Anton Chekhov, the Russian dramatist
and short-story writer, was born 150
years ago, 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, urbaneducated
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).
For more articles on this subject please visit www.historytoday.com/environment