If you read Chekhov in the Constance Garnett translations–and if you read those translations in order–volume six comes as a something of a surprise: Unlike the previous five volumes, the stories in volume six flow from one to the next, thematically linked even though they were written years apart. These are all tales set in the country and in rural villages, a world populated mainly by peasants, where power and money is in the hands of a distant and sometimes mysterious few.
In this volume, “The Pipe” comes directly after a small masterpiece, “Dreams,” and the two stories feel tightly aligned, both essentially about men talking as they walk in the woods. In “Dreams,” the men are a pair of constables escorting a tramp to his day in court; in “The Pipe,” it’s a bailiff who comes across a shepherd. In both these stories, Chekhov offers poetic and detailed descriptions of the natural world.
The natural world in “Dreams” is an imagined one: The frail tramp wishes for a life unmolested in the woods of Siberia. It has this lovely reverie: “It is sweet to think of the broad, rapid rivers, with steep banks wild and luxuriant, of the impenetrable forests, of the boundless steppes.”
“The Pipe,” too, is rich with such descriptions, but the world is close by and real. When we meet the bailiff, he is “exhausted by the sultry heat of the fir-wood and covered with spiders’ webs and pine needles.” And the trees are “wrapped in a light mist; there was a pungent smell of decay from the dampness of the wood.”
But in “The Pipe,” nature is despoiled. The bailiff and the shepherd complain bitterly that the forest wildlife is gone. Where there were once “geese and cranes and ducks and grouse—clouds and clouds of them,” now there are almost none to be found. And the same is true of bear, fox, otter and wolf. “The time has come for God’s world to perish,” says the shepherd.
On the one hand, their grousing seems almost (unintentionally) comical, a couple of geezers talking about the good old days. Their complaints verge on the ridiculous: Not only are the fish and fowl and game smaller and hard to find, they gripe, the birds are sitting on their eggs too long these days.
But on the other hand, the changes in Russia’s wildlife were real. In 1886/1887, when “Dreams” and “The Pipe” were published, Russia was in the midst of an industrial and agricultural revolution spurred by the end of feudalism and the freeing of the serfs in 1861. Over the next thirty years, “the number of hired workers increased five-fold and the number of industrial enterprises doubled,” wrote Natalia Bubnova in an article published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The number of towns in Russia tripled from 1863 to 1897. By 1900, Russia became second in the world in industrial growth, following only the United States.”
In other words, poor farm workers and and servants essentially transitioned from slavery or near-slavery to (semi) free agents in a (semi) free market. The sons of slaves became small business owners, as had happened in Chekhov’s own family. And factory towns sprung up where once there had been only rivers and fields.
So no wonder a shepherd and woodsman in 1887 would see the natural world declining, and even anticipate God’s judgment of man. The rate of change was almost unfathomably fast, particularly for rural societies that had gone essentially unchanged for 10 generations or more.
Having said all that, “The Pipe” is more interesting as a reflection of Russia’s social and economic transformation than as a piece of fiction. As a story, there’s not much there. It ends with a sort of writerly shoulder shrug: After learning the shepherd’s name, “Luka the poor,” the bailiff heads home in a foul mood.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
If you are not reading the Garnett translations in order, certainly the best story to read after “The Pipe” is “Dreams.” And if you are reading the volume in order, well, keep reading: the subsequent story in the volume, “Agafya,” also makes for a great comparison as well, as it portrays characters who are living in a sort of limbo between city and country, in a village where many of the local men work in a factory nearby.
A Chekhov Circus 