You could easily fill a book of Chekhov stories set on the steppe, the dreary, endless grasslands that stretch across much of Russia.
“At Home” is the tale of a young woman, Vera, who after receiving an education in a distant city, returns to her family’s decaying property on the steppe. There’s nothing for her there, but she seems to have nowhere else to go. It’s her home, where the bits and pieces of her family still live, everyone scraping by on too little money while the property falls apart bit by bit.
The residue of serfdom shadows this story — the grandfather “only rarely” beats his servants now, and they in turn are less reliable, I suppose because they no longer live in fear of quite so many cruel beatings.
Vera is understandably ambivalent about remaining on the farm. But her only other option would seem to be to get married, and the obvious and possibly only local option is a doctor in a neighboring town. He’s a dull man; she cannot possibly find it in herself to love him.
“At Home” is a deeply quiet story. As Vera wrestles with the question of how to live her life, there are minor disruptions in the tiny world of the family estate. She chats with a soldier who has been hired to do some work on the property; her aunt fires him, presumably because she noticed him talking with Vera. The soldier is a small symbol of possibility; then he is gone. The dreary steppe closes around Vera once again.
If this story has a problem, it’s the unremitting dreariness. It’s very well done. But it’s a whole lotta dreary.
It’s awfully good, though.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
When I was a kid, I was weirdly addicted to reading the fine print of the daily listings of televised movies, as written up in the New York Times. The blurbs were incredibly pithy, often harsh, and frequently arch – they had a bitchy tone utterly unlike the rest of the paper, and in retrospect it seems clear that, in this tiny corner of the Gray Lady, gay was being spoken openly.
Here’s a blurb from 1970 that I found just now in a completely random web search: “Sweet Bird of Youth: A repulsive human-round-up, Tennessee Williams style, and the wheels and heels show clearly.”
A phrase that the blurbsters at the Times used all the time back then was “youth at bay,” which was utterly mysterious to me at the time. (Here are examples, again based on a random search: “Pre-beatnik youth at bay…” “Youth at bay in rural Georgia…” “Youth at bay, and tuna boats.” (That last one is for a movie called “Chubasco.” Whoa.)
Now that I’m older and wiser, I get the coded speech, and more importantly (and to the point), I understand the phrase “at bay.” Chekhov specialized in writing about characters “at bay,” and especially women, whose choices and pathways were more restricted than men.
One of the most beautiful examples of this is the heartbreaking “The Schoolmistress.” It’s one of my favorites of all his works. “The Schoolmistress” makes a very nice counterpoint to “At Home,” which the New York Times, back in the day, might have blurbed as, “Woman at bay on the steppe. Rewarding, sad.”
A Chekhov Circus 