Michael Peverett: view from the steppes

Friday, August 05, 2022

view from the steppes

Daytime in the Steppes, 1852 painting by Aleksey Savrasov

[Image source: https://www.wikiart.org/en/aleksey-savrasov/steppe-day-1852 . In the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. There are now thought to be only around 8,000 Great Bustards in Russia; the largest population is in Spain, with around 30,000.]

A goldfish swam in a big glass bowl,
As dear little goldfish do,
But she loved with the whole of her heart and soul
An officer brave from the ocean wave
And she thought that he loved her, too.
Her small inside he daily fed
With crumbs of the best digestive bread . . .

"The Amorous Goldfish" was the most popular number from The Geisha, a musical comedy first performed at Daly's Theatre (London) in April 1896. Harry Greenbank wrote the lyrics, "Owen Hall" (James Davis) the libretto, and Sidney Jones the music. It was the same team who broke big with The Gaiety Girl (1893) and they had several huge hits through the 1890s, until Harry Greenbank, always in delicate health, died in February 1899.

The Geisha was the biggest hit of all. It arrived in New York later in 1896 (at another Daly's Theatre, this one being on 30th Street). And it swept Europe too; there are said to be records of 8,000 performances in Germany alone.

In 1899 Anton Chekhov saw a production of The Geisha in the Crimean resort of Yalta, where he had moved the previous year. Consequently, the now long-forgotten musical comedy survives as a footnote to "The Lady with the Little Dog", when Gurov, unable to forget his Yalta dalliance, visits Anna Sergeyevna's provincial hometown of "S.", spots an advert for "the first performance of The Geisha" and surmises (correctly) that she and her husband might attend the first night.

"I've suffered so much!" she continued, without listening to him. "I've thought about you all the time; all I've thought about is you. I wanted to forget about you, forget all about you. Why, oh why have you come?"

On the landing higher up, two schoolboys were smoking and looking down, but Gurov did not care; he drew Anna Sergeyevna to him and started kissing her face, her cheeks and her hands.

"What are you doing? What are you doing?" she said in horror, pushing him away from her. "We have both gone completely mad. You must leave today; you must leave now in fact ... I swear to you by all that is holy, I beg you... There are people coming!"

(from "The Lady with the Little Dog" (1899), translated by Rosamund Bartlett)

"The Amorous Goldfish", sung by Diana Martin (in 1985 at a Chappell Studios demo, piano by Lesley Hayes)

In The Geisha, the girls donned disguises to retrain flighty male passions along the right course, in the time-honoured manner of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Marriage of Figaro. Chekhov's open-ended story is haunted by just an agonizing glint of such happy and simple outcomes. Here the right course might be the transgression rather than reassertion of marital orthodoxy, and it's going to be messy at best.

So Chekhov was back on the coast again. The first nineteen years of his life had been spent in the port of Taganrog, some 800km from Yalta, near the mouth of the Don on the Sea of Azov. It was provincial but it had links, both northward to Moscow and south-west to the Mediterranean . In 1855, five years before he was born, Taganrog had been bombarded by an Anglo-French fleet.

Yet Taganrog was also on the edge of the Great Steppe, a vast plain you could only see beyond in a few places.

Not having anything better to do, the awakened sheep, all three thousand of them, started eating the short, half-trampled grass. The sun had not yet risen, but distant Saur's Grave, with its pointed top which looked like a cloud, and all the other kurgans were already visible. If you climbed to the top of Saur's Grave, you could look out and see a plain that was as flat and boundless as the sky, manor houses and estates, German and Molokan farms, villages; a far-sighted Kalmyk would even be able to see the town and railway trains. Only from up here was it possible to see that there was another life in the world beyond the silent steppe and ancient kurgans, a life which was not concerned with buried treasure and the thoughts of sheep.

(from "Fortune" (1887), translated by Rosamund Bartlett)

The silent steppe was not the timeless repository of a purely local culture. Even the old man in the story, speaking of treasure concealed by spells, senses the movement of history, the influence of elsewhere.

'There is treasure out there, but what is the use if it's buried in the ground? It will just be lost, without any use, like chaff or sheep droppings. But there is a lot of treasure, my boy, so much that there would be enough for the whole district, except that not a soul can see it! People will carry on waiting until the landowners dig it up or the government takes it. The landowners have already begun to dig the kurgans... They have sniffed them out! They are envious of the fortune which belongs to us peasants! The government has the same plan up its sleeve. It says in the law that if a peasant finds treasure, he has to report it to the authorities. Well, they are going to have to hang on a bit; they'll be waiting for ever! It's our treasure!'

No single interpretation can be forced onto the old man's words, but at some level he intuits that the treasure only belongs to the peasants so long as they never dig it up. The integrity of local culture depends on it being a culture of lack.

Today Saur's Grave, near Shakhtars'k, is covered in monuments commemorating the Patriotic War. It's true, on very clear days it's even possible to glimpse the Sea of Azov, 90km away. The Germans recognized its strategic importance, but Soviet troops finally took it on August 31, 1943. (Now it's once more in a war zone.) Later that same year, the Kalmyks were accused of having cooperated with the Germans and the entire Kalmyk population were deported to Siberia; Kruschev authorized their return in 1957.

[Is Chekhov tuning in to a Europe-wide trope of shepherds telling tales of inaccessible treasure? It would be fascinating to trace the connection, if there is one, with Bécquer's story "El gnomo" in his Leyendas (1860-1865).]

Chekhov's stories abstain from dignifying an educated, cosmopolitan culture over an uneducated, local culture. The real problems of his characters' human existences are certainly connected with the cultural artefacts they encounter, both high and low, but in unexpected and sometimes trivial ways. The idea that education and high culture confer illumination or any other tangible benefit is, if not quite absent, persistently questioned.

There was one time after evening tea when he was sitting on the balcony reading. In the drawing room they were learning the famous Braga serenade -- Tanya was singing soprano, one of the young ladies had taken the alto part, and the young man was playing the violin. Kovrin listened attentively to the words -- they were in Russian -- but he just could not work out what they meant. Finally, after he had put down his book and listened very carefully he understood: a girl with a febrile imagination hears some mysterious sounds one night in the garden, which are so beautiful and strange that she feels compelled to identify them as sacred harmony incomprehensible to us mortals, which must therefore fly away back to the heavens. Kovrin's eyes were starting to close. He got up and walked through the drawing room and the ballroom in a state of intense fatigue. When the singing stopped he took Tanya by the arm and went out on the balcony with her.

(from "The Black Monk" (1894), translation by Rosamund Bartlett)

The nerve-shattered Kovrin listens to the rehearsal of the popular serenade and its proposal of sacred harmonies acts as a catalyst for his own febrile spirits, sparking them into outright hallucination. At the end of the story, in Sevastopol, he hears the strains of the serenade again and with the same transforming effect.

In Chekhov's world it is not a question of what art means, but of what it means to an individual. Kovrin's psychosis might have seized on anything. His millenial myth, his wild ecstacy of himself as messiah, just happened to start from a sentimental piece of parlour music that most of us, most of the time, would consider fairly mundane. He saw what the sane would not see.

Gaetano Braga's "La Serenata" is a dialogue between a worried mother and a daughter who hears an angel's voice calling her. In the arrangement described by Chekhov, the mother's part was evidently sung by the "alto" (contralto). More commonly, as below, one vocalist takes the parts of both mother and daughter: