Natasha's Dance (67 page)

    As he sailed down the Amur passing Russian villages that had been settled only forty years before, he had the impression that he was ‘no longer in Russia, but somewhere in Patagonia, or Texas; without even mentioning the distinctive, un-Russian scenery, it seemed to me the entire time that the tenor of our Russian life is completely alien to the native of Amur, that Pushkin and Gogol are not understood here and therefore not necessary, that our history is boring, and that we who arrive from European Russia seem like foreigners’.
¹⁰⁴
The Russian prisoners were overwhelmed by this same sense of estrangement, so much so that, according to Chekhov, the convicts who attempted to escape the island were motivated chiefly by the physical yearning to see their native land:

    First and foremost an exile is spurred to leave Sakhalin by his passionate love for his home district. If
you listen to the convicts - what happiness it is, what

    joy, to live in one’s own place in one’s own country! They talk about Sakhalin, the land here, the people, the trees and the climate, with scornful laughter, with exasperation and loathing, while in European Russia everything is wonderful and enchanting; the most daring thinking cannot acknowledge that in European Russia there might be unhappy people, since to live somewhere in the Tula or Kursk region, to see log cabins every day, and to breathe Russian air already by itself constitutes the supreme happiness. God knows, a person might suffer poverty, sickness, blindness, dumbness and disgrace from the people around, just as long as God permits him to die at home.
¹⁰⁵

    The visual engagement with the landscape of Sakhalin is so intense that it seems at times as if Chekhov’s words are surrogates for paint:

    If a landscape painter should happen to come to Sakhalin, then I recommend the Arkovo Valley to his notice. This spot, besides the beauty of its location, is extremely rich in hues and tints, so that it is difficult to get by without the hackneyed simile of a multicoloured carpet or a kaleidoscope. Here there is dense, sappy verdure with giant burdocks glittering from the rain that has only just fallen; beside it, in an area no larger than a few square feet or so, there is the greenery of rye, then a scrap of land with barley, and then burdocks again, with a space behind it covered with oats, after that beds of potatoes, two immature sunflowers with drooping heads, then, forming a little wedge, a deep-green patch of hemp; here and there plants of the umbelliferous family similar to candelabras proudly hold up their heads, and this whole diversity of colour is strewn with pink, bright-red and crimson specks of poppies. On the road you meet peasant women who have covered themselves against the rain with big burdock leaves, like headscarves, and because of this look like green beetles. And the sides of the mountains - well, maybe they are not the mountains of the Caucasus, but they are mountains all the same.
¹⁰⁶

    There was in fact a landscape painter who had meant to go with Chekhov on the trip to Sakhalin. Isaak Levitan was a close friend of the writer. Exact contemporaries, they had known each other since their teenage years, when Levitan met Chekhov’s brother at art school. Born into a poor Jewish family in Lithuania, Levitan was orphaned by the time he met the Chekhovs, who adopted him as a brother and a friend. Levitan and Chekhov shared the same passions - hunting,

    fishing, womanizing, brothels - and perhaps it was because he knew his friend so well that, when the artist fell in love with Chekhov’s sister, the writer told Maria not to marry him.
¹⁰⁷
The two men were such close friends, they shared so much in common in artistic temperament, that their lives and art were intertwined in many different ways. Levitan appears in various forms in Chekhov’s works - perhaps most famously (and almost at the cost of their friendship) in ‘The Grasshopper’ as the lecherous artist Ryabovsky who has an affair with a married woman to whom he teaches art. Many of the scenes in
The Seagull
- the suicide attempt by the playwright Treplyov, the killing of the bird - were taken directly from Levitan’s own life.
¹⁰⁸

    Levitan’s approach to landscape painting was very similar to Chekhov’s own depictions of nature. Both men shared a passion for the humble, muddy countryside of Moscow’s provinces, whose melancholic poetry was captured perfectly in both their works. Each admired deeply the other’s work. Many of Levitan’s paintings are the prototypes for Chekhov’s best descriptions of the countryside, while Levitan thought this passage from the story ‘Fortune’ (1887) was ‘the height of perfection’ in landscape art:
¹⁰⁹

    A large flock of sheep was spending the night by the wide steppe road that is called the main highway. Two shepherds were watching over them. One was an old man of about eighty, who was toothless, with a face which shook, and who was lying on his stomach by the edge of the road, with his elbows resting on dusty plants. The other was a young lad with thick black brows and no moustache, dressed in the sort of cloth from which they make cheap bags, and lying on his back with his hands behind his head looking up at the sky, where stars were twinkling and the Milky Way stretched out right over his face… The sheep slept. Silhouettes of the sheep which were awake could be seen here and there against the grey background of the dawn, which was already beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky; they were standing up and had their heads lowered, thinking about something… In the sleepy, still air there was a monotonous humming sound which you cannot get away from on a summer night on the steppe. Crickets chirped without stopping, quails sang and young nightingales whistled lazily about a mile away from the flock in a gully where a stream ran and where willows grew… It was already getting light. The Milky Way was pair and inching away little by little like

    snow, losing its definition. The sky became cloudy and dull, so that you could not determine whether it was clear or completely filled with clouds, and it was only by the clear and glossy strip towards the east and the occasional star here and there that you could work out what was going on… And when the sun began to scorch the earth, promising a long, unvanquished sultriness, everything that had moved during the night and emitted sounds now sank into somnolence.
¹¹⁰

    What Chekhov most admired in Levitan’s art (and Levitan in Chekhov’s) was its spiritual response to the natural world. Levitan’s landscapes evoke reflective moods and emotions, even when their subjects are the most mundane. In this respect he was very much the pupil of his teacher Savrasov, whose famous painting
The Rooks Have Returned
(1871) was a perfect illustration of the poetry contained in the most ordinary provincial scene. Chekhov found in Levitan the sort of images he wanted to create in his reader’s mind. In ‘Three Years’ (1895) he gives a description of Levitan’s painting
A Quiet Dwelling
(1891) which captures perfectly the effect which Chekhov himself wanted to achieve:

    In Easter week the Laptevs went to the School of Art to see a picture exhibition… Julia stopped by a small landscape and idly looked at it. The foreground was a stream crossed by a wooden bridge with a path merging into dark grass on the far side. On the right was part of a wood with a bonfire near it - there must be grazing horses and watchmen hereabouts. Far away the sunset’s last fires smouldered. Julia imagined going over the bridge, and then further and further down the path. It was quiet there, sleepy landrails cried. A light winked far away. Suddenly she vaguely felt that she had often seen them long ago -those clouds spanning the red of the sky, that wood, those fields. She felt lonely, she wanted to walk on, on, on down the path. There, at the sunset’s end, lay reflected an eternal, unearthly something.
¹¹¹

    Chekhov knew the works of Monet and Cezanne; none the less, he considered Levitan the greatest landscape painter of his day.
¹¹²
Throughout his life he bitterly regretted that he had not bought his favourite Levitan painting,
The Village
(1888). As he told a journalist in 1904, it was just a ‘village that was dull and miserable, God-forsaken and lifeless, but the picture imparts such an inexpressible charm that

    you can’t take your eyes off it; you just want to keep looking and looking at it. No one has managed to achieve the simplicity and purity of conception which Levitan achieved at the end of his life and I do not know if anyone else will ever achieve anything like it.’
¹¹³

    In 1886 Levitan made the first of several trips to the Volga steppe. These marked the start of a new epic style in his landscape painting, completely different from the intimate and lyrical approach to nature in his earlier landscapes of the Moscow provinces. The first of these epic canvases was
Evenings on the Volga
(1888), where the steppe-land’s broad expanse is suggested indirectly by the dominating presence of the sky. Chekhov, too, was inspired by a visit to the Volga steppe-lands at this time. His approach to landscape in ‘The Steppe’ (1887), the first story to bring him literary fame, was very similar to Levitan’s:

    A wide boundless plain encircled by a chain of low hills lay stretched before the travellers’ eyes. Huddling together and peeping out from behind one another, these hills melted together into rising ground, which stretched right to the very horizon and disappeared into the violet distance; one drives on and on and cannot discern where it begins or where it ends…
¹¹⁴

    Enthused by the steppe, the two men thought of travelling together to Siberia, and Chekhov included his friend in his plans for the trip to Sakhalin. Levitan was in the entourage of friends and family who accompanied the writer on the first leg of his trip. But he did not go with Chekhov to Siberia, deciding in the end that he could not leave his lover and her husband for that long. Chekhov was annoyed at Levitan (it was perhaps the cause of his cruel satire in ‘The Grasshopper’ which broke off their relations for three years). In several letters from Siberia Chekhov told his sister that the artist was a fool to miss out on the scenery of the Yenisei, on the unknown forests and the mountains of Baikal: ‘What ravines! What cliffs!’
¹¹⁵

    Like Chekhov, Levitan was drawn towards Siberia’s penal history. In his
Vladimirka
(1892) (plate 23) he combined landscape art with a social history of the steppe. It was Levitan’s attempt to achieve in painting what Chekhov had achieved in
Sakhalin.
The idea of the painting had come to levitan on a hunting trip with his lover, the young artist
Sofya Kuvshinnikova (the one described by Chekhov in

    ’The Grasshopper’). The painter had chanced upon the famous highway near Boldino in Vladimir province. Levitan had just been staying with Chekhov and Chekhov had told him of his trip to Sakhalin, so perhaps this influenced the way he saw the road.
¹¹⁶
‘The scene was pregnant with a wondrous silence’, recalled Kuvshinnikova.

    The long white line of the road faded as it disappeared among the forests on the blue horizon. In the distance one could just make out the figures of two pilgrims… Everything was calm and beautiful. All of a sudden, Levitan remembered what sort of road this was. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘This is the Vladimirka, the one on which so many people died on their long walk to Siberia.’ In the silence of this beautiful landscape we were suddenly overwhelmed by an intense feeling of sadness.
¹¹⁷

    Looking at this scene, as Levitan portrayed it, one cannot fail to feel the desolation - it is haunted by the suffering of those distant prisoners, by people like Volkonsky, who for three hot summer months had dragged his heavy chains along the Vladimirka to Siberia.

    Chekhov’s ‘Steppe’ is also dominated by this atmosphere of suffering. Its boundless space seems inescapable - a prison in itself. The landscape in the story is stifling and oppressive, without sound or movement to disrupt the tedium. Time seems to come to a standstill, the scenery never changes, as four men cross the steppe in a ‘shabby covered chaise’. Everything is subdued by a feeling of stagnation and desolation. Even the singing of a woman in the distance sounds so sad that it ‘made the air more suffocating and stagnant’.
¹¹⁸

    Chekhov’s ambiguity toward the steppe - seeing both the beauty and the bleak monotony of its vast space - was shared by many artists and writers. There were many, on the one hand, who took pride and inspiration from the grandeur of the steppe. In the epic history paintings of Vasnetsov and Vrubel, for example, the heroic stature of the legendary figures of the Russian past is thrown into relief by the monumental grandeur of the steppe. In Vasnetsov’s painting
After Igor’s Battle with the Polovtsians
(1880), the notion of the epic is carried entirely by the vastness of the steppe, for what commands the eye is the lowered line of the horizon. Similarly, in his
Bogatyrs
(1898), it is the landscape which is the real subject of the painting, rather than

    the legendary warriors from which it takes its name. This is emphasized by the central
bogatyr,
who puts his hand against his brow to gaze farther into the distance. Vrubel’s panneau of the legendary ploughman
Mikula Selianovicb
(1896) is similar in this respect - the strangely inert peasant figure is raised to epic status by his relationship with the landscape. For these artists the national character had been shaped by the open plain: the Russians were as ‘broad and unrestrained’ in nature as the boundless steppe. This was the view which Gogol took in his ‘Thoughts on Geography’, published in his collection
Arabesques
in 1835. He also expounded it in his story ‘Taras Bulba’, where the vast size of the steppe is used as a projection of the Cossacks’ open nature and expansiveness. Many artists thought that the boundless plains were a spur to contemplation and religious hope - its infinite horizon forcing people to look upwards to the sky.
¹¹⁹
Chekhov, too, was inclined to fantasize that ‘giants with immense strides such as Ilia Muromets’ were still alive and that, if they were, ‘how perfectly in keeping with the steppe… they would have been!’
¹²⁰