The Tartar Steppe

“And yet the winds of time were blowing; heedless of mankind they blew to and fro on the world preying upon beauty; and no one could escape them, not even children so newly born as to still be unnamed.”

The Tartar Steppe is one of the most poignantly existential books ever written. The psychological profundity here equals Dostoevsky. It is all the adjectives that accompany great art; a masterpiece.

Often likened to The Castle by Franz Kafka, the novel follows Giovanni Drogo, a young lieutenant. We meet him full of ambition and determination as he leaves his childhood home for his first military assignment at Fort Bastiani, a remote outpost in the distant mountains. The Fort represents many things, it is at once the hope that comes with ambition, a tower of solitude for dreamers, and the monotony of a life left unexamined, a testament to the risks of taking no risks.

Beyond the Fort lies the mysterious Northern Territory, an uncharted land that captures the soldiers’ imaginations. Like the Fort, it symbolizes many things: the decay that may accompany desire, the anxious heart standing on tiptoe, waiting for something to change. At Bastiani, the soldiers await the return of the Tartar forces and spend generations preparing for a war that never arrives. Under this spell, one feels the ghostly whisper of greater possibilities — or grows so accustomed to the Fort’s walls that it seems best not to seek change. If something great were to happen, surely it would avoid those who long for it most.

The Tartar Steppe highlights the pangs of aging, contrasting the slow, joyful slumber of youth — with its endless summers and enchanting possibilities of the future — with the rushing days of adulthood. We climb toward an unseen vantage point, hoping it will hold the key to happiness. Yet upon reaching that keyless hill, we find in the distance only another destination, another fortune on an ever-expanding horizon that leads nowhere.

“They had not come to terms with ordinary life, with the joys of common people, with a mediocre destiny; they lived side by side, with the same hopes, never speaking of them because they were not aware of them or simply because they were soldiers who kept to themselves the intimacies of their hearts.”

This is melancholy. Yet I don’t perceive The Tartar Steppe as defeatist. It is merely an examination of a quality found in life — perhaps a warning or an acceptance of things to come. There is something in life we cannot hold, something always traveling northward.

“It is difficult to believe in a thing when one is alone and there is no one to speak to. It was at this period that Drogo realized how far apart men are whatever their affection for each other, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain, and that brings about life’s loneliness.”

All of us take the journey to Fort Bastiani. Some of us stay; some go northward. But in the end, we all must pack our things and bid the Fort — and life itself — farewell.

“So life had been reduced to a kind of game; everything had been lost for a bet made in a moment of pride.”