The Steppe (1888)

Anton Chekhov characterized his long story (novella, whatever) as "something rather odd and much too original." It does feel distinctly modern now. He wrote it after a journey to Ukraine for his health, rejuvenated by a reacquaintance with the geography of the steppe. I have similar feelings, I think, for the North American Great Plains, the grasslands of eastern Montana and Wyoming and the western Dakotas, which are steppe-like. The story focuses on a young boy, an orphan about 9, who is traveling with his uncle to be placed in a boarding school. It's high summer, hot and sweltering. The uncle has other business in the region and the boy is sent ahead with a group of peasants hauling a wagon train. A priest is also traveling with him. The action is built out of the boy's perceptions of this immense journey and the radical changes in his life. All these characters—a handful of the peasants become familiar to us—are like vivid phantoms flickering in and out of the vision of the boy. Many times he doesn't understand them but we often can even when he is confused. Toward the end he and the wagon train party encounter a giant thunderstorm. Chekhov has a great way of staying inside the boy yet always keeping us aware of the situation outside him too. It alternates between the concrete—the storm is wonderfully done—and the dreamy, as the boy's perceptions are often mixed-up and childlike. We grasp the poignancy of his situation as he will not for years. He's so alone in the world—his uncle accepts the responsibility for him, but he's not cut out to be a family man or father figure (even though he obviously has become the boy's father figure). The story often reminded me in pleasant ways of road trips I've taken across the Great Plains, not just the geography, though that is striking, but the sense of travel as an emotional or even spiritual transition from Point A to Point B. This journey obviously represents a lifetime before-and-after event for the boy no matter what happens next. Somehow Chekhov captures the almost unimaginable hugeness of it.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov