In ‘The Kiss’ the erotic encounter was a mistake, no forsaken woman is suffering, and the situation is touchingly comic. The lonely hero’s name Ryabovich, ‘pock-marked’, mutes our sympathy for his obsessive reaction; moreover we see him as one of a group of unmarried, unhappy and dull officers. Yet Ryabovich is the victim of the same forces as the hero of Verochka’s If the autumnal mists cool the ardour of Verochka’s admirer, Ryabovich is compelled by the smell of spring in the poplar trees, the lilacs and the roses, to a frenzy of erotic introversion (Chekhov’s acute sense of smell, which reminds one of the decadent sympathies of a Huysmans, shows itself in the importance of scents in determining the reactions of his characters.)

‘The Kiss’ met with a very positive response – partly because of Chekhov’s extraordinary ease in conveying a military milieu, something he was not to attempt again until the play Three Sisters. Mainly, perhaps, such stories evoked a positive reaction because they reminded the Russian reader of Maupassant. Chekhov’s work of the mid 1880s has much in common with Maupassant: extraordinary economy of language, an ability to penetrate the inner life of another social element (Maupassant too could write about officers), a fondness for highly sexed heroines, a love of rivers, seascapes and fishing. ‘The Kiss’ has the symmetry of a Maupassant story and, if it lacks the melodrama or violent action so characteristic of Maupassant, that lack was yet to be appreciated by Chekhov’s readers as a positive advance. We will find Maupassant often mentioned, even loudly praised, in Chekhov’s fiction; Maupassant’s fine tale, A Life, where a patrician estate falls into ruin and is sold to the heroine’s exploiters, was to provide much material for The Cherry Orchard. For a while, too, Chekhov shared Maupassant’s modest view of the modern writer as an honest artisan providing workmanlike prose for an era in which the great writers (whether Flaubert and Stendhal, or Turgenev and Dostoyevsky) had become canonized and new genius was still to be born.

Yet Chekhov’s modesty could not have been entirely sincere. Unlike Maupassant, he intuits forces in the universe which are not mere chance, and he is not content to limit himself to portrayal and condemnation of human folly. Chekhov’s medical training had given him a deeper, more tragic philosophy than Maupassant’s; his passion for Russia’s harsh nature, too, has a less hedonistic side than Maupassant’s enjoyment of the Côte d’Azur.

Nature, whether in the garden or the wild, dominating and directing the behaviour of the human beings who mistakenly believe they control nature, was what drew the envious attention of older writers to Chekhov’s early work. In 1887 Chekhov revisited nature. Taking a substantial advance from Suvorin, for the first time in several years, he crossed Russia from north to south to revisit not just the town where he had grown up but the steppe and forest landscapes he remembered as a child. (There were, it now transpires, other reasons for the journey: an infatuated woman desperately waiting for him in Taganrog.) If any external experience that transformed Chekhov can be identified, it is this revisiting of childhood landscapes: they had vanished. A Welshman called Hughes had established coal mining in what had been the Switzerland of the Don and built a coal-mining town, Khiuzovka: the forests were put to the axe to make pit-props, slag heaps despoiled the steppes. Lyricism about landscapes is central to Gogol’s and Turgenev’s work. Chekhov is different, for he is the first ‘green’ writer in the modern sense: he mourns the irreversible destruction of nature by man and implies that nature might be better off without man. Of the stories that resulted from this journey south, ‘Panpipes’ is perhaps the most poignant in lamenting the dried-up rivers, the disappearing birds and mammals, the deforestation.

Something of a dream of Eden underlies this sense of an irreversible fall. In Chekhov’s only novel, a half-spoof, half-serious detective story of 1884 known as The Shooting Party, the most striking element is the evocation of an estate run wild in which exotic trees (ignoring the realities of the Russian climate) create a Douanier Rousseau jungle, while human beings degenerate into liars and murderers. The peasants of ‘Panpipes’, dismayed and upset by the disappearance of their environment, are to find their dismay echoed for a long time in Chekhov’s work. He gives their phrases to the forest-loving doctor in his plays The Wood Demon and Uncle Vanya. The chopping down of trees is to be a typical token of the villain: right until the victorious Natasha in Three Sisters, celebrating her victory in driving (by breeding) the sisters out of their house by announcing that she will destroy a maple tree and an avenue of firs. From now on in Chekhov’s work characters are assigned the roles of dendrophiles or dendrophobes: they are to be judged by their effect on the environment. Not to have planted a tree becomes nearly as great a sin as having chopped one down.

For Chekhov’s critics, however, to give a moral and political lead was the prime duty of a conscientious writer. As Chekhov escaped from Suvorin’s zoo to become a self-sufficient writer, nobody reproached him directly for his lowly provincial origins, but it was clear that the public had expectations of an extended prose piece that would have to be structured along a plot and thus express a philosophy and take a stand: Chekhov’s claim to metropolitan nobility (at least of spirit) would be decided by the idealistic nature of the stand he adopted.

The extended piece, for which stories such as ‘Panpipes’ appear to be studies, was ‘The Steppe’. It is not actually Chekhov’s longest work: The Shooting Party is twice as long but, as it appeared in Chekhov’s lifetime only in daily newspaper instalments, it passed unnoticed. ‘The Steppe’ was commissioned for a very different readership from Suvorin’s New Times – the prestigious liberal monthly the Northern Herald. The story was successfully nominated for a prestigious prize; it was literally a masterpiece in that it proved that Chekhov had finished his apprenticeship to other writers and to professional editors. But ‘The Steppe’, for all the wonderment at its evocation of southern landscapes, left critics puzzled.

Where is the plot? A boy leaves his home town (presumably Taganrog), to be taken by strangers to begin his schooling in Kiev, on the other side of the Ukraine. A journey, centred on a carriage, is a conventional enough European and Russian device, from Laurence Sterne and Gogol to Chekhov. But the boy-protagonist is handed over to a convoy of drovers, the purpose of the priest who had taken him is forgotten and then turns out to be unimportant.