Chekhov and the Ukraine
The Three Sisters
Letters from Vienna #88
Chekhov and the Ukraine
“On the scale of things,” Alison Anderson wrote of the summer house in the village of Luka, not far from Sumy, which was close to the front line and threatened by fighting, “it is only one small summer house with a few precious artefacts donated by the writer’s sister or widow: his medical instruments, a pince-nez, the portrait his brother Nikolay painted of him, and a gardening hat worn by his sister Masha.”[1] Yet this is where Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) spent his highly productive summers of 1888 and 1889.
On May 30, 1888 he wrote to Alexei Suvorin: “…I am living on the banks of the Psel in the wing of an old feudal home. I hired the place sight unseen, hoping for the best, and thus far have not regretted it. The river is wide, deep, teeming with islands, fish and crayfish, the banks are beautiful and there is much greenery. But its chief virtue is its sense of spaciousness, which is such that it seems to me my hundred rubles have given me the right to live amidst a limitless expanse. Nature and life hereabouts are of a pattern that editors are rejecting as old-fashioned, let alone the nightingales, which sing day and night, the distant barking dogs, the old neglected gardens, the tightly boarded, very sad and poetic country places, where dwell souls of beautiful women, the venerable, doddering feudal retainers and the young girls athirst for the most conventional type of love; not far from here we have such a worn-out device of romance as a watermill (sixteen wheels), along with a miller and his daughter who keeps sitting at her window, obviously waiting for something to happen. Everything I see and hear about me seems like the ancient tales and fairy stories I have known for so long…”
“My landlords have proved to be very fine, hospitable people. It is a family worth studying and consists of six persons. The old mother is a very kind, rather faded and long-suffering woman; she reads Schopenhauer and goes to church to hear the Song of Praise…”
“Her oldest daughter, a woman physician, is the pride of the whole household, and a saint, as the peasants call her, a truly unusual figure. She has a tumour on the brain which has rendered her completely blind; she suffers from epilepsy and constant headaches. She knows what awaits her, and speaks of her imminent death stoically in astonishing cold blood…”
“The second daughter is also a woman doctor and an old maid, a quiet, shy, infinitely good, tender and homely being. Sick people are an absolute torment to her, and she is practically psychotic in her anxiety about them…”
“The third daughter, who was graduated from the college in Bestuzhevka, is a young girl of masculine frame, strong, bony as a shad, well-muscled, tanned and vociferous…she laughs so loud you can hear her half a mile off. A super-Ukrainimaniac. She has built a school on the estate at her own expense and teaches little Little Russians Krylov’s fables translated into Little Russian…”
“The oldest son is a quiet, modest, bright, unlucky and hard-working young person, unpretentious and apparently satisfied with what life has given him. He does not boast of being expelled for political activity during his fourth year at the university. He says little, loves domestic life and the earth and lives peaceably with his Little Russian neighbours.”
“The second son is a young man and a fanatic on the subject of Tchaikovsky’s genius. A pianist. He aspires to the Tolstoyan life…”[2]
The Three Sisters
The attentive reader will note the similarities to and differences from the characters of Olga, Masha and Irina in Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters”, which was written in 1900 and first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in January 1901.
Two of the daughters in the play: Olga, a spinster, and Masha, who is married, are teachers, while the youngest: Irina, is bored to death and longs for something to do with her life. The one thing they have in common is their yearning for Moscow. Their brother on the other hand botches his promised academic career with an unfortunate marriage and mortgages the family’s house to pay off his gambling debts.
Reviving Little Russian
Of interest for today of course is the mention of the fact that Little Russian (Ukrainian) was being taught to children in Luka in the 1880s. Although this is highly speculative on my part I would suggest that this phenomenon could be interpreted as an example of “push-back” rather than nascent “nationalism”. The people living in the Ukraine wished to retain their cultural identity. This phenomenon wasn’t limited to the Ukraine but could be observed in Ireland too. In the Ukraine just as in Ireland there was both a cultural and a political dimension to the language question and, as we saw from the fate of Joseph Conrad’s parents in letter #57, trying to preserve one’s cultural heritage sometimes came at a terrible cost.
“The Ukrainian revival in the Russian Empire” Serhy Yekelchyk tells us “began in the Left Bank, but only partially because of the Cossack traditions preserved there. At the turn of the nineteenth century, most nobles descended from the Cossack officer class assimilated into Russian culture, just as the Ruthenian nobility in the Right Bank had become Polish two centuries earlier…”
“…The intelligentsia’s interest in the common folk, their speech, and customs marked the “scholarly”, or heritage-gathering, stage of the Ukrainian revival. But few of its pioneers had a clear nation-building program in mind…”
“Paradoxically, the imperial government supported the early stages of the Ukrainian revival. Concerned with the continuing domination of the separatist Polish gentry and Polish high culture in the Right Bank, St. Petersburg sought to prove the region’s “Russian”–or at least, Little Russian–heritage.”
“The Polish Uprising of 1830-1831, which began in Warsaw but spread to the Right Bank, only reinforced this concern. The Polish gentry rebels failed to attract the Ukrainian peasantry and were quickly defeated by the Russian army. Subsequent Russian measures included harsh repressions against the Polish nobility in the Right Bank, with 340,000 noblemen losing their noble status during the next twenty years. But the government also took serious measures to replace Polish high culture in the Right Bank with Russian. In 1834, Kiev University was established as a citadel of Russian schooling in a region where most educated people still spoke Polish. In their struggle against Polish influences in the Ukrainian lands, imperial bureaucrats enlisted some early Ukrainian patriots, such as Maksymovych, who served briefly as the first head of Kiev University.”
Suffice it to say: the Russians were none too happy when the Ukrainians showed too much independence and they repeatedly cracked down on the study and use of the language when it suited them.
In the 1880s however the Ukrainophiles were once more in favour, if only because they weren’t regarded as being dangerous left-wing revolutionaries. “In 1881, Alexander III (1881-1894) modified the Ems Ukase (which banned the publication of all Ukrainian books) to allow the publication of dictionaries and music lyrics in Ukrainian, as well as the staging of Ukrainian plays with permission from local authorities.”[3]
Chekhov’s stay in Luka was not the first nor was it the last time that the Ukraine inspired him. After all: he was born in the town of Taganrog (which is merely a hundred miles from Mariupol, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the ongoing conflict) on the 29th of January 1860.
In March 1888 Chekhov published “The Steppe”, a novella based on his journey to the Ukraine a year before. For all his awareness of its poetic beauty Chekhov resists the temptation to idealise the landscape and always retains his objective, calm and cool gaze; he remains the scientifically trained, critically minded, perceptive doctor that he was. The grass “droops”, the air is “stagnant”, the “endless” sky “petrified with dreariness”, while the steppe itself is “disillusioned”, “jaded”, “stifling” and “oppressive” while the “sun–baked” hills are “brownish-green and lilac in the distance”.
Chekhov loved the Ukraine and spent most of his last years close to Yalta, where, although he suffered much discomfort, he felt very much at home. Yalta, after all, isn’t too far removed from Taganrog, and has a similar climate. Yet, like the figures in “The Three Sisters”, he also loved Moscow, and yearned for it too. One, naturally enough, doesn’t exclude the other.
[1] https://lithub.com/anton-chekhovs-beloved-summer-home-in-ukraine-is-under-threat/
[2] pp. 51-54 The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov
[3] pp.39-45 Ukraine, Serhy Yekelchyk
Beautiful….