Reading Chekhov

During the amended "city tour," on the way to the Novodevichie cemetery, Sonia pointed out a low, long, white building behind some trees as the former Ostroumov clinic, which is now a part of the Moscow University medical school-and, a few blocks later, identified a large red wooden house as Tolstoy's Moscow house. I knew that Tolstoy had visited the debilitated Chekhov two days after his arrival at the clinic, but I hadn't realized how close to the clinic he lived. "We had a most interesting conversation," Chekhov wrote two weeks later to Mikhail Menshikov, of Tolstoy's visit, "interesting mainly because I listened more than I talked. We discussed immortality. He recognizes immortality in its Kantian form, assuming that all of us (men and animals) will live on in some principle (such as reason or love), the essence of which is a mystery. But I can imagine such a principle or force only as a shapeless, gelatinous mass; my I-my individuality, my consciousness-would merge with this mass-and I feel no need for this kind of immortality, I do not understand it, and Lev Nikolayevich was astonished that I don't." Three years later, when Tolstoy was himself ill, and there was a great deal of speculation about the seriousness of his condition, Chekhov wrote again to Menshikov, to say that he had come to think that Tolstoy was not terminally ill, but he added: His illness frightened me, and kept me on tenterhooks. I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. If he were to die, there would be a big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never loved any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of all beliefs I consider his the nearest and most akin to me. Second, while Tolstoy is in literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even recognizing that one has done nothing and never will do anything is not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon literature. Third, Tolstoy takes a firm stand, he has an immense authority, and so long as he is alive, bad taste in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the shade. Nothing but his moral authority is capable of maintaining a certain elevation in the moods and tendencies of literature, so-called…

Chekhov had met Tolstoy only a few times, but "when he spoke about Tolstoy," Gorky writes in his memoir of Chekhov, he "always had a particular, barely detectable, affectionate and bashful smile in his eyes. He would lower his voice as if talking of something spectral, mysterious, something requiring mild and cautious words." As for Tolstoy, "he loved Chekhov," Gorky wrote, "and always when he looked at him his eyes, tender at that moment, seemed to caress Chekhov's face." However, Tolstoy did not love Chekhov's plays. He is reported to have said to Chekhov, "You know, I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse."

Chekhov, in turn, had a few reservations about Tolstoy's writings. He didn't like the characterization of Napoleon in War and Peace ("As soon as Napoleon is taken up, we get a forcing of effect and a distortion to show that he was more stupid than he actually was," he wrote to Suvorin in 1891), and took issue with certain of Tolstoy's pronouncements in The Kreutzer Sonata. "Tolstoy treats that which he does not know and which he refuses to understand out of sheer stubbornness," he wrote Alexei Pescheyev in 1890. "Thus his statements about syphilis, about asylums for children, about women's aversion to copulation, etc., are not only open to dispute, but they actually betray an ignorant man who, in the course of his long life, has not taken the trouble to read two or three pamphlets written by specialists." But he felt constrained to add: "And yet all these defects scatter like feathers before the wind; one simply does not take account of them in view of the merits of the novel…" Chekhov had also gone through a period of belief in Tolstoy's ideas about nonviolence and then had become skeptical of them. But, as is evident from his comments about the threat of Tolstoy's death, he never lost his sense of Tolstoy's artistic preeminence.

Earlier in the day, in the Arbat, once an elegant shopping district and now, much reduced in size, an undervisited tourist trap of souvenir shops, secondhand stores, and kitsch art galleries, Sonia had stopped before a small oil painting of a vase of lilacs. "This is good," she said. "Are you going to buy it?" I asked.