly, ‘Let’s go, Your Excellency! It’s all ready.’

  ‘My Excellency’ is led into the street, put into a cab and driven away. To occupy my mind I read the shop signs backwards: traktir (tavern) becomes Ritkart. That would do very well for a baronial surname – Baroness Ritkart! Further on I drive through open country, past a cemetery which makes no impression on me at all, although I shall soon be lying there. Then I drive through a wood and through open country again. There’s nothing of interest. After a two-hour drive ‘His Excellency’ is taken to the ground floor of a dacha and accommodated in a small, very cheerful little room with blue wallpaper.

  I have insomnia at night again, but instead of waking up in the morning and listening to my wife I am lying in bed – not asleep, but in that drowsy, half-conscious state when you know you’re not asleep, yet still have dreams of a sort. At midday I get up and from habit I sit down at the desk; I don’t do any work, though, and I amuse myself with the yellow French paperbacks that Katya sends me. Of course, it would be more patriotic of me to read Russian authors, but I must confess that I don’t really have much enthusiasm for them. Apart from two or three old-timers, the whole of contemporary literature seems less literature than a special kind of cottage industry which exists only to be patronized by those who are reluctant to avail themselves of its produce. The best of these home-produced artefacts cannot be called remarkable and cannot be praised without strong reservations. The same must be said of all those literary novelties which I’ve read over the past ten to fifteen years, none of which can be called remarkable or praised without a ‘but’. The product may be intelligent, uplifting, but lacking in talent. It may be talented and uplifting, but it’s unintelligent. Or – finally – it may be talented and intelligent, but it’s not uplifting.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that French books are talented, intelligent and uplifting. Nor do they satisfy me. But they aren’t so boring as Russian books and it’s not uncommon to find in them what is essential for artistic creativity – a feeling of personal freedom which you don’t find in Russian authors. I can’t remember one new book where the author doesn’t try from the first page to shackle himself with all kinds of conventions and contracts with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body, another has bound himself hand and foot with psychological analysis, another stands in need of a ‘warm attitude to man’, a fourth deliberately pads out whole pages with nature description so as not to be suspected of tendentiousness… One wants to appear lower class in his writings, whilst another simply has to be one of the gentry, and so on. They have a sense of purpose, are careful, shrewd, but they have neither the freedom nor the courage to write what they like and therefore there is no creativity.

  All this applies to so-called belles-lettres.

  As for serious Russian articles – on sociology, say, or art and so forth – I don’t read them simply because I’m scared of them. In my childhood and youth I was terrified of porters and theatre ushers for some reason and this fear is with me to this day. I fear them even now. It’s said that we fear only what we don’t understand. And indeed it’s very difficult to understand why porters and ushers should be so self-important, overbearing and imperiously ill-mannered. Reading serious articles I experience exactly the same vague fear. Their incredible pomposity, their bantering, magisterial style, the familiarity with which they treat foreign authors, their ability to retain their dignity whilst labouring in vain – all this I find incomprehensible, frightening and utterly unlike the humility and the calm, gentlemanly tone to which I’ve become accustomed when reading our medical and scientific authors. Not only articles, but even translations made or edited by serious-minded Russians I find difficult to read. The arrogant, condescending tone of the prefaces, the mass of translator’s footnotes that ruin my concentration, the question marks and parenthetical ‘sics’ with which the generous translator has peppered the entire article or book are an invasion of the author’s personality – and of my independence as a reader.

  Once I was called to give expert evidence at a Court of Assizes. In the adjournment one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor’s rude treatment of the defendants, who numbered two cultured women. I don’t believe I was exaggerating in the least when I replied to my friend that the prosecutor’s treatment was no worse than that which prevails among authors of serious articles. In fact, their manners are so rude that it doesn’t bear talking about. Either they treat each other and those writers they criticize with excessive obsequiousness, at the expense of their own dignity, or they go to the other extreme and deal with them far more ruthlessly than I have done in these memoirs and in my thoughts about my future son-in-law Gnekker. Charges of irresponsibility, impure motives and all kinds of criminal activity even, are the standard embellishment of these serious articles. But, as young doctors are fond of putting it in their articles, this is the ultima ratio! Such attitudes are bound to be reflected in the morals of the young generation of writers and therefore it doesn’t surprise me in the least that, in the new books added to our stock of belles-lettres over the past ten to fifteen years, the heroes drink too much vodka, while the heroines are hardly what you’d call chaste.

  I read French books and glance out of the open window. I can see the spikes of my garden fence, two or three spindly little trees and beyond the fence the road, the fields, then a broad strip of pine forest. I often enjoy looking at a boy and girl, both fair-haired and ragged, climbing the fence and laughing at my bald pate. In their sparkling little eyes I can read the words: ‘Go up, thou bald head!’20 They must be almost the only ones who don’t care a rap about my fame or rank.

  Now I don’t have people coming to see me every day. I shall mention only the visits of Nikolay and Pyotr Ignatyevich. Nikolay usually comes on a Sunday or saint’s day, ostensibly on business, but really just to see me. He turns up very tipsy, which he never is during the winter.

  ‘How are things?’ I ask as I go out into the hall to meet him.

  ‘Professor!’ he says, pressing hand to heart and looking at me with a lover’s ardour. ‘Your excellency! May God punish me! May lightning strike me dead on this very spot. Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus!’21

  And he eagerly kisses me on my shoulders, sleeves, buttons.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Professor! As God is my witness…!’

  He never stops gratuitously invoking the deity and I soon get bored with him, so I dispatch him to the kitchen where they give him a meal. Pyotr Ignatyevich also comes on holidays, especially to see me and to share his thoughts. He usually sits next to me at table. Unassuming, spruce and sensible, he doesn’t dare cross his legs or lean his elbows on the table and in his soft, even, smooth pedantic little voice relates what he considers very interesting and spicy novelties that he has gleaned from journals and books. All these items are identical and follow the same pattern: a Frenchman has made a discovery. Someone else, a German, has exposed him by proving the discovery was made as long ago as 1870 by some American. And a third (also a German) has outsmarted both of them by demonstrating that the two of them had committed a gaffe by mistaking air bubbles under a microscope for dark pigment. Even when he wants to amuse me Pyotr Ignatyevich talks at great length and diffusely, like someone defending his dissertation with an infinitely detailed itemization of bibliographical sources, endeavouring not to make one slip-up in the dates, issues of the journals, or in the names. He never calls anyone plain and simply Petit, but always Jean-Jacques Petit.22 Sometimes he stays for dinner and throughout the meal tells the same spicy stories, which depress the whole company. If Gnekker and Liza mention fugues or counterpoint in his presence, Brahms or Bach, he humbly drops his eyes and shows embarrassment. He is
ashamed that such trivial matters can be discussed in the presence of such serious-minded people as himself or me.

  In my present mood five minutes are enough for him to bore me as if I’d been seeing and listening to him from time immemorial. I loathe the poor devil. His quiet, even voice and pedantic language make me droop, his stories stupefy me. He nourishes the kindest feelings towards me and only talks to give me pleasure. But I pay him back by staring straight at him, as if I want to hypnotize him. ‘Go away, go away!’ I think to myself. ‘Go!’ But he cannot read my mind and stays on and on and on…

  When he’s with me I just can’t shake off the thought that when I die he’ll very likely be appointed to succeed me and my poor lecture-room seems like an oasis where the spring has run dry. I’m rude to Pyotr Ignatyevich, taciturn and sullen – as if he were to blame for such thoughts, not I. When he starts rapturously praising German scholars I no longer good-humouredly chaff him as I used to.

  ‘Your Germans are asses…’ I mutter gloomily.

  That reminds me of the late Professor Nikita Krylov,23 when he was once bathing with Pirogov at Revel. He became furious with the freezing cold water and cursed those ‘German scoundrels’. I behave badly towards Pyotr Ignatyevich and only when he’s leaving and I look through the window and glimpse his grey hat beyond the fence do I feel like calling out to him: ‘Please forgive me, my dear fellow!’

  Lunch is even more boring than during the winter. That same Gnekker, whom I now hate and despise, dines with me almost every day. Once I tolerated his presence in silence, but now I make caustic remarks at his expense, which make my wife and Liza blush. Carried away by malicious feelings I often come out with complete inanities. For example, once after I’d given Gnekker a long, contemptuous look I suddenly blurted out, for no apparent reason: