[
The Steppe] was not Chekhov’s longest piece of prose fiction; that distinction belongs to his detective novel
Drama na okhote[
The Shooting Party, 1885]. Nor was it his first work to deal with the steppe: his short story
Schast'e[
Fortune, 1887], written after Chekhov had revisited his Taganrog birthplace, became extremely popular. It was, however, the first of Chekhov’s works to appear in one of the
tolstye zhurnaly(thick journals), being published in
Severnyi vestnik[
The Northern Herald: March 1888]. Its appearance was a direct result of a letter written to Chekhov on 25 March 1886 by the venerable writer Dmitrii Grigorovich, which urged him to “stop doing hack work”. Over the course of the next two years a series of letters were exchanged between the two men, in the…
1600 words
Citation: Pursglove, Michael. "Step'". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 December 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12262, accessed 21 November 2024.]
