Chekhov and Conservation

Anton Chekhov, the Russian dramatist and short-story writer, was born 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, urban-educated 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.

In 1892 Chekhov bought an estate at Melikhovo, about 50 miles from Moscow, in the middle of a large area of forest. Soon after moving there, he enthused about the spiritual and practical advantages of living in the woods: ‘In a forest you sense the presence of a deity, not to speak of the fact that it is more advantageous – there is no stealthy felling of trees and the care of the woods is easier.’ It was probably while Chekhov was living at Melikhovo that he re-wrote The Wood Demon as a new play, Uncle Vanya, which was first performed in 1899. Although The Wood Demon had been unsuccessful, Chekhov retained, with hardly any alteration, the passages in the play about the destruction of the forests. In Uncle Vanya, Astrov, a doctor, helps to look after a government plantation and has been awarded a medal and a diploma for his efforts. His passionate plea for the conservation of the forests is the longest speech in the play but, as in The Wood Demon, it falls on deaf ears. Yeliena, the young wife of a retired professor, thinks that Astrov’s fondness for the forests interferes with his real vocation: medicine. Astrov concedes that his concern may be just crankiness but, later in the play, he examines a colour-coded map that he has drawn up of the environmental changes to the local district over the last three generations. The map shows that much of the forest has gradually disappeared and, along with it, most of the wildlife, small farms, monasteries and windmills – a process that will be complete in 15 years. Chekhov’s reference to a detailed land-use map is interesting because at the time that he was writing, such surveys were rare, not only in Russia, but elsewhere as well. Astrov admits that the deforestation would have been acceptable if workshops, factories and schools had replaced the woodland. That had not been the case, however, for the district still suffered from old hazards: swamps, mosquitoes, typhus, diphtheria and fires, along with poverty and a lack of roads. Nevertheless, Astrov fails to interest Yeliena in the need to conserve the natural environment.

In Three Sisters (1901), Chekhov’s next play, the sisters long to escape the boredom and cold of their provincial home and to live in Moscow. Thus the theme of the play is of urban, rather than rural, longing. Yet even in Three Sisters, Chekhov provides a countervailing viewpoint when two army lieutenants enthuse about the beauty of the local birches, maples and firs and the ‘really Russian’ climate of the district.

The prominence of forests in Chekhov’s plays reflected the environment in which most Russians lived. In the early 20th century, 39 per cent of European Russia was forest – over two-thirds in some parts, such as the areas south of Moscow, where Chekhov spent much time. The utilisation and care of those forests was a matter of great public and private concern. The Emancipation Act of 1861, which freed the serfs, left most forests in the hands of large landlords. More than half of the forests were owned by the State, a third by private landowners, with the rest held by the Orthodox Church or the peasantry. Landless peasants often stole timber and firewood from the forests and during the 1905 revolution many of them plundered, with impunity, the forests in the provinces south of Moscow. The zemstvos – local government bodies with representatives from five social classes – tried to improve the low productivity of the forests but with little success.

Chekhov was not the first Russian playwright to appreciate natural woodland or refer to its role in rural life. Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), for example, in his 1848 play, A Month in the Country, extolled the beauty of the oaks and birches and contrasted their vigour with the lassitude of his human characters. What was new in the plays of Chekhov was the emphasis on the need to conserve Russia’s forests. That was prompted by their rapid destruction, caused by growing demand for timber. The population of the Russian empire doubled during Chekhov’s lifetime and most people lived in the countryside and relied on local woodland for heating, craft materials and income. At the same time, Russian timber was being exported in increasing quantities to less afforested countries, such as Britain. Russian scientists and agronomists were worried by deforestation but were unclear about its consequences. The ‘wood demon’ and his counterpart in Uncle Vanya both claim that trees warm the climate, which conflicts with the current orthodoxy that trees reduce global warming by capturing carbon dioxide. The issue is complex, however, and it has recently been claimed that trees do help to warm the climate in cold, largely snow-covered regions such as northern Russia.

Despite his love of forests, Chekhov was, personally, a horticulturist rather than a woodman. In 1897, his deteriorating health – he had tuberculosis – led him to sell his property at Melikhovo and he subsequently moved to Yalta, in the Crimea, where the climate was much warmer. There he built a house and created an orchard and a kitchen garden. There are many references to orchards in his works, most notably in his last play, The Cherry Orchard, which was premiered in 1904. The play begins with a view of cherry trees in blossom and it ends with the sound of axes cutting them down. In the play, Lopakhin, a merchant and the son of a serf, advises the female landowner to divide up the cherry orchard into lots and lease them out as summer residences for town-dwellers.

The plot of The Cherry Orchard echoes Alexander Ostrovsky’s 1871 play, The Forest, in which a landowning widow sells parts of her forest to a timber merchant, who was formerly a serf. The merchant claims that forests are nothing but trouble: the peasants steal the timber and female servants return from the woods with more than mushrooms and berries inside them. The widow, however, rejoins that an estate without a forest isn’t a real estate at all – an attitude that most landowners of the era would have endorsed. They valued forests for both the opportunities for shooting that they provided and for their supply of timber, which was a useful source of money when they were short of income.

In The Cherry Orchard, the fate of the orchard symbolises not only the end of the old rural social order but also the suburbanisation of the countryside. That process was already apparent in Russia by the early 20th century, facilitated by the rapid expansion of the railway network. Yet, as two characters in the play point out, Chekhov does not present a simple picture of rural life giving way to an urban one. Feers, an old manservant, recalls that, in past times, cartloads of dried cherries from the orchard had been sent to Moscow and Kharkov, where they had fetched good prices. Therefore the orchard itself had once been part of an urban economy. Lopakhin, a parvenu merchant, suggests that the new suburbanites will eventually start cultivating their land and thus become ruralists in their turn. The threats posed by suburban development were real enough, however, and not confined to Russia. A few years earlier, A.E. Housman had extolled the beauty of cherry blossom in A Shropshire Lad: ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bow.’ Yet in England, as in Russia, cherry orchards were also being cut down and sold off as building sites.

Despite the prominence of conservation issues in Chekhov’s plays, he did not write them as clarion calls to action. He described both The Wood Demon and The Cherry Orchard as comedies, although they are comedies of manners and ideas, rather than comedies in their plots and situations. Chekhov did not side with either the conservationists or the developers because he believed that he had an artistic duty to present convincing portraits of characters with varying views on all manner of subjects. The ensuing disputes between them are not resolved and that is one of the hallmarks of Chekhov’s drama. Nevertheless, he denied that he lacked principles and he was clearly concerned by the destruction of Russia’s woodland environment. In that respect, his outlook matched that of contemporary conservationists in other countries, such as John Muir, who campaigned to preserve the giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevada of California.

The rural world that Chekhov depicted came to an end with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The new Soviet regime established State forest enterprises, which provided employment, amenities and products for local communities. Their focus, however, was on exploiting, rather than conserving the nation’s forests. Deforestation proceeded apace during the Soviet era and has continued up to the present day, recently encouraged by the huge demand for timber from the Far East. Nevertheless, Russia still has over one fifth of the world’s forests – much more than any other nation. There are signs, moreover, that the Russian government is now more alive than its predecessors to the need to conserve the forests – for global, as well as national, reasons. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has insisted that any global warming pact must take into account the major role that Russia’s forests play in soaking up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Chekhov would have welcomed this new concern for the conservation of the forests but he would have been surprised that it is not universally shared.

Roland Quinault is Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the co-author, with David Cannadine, of Winston Churchill in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2004).