by ROLAND QUINAULT
The great Russian author drew inspiration from the countryside and explored the practical and spiritual impact of trees on people, as well as on the environment and climate.
Anton Chekhov, the Russian dramatist and short-story writer, was born 150 years ago, in January 1860. By the time of his early death in 1904 he had a high reputation in Russia and in the century since then he has become internationally recognised as one of the most influential writers of the modern age. Consequently his life and works have been well studied but little attention has been paid to his interest in preserving the natural environment in general and trees in particular.
Chekhov had an urban upbringing: he was born and raised at Taganrog, a port on the Azov Sea in southern Russia, and then studied medicine in Moscow. Subsequently, however, he spent considerable periods in the countryside, either working as a doctor or on holiday. That led him to appreciate two contrary attitudes to the countryside. On the one hand, urbaneducated professionals regarded rural Russia as an enormous outdoor laboratory where they sought to elevate the condition of the peasantry through education, medicine and other forms of modernisation. On the other hand, many Russian writers regarded the countryside as the heart and soul of the nation and the home of its traditional and spiritual values. The tension between those two viewpoints was evident in many of Chekhov’s works. In his 1895 short story, The House with the Mezzanine, for example, he contrasted the attitude of a landscape painter who spends hours just looking at the sky, the birds and the trees, with that of his sweetheart,who supports practical measures to benefit the peasants. The painter argues that interference with the lives of the peasants, through the creation of medical stations, schools, libraries and other innovations, only leads to a new kind of slavery which blocks the spiritual development that makes life worth living.
Chekhov’s appreciation of Russia’s natural environment was evident both in his short stories and in travel writings. He wrote about a journey through southern Russia in The Steppe (1888) and he chronicled his expedition across Siberia to the Russian government’s offshore penal settlement in Sakhalin Island. On that journey, he encountered the taiga – vast coniferous forests made up of larch, spruce and pine – that lie between the steppe to the south and the tundra to the north. In central European Russia, by contrast, most of the indigenous forest consists of hardwoods, particularly birch and oak. Chekhov voiced his sadness at the destruction of ancient hardwood forests in his short story, Rothschild’s Fiddle (1894) and, more prominently, in his major plays.All of them are set in the wooded countryside of central European Russia and they were partly inspired by the long summer holidays that he spent,with family and friends, in country dachas south of Moscow.
In Chekhov’s first long play, Ivanov, performed in 1887, the eponymous landowner admits that his estate is going to ruin and that ‘the forests are groaning under the axe’. That theme was developed in his next play, The Wood Demon. The title is the nickname of Kroushchov, a landowner and medical doctor,who passionately desires to protect the forests.He complains that millions of trees are being felled merely because people are too lazy to use peat, rather than timber, for fuel. Kroushchov also claims that deforestation destroys the habitat of birds and animals and dries up rivers, whereas planting trees softens the harsh climate and thus helps to civilise man. His argument fails, however, to persuade a friend to stop burning wood for heating or building wooden barns.
History Today for more