SOURCE: “Huntsmen, Birds, Forests, and Three Sisters,” in Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jean-Pierre Barricelli, New York University Press, 1981, pp. 144-60.

[In the following essay, Karlinsky discusses the images of hunting and the forest throughout Chekhov's work and points to its significance in The Three Sisters.]

In describing the domestic arrangements of her parents at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's daughter Aleksandra emphasized the major role that dogs and horses played in their day-to-day existence.¹ Few people who live in the twentieth century find themselves in such close proximity to such large numbers of these two domesticated species of animals. Those who have read Pushkin's “Count Nulin,” Gogol's Dead Souls, Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches, Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and almost anything by Aksakov will know that the pursuit on horseback of foxes, wolves, and hares, with the aid of large packs of hunting hounds, was the favorite pastime of nineteenth-century Russian gentry. The hunting of small game with a dog and rifle was widely practiced by all strata of the Russian population. On the staff of most rural estates were kennel masters, kennel hands, and special professional huntsmen (yegerya), whose job it was to keep the estate kitchens supplied with edible game of every imaginable sort.

From the Testament of Prince Vladimir Monomakh, written at the beginning of the twelfth century to Tolstoy's great novels of the 1860s and 1870s, hunting was depicted in Russian literature as a noble and poetic passion, a major component of the good life, and the most direct way of achieving communion with nature and with the Russian common people. In Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches (more correctly, Diary of a Hunter) and in Sergey Aksakov's Diary of Bird Hunting in Orenburg Province, the hunter wandering about the countryside in pursuit of waterfowl and of the birds of the forest and the fields is shown as a warm, responsive person who is in tune with the creatures of the wild and with the natural beauty of his country. Aksakov's approach to wild birds and animals—his love and admiration of them, combined with a determination to exterminate as many of them as possible—did not seem paradoxical to his contemporaries. It took an early-twentieth-century critic, Yuliy Aykhenval'd, a great admirer of the author of Family Chronicle, to realize that “the meek murderer Aksakov fell passionately in love with nature and devoted his life to bringing death into it.”²

Perhaps the most powerful instances of poetic idealization of hunting in Russian literature are to be found in the novels of Tolstoy. Olenin in The Cossacks imagines that he has grasped the meaning of life and the essence of his own humanity while hunting boar and pheasant in the Caucasus. In Anna Karenina, Konstantin Levin's rapport with his wonderfully humanized bird dog, Laska, combined with his haymowing and other agrarian activities, serves to characterize him as a decent man, whose natural, sincerely felt mode of life is contrasted with the artificial worlds of bureaucracy and high society in which the lives of other major characters of the novel are spent. The accidental encounter of Levin on the train with Alexey Aleksandrovich Karenin, as described in their conversation at Stiva Oblonskiy's dinner party, is most telling in this respect. Levin had traveled to the Tver’ province in order to kill a she-bear that had been discovered there, the she-bear whose skin Oblonskiy later finds him measuring in a Moscow hotel room. Karenin, who in most ways is Levin's intellectual and moral opposite within the scheme of the novel, was on a fact-finding errand, connected with an investigation of the status of national minorities. There is little doubt that Tolstoy regards Levin's bear-hunting trip as a meaningful and admirable activity and wishes to contrast it to Karenin's travels, which he sees as a pointless bureaucratic exercise. And, of course, the overwhelmingly vivid scenes in War and Peace (when Natasha literally squeals in ecstasy and delight upon seeing a pack of hounds tear a jackrabbit to bits and when her brother Nicholas plaintively asks God what sin he had committed that God is allowing a hunted wolf to escape) belong among the most unforgettable depictions of hunting in world literature.

There was, then, in Russian literature of the nineteenth century, a widespread tradition of depicting the hunt and hunters both reverently and poetically. It is against the background of this tradition that we can best appreciate the audacity and originality with which the hunting theme was treated in a story that appeared in June 1881 in the Moscow humor magazine The Alarm Clock. The title of the story was “St. Peter's Day,” and it was signed by a name that meant nothing to anyone outside the narrow little world of Moscow humor magazines: Antosha Chekhonte. The story deals with the opening of the hunting season, which began legally on the feast day of St. Peter, June 29. Instead of the civilized, humane, or heroic hunters of the literary tradition, we are shown a nasty bunch of ill-tempered, squabbling people who shoot every living creature in sight, including meadowlarks, starlings, and domestic pigeons. When no birds can be found, the hunters kill a ground squirrel by throwing rocks at it. The deep understanding of wild animals and their ways, which is usually ascribed to hunters, is belied in “St. Peter's Day” when the ground squirrel is cut open and one of the hunters declares that it lacks a heart and other internal organs and that its insides consist entirely of intestines. Nor is there any of the expected poetic rapport between the hunters and their hounds: these hunters beat and mistreat their dogs and throw pebbles at them. The most distinguished member of the hunting party, a retired general, tears out the throat of a wounded quail “with his own fangs.” The representatives of the human and canine younger generation, the schoolboy Vanya and the puppy Tshchetnyy (the name means “in vain”), who have been taken along to teach them about the sport, have clearly not had an edifying experience during the outing. At the end of the day, the puppy is scared witless, and the boy is hideously sick from his first exposure to hard liquor.

Exactly one year after the appearance of “St. Peter's Day,” Antosha Chekhonte produced another similar story, “The Twenty Ninth of June,” which he published in a different humor magazine. The subject is again the opening day of the hunting season. The group of hunters in this story is not as indiscriminately destructive as the ones in “St. Peter's Day,” but only because they are too busy gossiping and telling each other dirty stories to do much shooting. At the beginning of the story, these absurd people are ironically contrasted with the true and natural bird hunters, the hawks, owls, and kites whose hunting is clearly seen as more real and meaningful than that of the humans.

Also in 1882, Antosha Chekhonte published a journalistic piece about the popular sport of baiting wolves and foxes with hounds in an enclosed area at the Khodynka Field outside Moscow. In “Impressions of Wolf Baiting” (“Na volchey sadke”), the joys of capturing and killing wolves, so memorably described by Aksakov and Tolstoy, are shown from the opposite perspective.³ The happily howling audience, which includes elegantly dressed upper-class women and small children who had been brought by their parents for an educational experience, fails to understand that it is witnessing a sordid massacre of anguished, terrified animals. The author's sympathy is entirely on the side of the tormented wolves and foxes, and the reader ends up feeling disgust for the inhumanity of the promoters and the spectators of this ugly sport.⁴

In August 1883, Antosha Chekhonte offered to the humor magazine, The Dragonfly (one of his regular outlets at the time), still another story about hunting, “He Understood.” The protagonist of the story is an impoverished, runty little peasant named Pavel Khromoy (“Paul the Lame”), who is out hunting with an absurd homemade shooting weapon and an emaciated, limping mongrel for a bird dog. Caught in flagrante when he shoots a starling out of season in the local landowner's forest, thus combining poaching with a hunting season violation, Pavel explains to the landowner that his compulsion for shooting inedible birds (mostly starlings and jackdaws) is a form of alcoholism. The landowner, revolted by the senseless extermination of birds, softens when alcoholism is mentioned, for he knows it from experience and realizes how irresistible alcoholism can be. He lets Pavel go without punishment.

The editors of The Dragonfly thought the story not humorous enough and rejected it. The author then submitted it to the leading Russian hunting journal, Nature and Hunting. The editors of Nature and Hunting saw the story as a “pretty little toy or a piece of pastry.”⁵ They agreed to print it provided it could be had for free. We know that the literary activities of the story's author during the period of his medical studies were strictly a money-making proposition. However, an exception was made for “He Understood,” and it appeared in Nature and Hunting, signed, not with a pen name, but with the author's real name, Anton Chekhov.

In his often hastily written productions of 1881-83, Antosha Chekhonte had not yet learned to write like Anton Chekhov. In terms of their literary art, “St. Peter's Day,” “The Twenty Ninth of June,” “Impressions of Wolf Baiting, and “He Understood” cannot be meaningfully compared with the mature, masterful writings of Aksakov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy on the same subject. Nor is it surprising that these four early pieces were lost in the torrent of the young Chekhov's other early satirical stories and humorous sketches. Neither the critics nor the readers noticed that Chekhov was quietly questioning and challenging the millennia-old assumption about the beauty and nobility of killing wild animals for sport and laying bare the primeval murderous instinct that often underlies the hunting impulse.

The attitude of the mature Chekhov toward the sport of hunting was for the most part negative, though not always consistent.⁶ His interest in man's relationship to wild animals, however, and in man's effect on their habitat remained constant for the rest of his life. This interest was expressed not only in Chekhov's typical attention to the natural environment in which his characters dwell, but also in his continuous reading of books and articles by biologists, explorers, and physical scientists (most notably, Charles Darwin, Nikolay Przhevalskiy, Aleksandr Voyeykov, and Herbert Spencer). By the years 1887-89, these concerns had enabled Chekhov to formulate a set of views about the interaction between humanity and other forms of organic life on this planet and about man's potential for damage to the environment that seem most unusual for his time and are also strikingly reminiscent of the ecological views that have become current during the recent decades, especially in the West.

Chekhov's novella The Steppe (1888) may be read as an account of a journey through the steppe regions of southern Russia, or as a journey through various social strata of that time or as a journey through several stages of a little boy's mood and mind. But read on still another level, The Steppe is a journey through a series of ecosystems. The last term did not exist in Chekhov's time but it can still be justifiably used because in his account of the various relays of the characters' travels through the steppe, Chekhov is careful to note and point out the interrelationships of the local plant life, birds, and animals with the available sources of water and the weather conditions. Even such a recent preoccupation as the danger of releasing harmful chemicals into the natural environment is present in The Steppe, where it is associated with the character of the cart driver Vasya.

Chekhov had little sympathy for the Rousseauist concept of natural man that so attracted Tolstoy. Vasya represents Chekhov's own idea of a natural man, and he makes for an interesting contrast with Tolstoy's Platon Karatayev from War and Peace. Whereas Karatayev was imbued with a native Christian goodness, Vasya is almost animal-like, with a preternaturally sharp sense of vision that enables him to discern the motionless creatures that lurk in the steppe and with whom he identifies much more closely than with his fellow humans. Vasya's sense of identity with the animals of the wild is almost Buddhist. He is hurt when his colleague Dymov cruelly whips a harmless grass snake to death; he greets a passing fox as if it were a relative; and he has equally warm feelings toward the minnow he catches and eats alive, to the disgust of the other drivers. Surely it is not by accident that it is Vasya of all the drivers who had his face disfigured by phosphorus poisoning that resulted from his onetime employment at a match factory.

In the story “The Reed Flute” (Svirel'), written one year before The Steppe and in the play The Wood Demon, written one year after it, Chekhov outlined a view of ecological interaction between man and his natural environment that was so far removed from the literary or scientific thought of his time that it was either shrugged off by his contemporaries or went unnoticed. Whereas the famed writer Sergey Aksakov merely pointed out in his Diary of Bird Hunting the reduction in the number of migratory birds with every passing year, but refused to connect this reduction with excessive hunting, the increase of human population or any other observable factor,⁷ Chekhov's aged and illiterate village shepherd Luka Bednyy (“Luke the Poor”) in “The Reed Flute” quite perceptively relates the disappearance of the once abundant birds and fish to the lowering of the water level in the local rivers and streams, to the indiscriminate destruction of forests, and to the decline in the health and strength of the human population. Luka conveys his insights to an audience consisting of one single person and attributes the situation to God's warning to mankind that the end of the world is at hand.

In The Wood Demon, Chekhov passed Luka's discoveries on to a man trained in medical and biological sciences and capable of drawing appropriate scientific conclusions, the hero of the play, the landowner, physician and forester Mikhail Lvovich Khrushchev. Artistically, The Wood Demon may well be Chekhov's weakest play. But it is also the most polemically pointed of his plays and the one that most concretely embodies his innermost ideas about life, society, and nature. As a rule, Chekhov avoided depicting what the Russian critical tradition likes to call “the positive hero.” Khrushchev is the only instance of such a character in a play by Chekhov. Because he is so unarguably right during much of the play, Chekhov tried, not entirely successfully, to humanize him by making him something of a prude. Rather uncharacteristically, Khrushchev believes and spreads the gossip about Yelena's affair with Voynitskiy and he treats Yelena, the only other character who understands and appreciates his conservationist efforts, rudely and callously. If the resultant characterization is not really convincing, it is because advocacy of ideas was simply not Chekhov's forte and was alien to his artistic method.

The other characters of The Wood Demon regard as some sort of peculiar eccentricity Khrushchev's concern about the destruction of forests and its effect on the rivers, the animal life, and the climate, as well as his denunciations of labels and stereotypes and of the congealed slogans of the reform epoch of the 1860s. This was also how Chekhov's contemporaries viewed this aspect of the play when it was first published and performed, including even his close friends, such as Grigorovich, Suvorin, and Pleshcheyev.⁸ Chekhov himself soon grew dissatisfied with The Wood Demon. He eventually reworked it into Uncle Vanya, an immeasurably superior play artistically. In Uncle Vanya, the ecological insights that were first articulated by the shepherd Luka in “The Reed Flute” and then given a rationalistic and scientific cast by Khrushchev in The Wood Demon, were deepened and at the same time compressed. But here they were assigned to a rather disreputable character, Doctor Astrov, which may have minimized their impact.

It should be emphasized that Chekhov's thinking in these three works is not merely conservationist, but ecological in the recent sense of the term.⁹ Various forms of nature conservation, such as game protection laws and forestry regulations, were known and practiced in Russia long before Chekhov's time.¹⁰ Ecology as a scientific discipline devoted to the study of the interaction of living organisms with their environment had its origin in the work of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in the 1860s¹¹ (although the term itself had already been used in its modern meaning by Henry David Thoreau in a letter written in 1858).¹² It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the concept of ecology began to merge with what was earlier meant by nature conservation. Yet this merger had already taken place in the three works by Chekhov on ecological themes, which were written in the 1880s and 1890s. Chekhov wrote of the mutual interaction of forests, bodies of water, climate, animals, and human populations in ways that are simply not found in the Russian literature of his time. In The Steppe, and even more pointedly in his masterful later story, “In the Ravine,” Chekhov also takes up the subject of industrial pollution, another theme that was largely disregarded by the people of his time.

The question arises: What may have been the sources of his ideas in this entire sphere? The American geographer Ian Murray Matley in a suggestive article he published in Russian Review in 1972 named the historian Sergey Solov'yev and the climatologist and traveler Aleksandr Voyeykov as the contemporaries whose views might possibly have stimulated Chekhov's environmentalist concerns in The Wood Demon and Uncle Vanya.¹³ The choice of Voyeykov's name was particularly felicitous because, unknown to Professor Matley, Chekhov indeed knew and valued Voyeykov's book Climates of the Earth (1884)¹⁴ and wrote of it with enthusiasm to Alexey Suvorin in his letter of March 22, 1890. Chekhov might also have read Voyeykov's essay, “The Influence of Forests on the Climate,” which was published in 1878 in Nature and Hunting, the same journal where Chekhov's “He Remembered” appeared.¹⁵

Both Voyeykov's book and his essay contain much information about the interaction of forests and climate that was bound to be of interest to Chekhov. But Voyeykov's writings do not touch on the situation of birds and animals; nor does he say anything about the effect of human activity on the environment. Still, Ian Murray Matley's article raises the basic question of the necessity of studying scientific literature in order to get to the origins of Chekhov's literary art. Critical and philosophical writings, to which the purview of literary scholarship is usually restricted, are not sufficient in Chekhov's case. For a deeper grasp of his themes and his style, scholars will have to turn to the writings of biologists, climatologists, explorers, and geographers whose works Chekhov constantly read and studied and who made a major contribution to his literary formation.

If one searches in the nineteenth century for expressions of concern about man's impact on the natural environment similar to Chekhov's, one will find it most frequently articulated in the literature of the country where this impact was most clearly visible at the time: the United States of America. This concern was initially voiced not by scientists or foresters, but by writers and painters, whose artistic vision and intuition told them that the natural beauty of the North American continent was suffering irreparable damage. James Fenimore Cooper wrote about this in his novels The Pioneers (1823) and The Prairie (1827). The artists John James Audubon (in his essay “The Ohio,” 1834)¹⁶ and Thomas Cole (in “Essay on American Scenery,” 1836) wrote about the forests of America “fast disappearing under the axe” in terms remarkably similar to what Chekhov's Khrushchev and Astrov had to say about the forests of Russia. The poet William Cullen Bryant toured the Great Lakes region in 1846 and sadly noted that the wild and lonely woods of that area would soon be chopped down to give way to cottages and boardinghouses,¹⁷ thus unwittingly anticipating the tone and the theme of The Cherry Orchard.

In 1852 came the publication of Thoreau's Walden, the book that was crucial in changing the American public attitude toward nature and wilderness from indifference and hostility to appreciation and concern. Finally, in 1864, George Perkins Marsh, known to his contemporaries primarily as diplomat and philologist, published a remarkably prophetic book, Man and Nature, described in more recent times as “the first book to attack the American myth of superabundance and the inexhaustibility of the earth” and “the fountainhead of the modern conservation movement.”¹⁸

Among these American writings on the subject that was so close to his heart, Chekhov may have known the novels of Cooper. Both The Pioneers and The Prairie were translated into Russian soon after their publication,¹⁹ and like the rest of Cooper's novels, they remained the favorite reading of Russian schoolchildren for the rest of the nineteenth century. (Chekhov's story “The Boys,” 1887, is a humorous and affectionate satire of Russian children's craze for the romance of the prairies, Indians, and pathfinders, which arose due to the popularity of Cooper and of his Anglo-Irish imitator Thomas Mayne Reid, the latter long forgotten in the English-speaking countries, but perennially popular with the Russians.)

Chekhov was very definitely familiar with Thoreau's Walden, which he read when it was serialized in Suvorin's newspaper, New Times, in 1887. In a letter to Vladimir Korolenko of October 17, 1887, Chekhov conveyed his impression of Thoreau's book: “He's got ideas and a certain freshness and originality about him, but he's hard to read. The architectonics and construction are impossible.” Thoreau's somewhat Rousseauist views on the corrupting influence of civilization and technology could hardly have appealed to Chekhov, who saw the new scientific and technological developments of his time as beneficiary and promising. But Thoreau's appreciation of the woods and of the solitude around Walden Pond is sure to have struck a responsive chord in Chekhov.²⁰

It is George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, however, with its synthesis of the earlier thinking on man's effect on the forests and rivers, the extermination of wildlife and erosion of the soil, that comes closest to what Chekhov had to say in “The Reed Flute,” The Wood Demon, and Uncle Vanya. Man and Nature was translated into Russian in 1866, during a period of reforms and political turmoil.²¹ The theme of the book was too remote from Russian issues of the time and the appearance of the Russian translation went virtually unnoticed.²² Although there is no evidence that Chekhov was familiar with Marsh's book (which he would undoubtedly have liked enormously), there exists another book, far more popular and widely known at the time, through which Marsh's conservationist ideas might have reached Chekhov. This book is La Terre by Élisée Reclus.

Reclus, the French geographer and noted theoretician of anarchism, was struck by Marsh's notion that “we are even now breaking up the floor and doors and window frames of our dwelling for fuel to warm our bodies and to seethe our pottage.”²³ The concluding chapters of the second volume of La Terre, published in France in 1869 and in Russian translation in 1883, are a simplified retelling of some of the basic theses of Man and Nature. Chekhov mentioned La Terre in the list of books he had intended to donate to the Taganrog municipal library (adding “Not purchased” in the margin), which was appended to his letter to Pavel Iordanov (the mayor of Taganrog) of November 24, 1898. However, the initial publication of the Russian translation of the second volume came during Chekhov's university years, a time when he followed the new developments in the sciences with particular avidity. It appears highly probable, therefore, that he read the second volume of La Terre shortly after its appearance in Russia in 1883, that is, prior to writing “The Reed Flute” and The Steppe. This would explain the similarity between the ecological thinking of Chekhov and the last two sections of the final chapter of La Terre,²⁴ with their citations and paraphrases from Marsh's book. Sonya's speech in the first act of Uncle Vanya about the flourishing of the arts and sciences and the chivalrous attitude of men to women in those countries where the forests had not been cut down seems also to have been suggested to Chekhov by Reclus. This idea, found in the concluding pages of the second volume and illustrated by the brutalization of the inhabitants of Spain and Italy after their forests were destroyed in the Middle Ages, seems to belong to Reclus himself, rather than to Marsh.²⁵

Although it is important to know of the stimuli Chekhov may have received from reading Voyeykov, Thoreau, or Marsh as paraphrased by Reclus, we must not underestimate his own artistic sensibility as well as his commitment as a physician and a biologist. The combination of this sensibility and this commitment enabled Chekhov both to express his ecological thinking in a number of important literary productions and to derive from it a series of personal symbols that dominate much of his writing for the theater from The Wood Demon on. It is of course generally known that The Wood Demon was the progenitor of Uncle Vanya. But in a wider sense, this most personal of Chekhov's plays is also, despite its undeniable artistic and formal shortcomings, ancestral in one way or another to every single one of the great plays of Chekhov's maturity.

The text of The Wood Demon is permeated by two sets of contrasting bird symbols, which in the original Russian depend on the grammatical gender of the respective bird names, with the species whose names are feminine symbolizing the female characters and the masculine bird names applied to men. Yelena and Sonya are likened to caged captive birds (the Russian word for “bird” being feminine in gender) at several crucial points. Yelena's temporary escape from her husband is compared to a bird's regaining its freedom. Professor Serebryakov is compared to a horned owl, and Khrushchev promises at the end of the play that he will grow the wings of a free eagle (the environmentalist in touch with nature contrasted with a cabinet scholar bogged down in sterile theorizing). This avian imagery was eliminated in Uncle Vanya, but the even more significant image of wantonly destroyed forests is given greater prominence, both on the realistic and on the symbolic levels of the play. The pointlessly destroyed seagull, introduced with Treplev's line, “I was base enough to kill this gull today,” becomes the central symbol of the first play of Chekhov's maturity as a playwright, standing both for the subsequent fate of Nina and for the human propensity for destructive behavior that can manifest itself in personal relationships as well as in man's dealings with nature. Similarly, the cherry trees that could not be saved from destruction set the tone and illustrate the predicament of the human characters in The Cherry Orchard.

Chekhov's most pervasive, comprehensive, and consistent application of the imagery and symbolism derived from his conservationist ethic is found in the play that many consider his masterpiece, Three Sisters. At the core of the play are three sets of unobtrusive and yet essential symbols: birds, which represent freedom and escape; trees, which stand for the good and meaningful life the good characters want to achieve and the bad ones to destroy; and the huntsman, who callously exterminates living beings.

In Act I, Irina, intoxicated with her youth and happiness, imagines a wide blue sky and big white birds over herself, whereupon Chebutykin calls her “My white bird.” In Act II, Tuzenbakh cites migratory birds, such as cranes, as proof that the meaning of life is to go on living. Then Vershinin speaks of the imprisoned French minister who saw in birds visible through his prison window the embodiment of freedom but who no longer noticed them after he was released. In Act IV, Masha, feeling trapped in her marriage to Kulygin, envies the migratory birds and wishes she could fly away as they do. The old doctor Chebutykin compares himself to an aged migratory bird grown too old to fly and unable to join Irina and Tuzenbakh in their escape to a meaningful life.²⁶ Irina says that after she had accepted Tuzenbakh's proposal, she felt as if she had grown wings. But Tuzenbakh is prevented from achieving his escape by Captain Solenyy, the huntsman. In one of his first lines in Act I, Solenyy jokes about shooting Dr. Chebutykin out of boredom. In the last act, he declares his intention to shoot down Tuzenbakh as if he were a woodcock,²⁷ which he then proceeds to do.

Tree imagery is used in Three Sisters in an equally unobtrusive manner, and it is perhaps even more telling. In Act I, Vershinin establishes his credentials as a decent, sensitive man by speaking appreciatively about the local forest and the river, which he sees as contributing to a wholesome climate, and by mentioning his love for the “dear, modest birch trees.” Solenyy, nature's opponent, tries to ridicule this speech with his unsuccessful joke about the location of the railroad station. At the beginning of Act IV, the likable officer Rodet bids farewell, not only to his human friends, but also to the trees. The even more likable Baron Tuzenbakh, before going off to the duel that will end his life, speaks of his newly found appreciation of firs, maples, and birches, which, he feels, are looking at him with curiosity and expectation. He then says: “What beautiful trees and, actually, what a beautiful life must there be next to them.” He goes on to compare himself prophetically to a dried-up tree that still sways with the live trees in the wind.

After Tuzenbakh's departure, the tree theme is taken over by another ecologically destructive character, Natasha. Natasha's role in the play is that of a usurper. In Act I, she gains control of the brother of the three sisters. In Act II, she is in control over their mode of life. By Act III, Natasha is the mistress of the Prozorov house, having driven Ol'ga and Irina into a small garret room and trying to throw Anfisa out. In Act IV, the three sisters have been evicted out of their father's house. Ol'ga lives at her school; Irina is ready to leave for the brick factory; and Masha says: “I will not go into the house. I can no longer enter it.” At the end of the play Natasha intends to consolidate her victory by chopping down the beautiful trees: “Well then, tomorrow I shall be alone. She sighs. I will order them first of all to chop down this avenue of firs, and then this maple tree here. … It is so ugly in the evening.” After destroying the magnificent trees that meant so much to the departing Vershinin and the exterminated Tuzenbakh, Natasha plans to replace free nature with a tame variant of it that is acceptable to her: “And here I will order them to plant little flowers, lots of little flowers and they'll smell. …”²⁸

From Antosha Chekhonte's early immature story “St. Peter's Day” to Anton Chekhov's last great masterpieces—“In the Ravine,” Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters—there is a continuous expression of longing for a decent, natural, and unpolluted life, a life that mankind cannot achieve if it continues to exterminate other living beings, destroy forests, and abuse the planet that we all share. Like many other basic Chekhovian themes, this longing was ignored by his contemporaries. Today it strikes us as genuinely visionary and deeply prophetic.

Notes

1. A. L. Tolstaya, Otets (My Father) (New York: Izd-vo im. Chekhova, 1953), I, 7.

2. Yu. Aykhenval'd, Siluety russkikh pisateley (Silhouettes of Russian Writers), series 1 (Moscow: Izd-vo Nauchnogo Slova, 1906), pp. 126-27.

3. Cf. S. T. Aksakov Zapiski ob uzhen'ye ryby (Fishing Diary) in Sobraniye sochineniy (Collected Works) (Moscow: Izd-vo A. A. Kartseva, 1900), the sections “Shchastlivyy sluchay” (“A Fortunate Incident”), V, 265-66 and “Gon'ba lis i volkov” (“The Chase of Foxes and Wolves”), pp. 254-57; and L. N. Tolstoy, War and Peace (any edition), vol. 2, Book 4, sections V and VI.

4. Chekhov's “Impressions of Wolf Baiting” makes for an interesting comparison with the description of the same event by A. E. Korsh in his article “The Baiting of January 6, 1882” in the February, 1882 issue of Nature and Hunting (Priroda i okhota). The spectacle that aroused the young Chekhov's indignation is described by Korsh with evident pleasure and appreciation. In response to people who consider the custom of wolf baiting a cruel and inhuman sport, Korsh wrote: “Humanitarianism is a fine thing, but like everything else it should be applied sensibly and in moderation.”

   Almost every issue of Nature and Hunting contained accounts of the hunting, baiting and poisoning of wolves and foxes. The general tone of these accounts indicates that wolves and foxes were regarded as harmful pests, subject to total extermination. Against this background, Chekhov's attitude to wolves, in “Impressions of Wolf Baiting” and his later story “Whitebrow” strikes one as unprecedented.

5. Letter from the editors of Nature and Hunting to Chekhov, October 23, 1883. Cited from A. P. Chekhov, Sobraniye sochineniy (Collected works) (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo Knudozhestvennoy literatury, 1960), II, 560.

6. In Chekhov's story “The Huntsman,” 1885, hunting is represented as a form of art and huntsman-hero appears as a figure of a misunderstood artist. In his letter of November 8 or 9, 1893 to Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov Chekhov cites a passage about the wounded stag from Shakespeare's As You Like It and in his letter of December 17, 1892 to Aleksey Suvorin he makes the following comment on this passage: “If you happen to see Leskov, tell him that Shakespeare in As You Like It. Act II, Scene 1, has some good words concerning hunting. Shakespeare himself used to go hunting, but you can see from this scene what a poor opinion he had of hunting and of murdering animals in general.”

   Chekhov's letter to Suvorin of April 8, 1892 contains an ironical, self-mocking account of how Chekhov had to finish off a woodcock ineptly wounded by Isaak Levitan. On May 9, 1889, Chekhov wrote to Maksim Gor'kiy in reply to Gor'kiy's offer to present him with a hunting rifle: “I used to enjoy hunting small game, but it doesn't attract me any more.” However, in a letter of April 13, 1904 to Boris Lazarevskiy who was leaving for the Far East, Chekhov suggested that Lazarevskiy hunt Siberian tigers. [Unless otherwise indicated, Chekhov's letters are quoted from Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought, ed. Simon Karlinsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1976].

   In The Island of Sakhalin, Chekhov stated his opposition to the proposed introduction of hunting as a regular occupation among the exiled settlers: “One should not permit a former murderer to kill animals on a regular basis and to commit those brutal actions which are unavoidable during almost any hunt, such as stabbing to death a wounded stag, finishing off a still-living partridge by biting through its throat, etc.” [A. P. Chekhov, Sobraniye sochineniy (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo Knudozhestvennoy literatury, 1963), X, 301-2. The translation from the Russian is my own].

7. S. T. Aksakov, Sobraniye sochineniy (Moscow: Izd-vo A. A. Kartseva, 1897), VI, 27.

8. In his letter to Chekhov of March 24, 1889, Aleksey Pleshcheyev wrote that the views and the actions of Khrushchev in The Wood Demon strike him as unmotivated and self-contradictory: “And what sort of an idealist is he? … He loves the forest, but he treats humans in a far from human way.” (Cited from L. S. Pustil'nik's article “Chekhov i Pleshcheev” in the Chekhov issue of Literaturnoye nasledstvo, 68 (Literary Heritage) (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1960), p. 304.

   Dmitriy Grigorovich, who encouraged the young Chekhov and thought very highly of his work, believed that The Wood Demon was an unsuccessful imitation of Dostoeyevskiy: “this is something or other half-way between The Possessed and the Karamazovs.” (A. P. Chekhov, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem (Complete Collected Works and Letters) (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1976), Pis'ma (Letters) III, 455.

   Aleksey Suvorin's opinion of The Wood Demon, as stated in his letter to the actor Pavel Svobodin, shows that Suvorin failed to notice the significance of the ecological and conservationist theme in the play (ibid., p. 470).

9. One of the first to note this was the Soviet scholar Aleksandr Chudakov in his superb book Poetika Chekhova (Chekhov's Poetics) (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1971). In my own introduction to an American edition of Chekhov's letters with commentary, written before I had a chance to see Chudakov's book, I pointed out the similarity of Chekhov's views in this sphere to contemporary ecological thinking [Letters of Anton Chekhov, translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky. Commentary and Introduction by Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 28-29. This volume was subsequently published in a revised paperback version as Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought].

10. See the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1955, XXXI, 477, for various laws introduced in Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that dealt with the protection of endangered species and set up forest preserves.

11. A good account of the origin of the term “ecology” is to be found in the collection Ocherki po istorii ekologii (Studies in the History of Ecology), “Nauka,” Moscow, 1970. Despite the introduction of the discipline of ecology by Haeckel in the 1860's, the exact meaning of the term remained unclear for many decades. Thus the Russian 1904 edition of the Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedia defines ecology as the study of animals' dwellings, such as burrows and nests.

12. Paul H. Oehser, letter to the editor in Science, 129, No. 3355, p. 992.

13. Ian M. Matley, “Chekhov and Geography,” The Russian Review, 31, No. 4, 1972.

14. A. I. Voyeykov, Klimaty zemnogo shara (Climates of the Earth), St. Petersburg, 1884. Reprinted in the Soviet edition of Voyeykov's selected writings (A. I. Voyeykov, Izbrannyye sochineniya (Moscow-Leningrad: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1948, I.

15. A. I. Voyeykov, “O vliyanii lesov na klimat” (“The Influence of Forests on Climate”), Priroda i okhota, 1878, No. 4, pp. 1-23. Reprinted in Izbrannyye sochineniya (1952), III, 42-58.

    Chekhov stated his opinion of Nature and Hunting and described his great interest in this magazine in his letter to his brother Ivan written early in 1883 (Pis'ma, “Nauka,” [1974], I, 90).

16. John James Audubon, “The Ohio,” cited from his book Delineations of American Scenery and Character (New York: G. A. Baker and Co., 1926), p. 1-5.

17. The essays of Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant are cited from Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 97.

18. See David Lowenthal's introduction to the centennial edition of George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).

19. The Pioneers was published in Russian (as “The Settlers”) in 1832. The Prairie appeared (as “The American Steppes”) in 1829.

20. The following passage from Chekhov's letter to Suvorin of May 28, 1892 reads as if it might have been inspired by Walden: “I bought three mouse traps and catch twenty-five mice a day and take them off to the woods. I feel wonderful in the woods. It's terribly stupid of landowners to live among parks and fruit orchards rather than in the woods. There is a feeling of divine presence in the woods, to say nothing of the practical advantages. …”

21. A Russian translation of Marsh's Man and Nature by N. Nevedomskiy, St. Petersburg, 1886, is listed in the Catalogue of Russian Books at the Library of St. Petersburg University of 1897, I, 470. This information was communicated to me by Douglas Weiner of Columbia University, whose help is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

22. The Russian edition of the Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedia, 1896, lists G. P. Marsh only as a statesman and philologist. Man and Nature is listed among his other books, with no indication of its special significance. There is no mention of the Russian translation of the book.

23. On the connection between Marsh and Reclus, see David Lowenthal's introduction cited in note 18 above.

24. Élisée Reclus, La Terre (Paris: Hachette, 1869), II, 736-57.

25. Cf. Section X of the last chapter of the second volume of La Terre and Sonya's speech to Yelena in which she describes Dr. Astrov's activities at the end of Act One of Uncle Vanya.

26. A comparison of people to either a captive or a freed bird is frequently found in Chekhov's stories as well as plays. To give just two examples, the two lovers at the end of “The Lady with the Dog” are likened to two captured migratory birds; and the dying hero of “The Archbishop” believes he is as free as a flying bird, able to fly wherever it pleases.

27. The parallel between Tuzenbakh and the woodcock might have its origins in Chekhov's painful experience of having to finish off the woodcock which his friend, the painter Levitan, had wounded. A description of this incident, found in Chekhov's letter to Suvorin of April 8, 1892, concludes: “I had to obey Levitan and kill it. And while two idiots went home and sat down to dinner, there was one less beautiful, enamored creature in the world.”

28. Quotations from the text of Three Sisters are cited in my own translation.