Contributor: Marta V.
Art Historian
Chekhov and his wife, actress Olga Knípper.
"Give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky." (Chekhov)
All through last year, after Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, one couldn't stop hearing that it has been repeated time and again that Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) is the father of modern literature. So a few weeks ago I decided to sit down and re-read "The Steppe", and an uneasy feeling has remained there, deep down, undigested, confusing.
This long story of around 150 pages is about the journey of a child over the Ukrainian steppe around 1880. For Chekhov, "the Russian soul" depended on the unparalleled loneliness of the steppe landscape, discovering it gradually as if it were canvases, one after the other, revealing themselves between the lines. It seems to be the closest thing to a written painting.
How many painters, illustrators or film directors have been able to convey a storm as convincingly as Chekhov?
"Detrás de las colinas surgió, de manera inesperada, una nube rizada de color ceniza. Intercambió una mirada con la estepa, como si quisiera decirle: "Estoy preparada" y frunció el ceño. De pronto, algo se desgarró en el aire estancado, el viento sopló con todas sus fuerzas y con un silbante estrépito corrió formando remolinos por la estepa. Al instante la hierba y la maleza del año anterior empezaron a murmurar; el polvo sobre el camino avanzó por la estepa y, arrastrando tras de sí la paja, libélulas y plumas, se elevó en forma de tromba negra hasta el cielo oscureciendo el sol. Atravesando la estepa a lo largo y ancho, tropezando y saltando, se desplazaban los cardos; uno de ellos, atrapado por el torbellino, giró como un ave, se elevó hasta el cielo y, tras convertirse allí en un punto negro, desapareció de la vista. Otro lo siguió y luego un tercero; Yegoruska vio cómo dos de ellos chocaban en las alturas azules y se acometían en una suerte de combate singular".
The real protagonists here are the vivid description and the landscape. For the most part, though, it's a slow read with very little action.
So if nothing much happens, how do we explain the impact on the contemporary reader?
Particularly in an age of immediacy, information overload and expectations of complex, highly elaborate content. In the midst of recent Oscar-winning films about relationships between a man and an operating system, or the full-on anxiety of a space mission gone wrong, what can we hope to get out of a book whose opening lines describe the flight of a great bustard? Why are we so impressed by the description of time passing one morning in the countryside, as if it "stretched endlessly, as if it had stopped altogether"? We're excited to see how the author unravels the decline of Russian society at the end of the 19th century through the actions of an old priest. "Father Jristofor had never experienced a concern so strong as to tighten his soul like a boa."
To find the answers to these questions, we need to look at how this is handled in painting.
When we study Jan Van Eyck's "Man with Red Turban", looking at each and every strand of mink hair on the neck, and studying the eye closely, in which we discover a tiny drop of blood, do we not feel the same mental slap as when see this other painting, Freud's "Portrait of the Young Painter"?
Isn't this journey, from Chekhov's (or even Thoreau's) letters right up to the "tornado effect" caused by, say, David Forster Wallace's novels, somewhat similar?
Perhaps it's merely the fact that all these works of art come from a place of genius. They have all left us with some sort of sting in a corner of our hypothalamus, an intense, uneasy feeling that's difficult to shake off. We're predators of emotions and we recognize our catch.
