The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91

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An interesting game (invented by the drama specialist Harai Golomb) can be played with Chekhov’s plays: leave one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and so on, before the curtain falls on the last act and see how completely you change your understanding of the play with each exit. We can play the game with Chekhov’s work. Imagine that tuberculosis had killed him not in 1904, but in 1897, 1891 or 1884, and how differently we would view him. A Chekhov who had died in the Moscow clinic in April 1897, leaving no Three Sisters or Cherry Orchard, would not be seen as a dramatist (despite the existence of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya), but almost solely as the progenitor of the modern short story, a prose poet who relegates plot, characterization and moral argument to equal or even lesser status than atmospheric mood. A Chekhov who had stopped with this volume (after all, his journey across Siberia to Sakhalin might very well have killed him in 1890 or 1891), leaving no Ward No. 6, Black Monk or Ariadna, might appear as a gifted disciple of Russia’s elder generation of great novelists, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Leskov, refining, miniaturizing their techniques, but as yet unable to match their cosmic vision or moral authority, or to devise a narrative language of his own.

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