Nearly every contemporary Russian writer of consequence, and many foreign ones, made the pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana or to Tolstoy's Moscow home. But after more than ten years of literary endeavor, at the conclusion of which Chekhov's name was being coupled with Tolstoy's by reviewers, the two writers had not yet met. Reports of Tolstoy's praise of his stories had been brought to Chekhov, and he had heard that the great man had once tried to see him in Moscow. On several occasions mutual friends had offered to introduce him to Tolstoy, but he had always refused, declaring that when the time came he would seek him out himself.
That time had arrived. Chekhov began inquiring where Tolstoy was spending the summer, for he wished to visit him. When I. I. Gorbunov- Posadov, a close friend of Tolstoy and a worker in his cause, was at Melikhovo at the beginning of August 1895, Chekhov learned that he was on his way to see Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. Chekhov decided to accompany him and spent August 8-9 on Tolstoy's estate. Tolstoy made a wonderful impression on him. He felt as though he were in his own home and conversation flowed easily. They went for a walk on the Tula highway, for Tolstoy wanted to show his guests how the young people rode on bicycles, which were then coming into fashion in Russia, a technological advance which Tolstoy approved. In the evening Gor- bunov-Posadov and V. G. Chertkov, Tolstoy's leading disciple, read to the visitors and members of the family parts of Resurrection, the first draft of which Tolstoy had just about finished at this time. Chekhov listened attentively, and after the reading he told Tolstoy that he thought the court scene had been especially well handled, but he pointed out that Katya Maslova's sentence of two years at hard labor was in error, for the courts did not stipulate penal servitude in such a short sentence. Tolstoy corrected this mistake.
In writing of the visit to Suvorin, who had some doubts about the sincerity of Tolstoy's moral views, Chekhov remarked that he found Tolstoy's daughters quite appealing: "They adore their father and believe in him fanatically. This shows for certain that Tolstoy is a mighty moral force, for if he were insincere and not above reproach, his daughters would be the first to regard him skeptically, for daughters are wise birds: you don't catch them with chaff. You can dupe a fiancee or a mistress as much as you please, and in the eyes of a loving woman even a donkey may pass for a philosopher, but daughters, well this is another matter." (October 26,1895.)
The only recorded reaction of Tolstoy to Chekhov's visit is in a letter to his son Leo: "I liked him ... he is very talented and he must have a kind heart, but up to now he has not revealed a definite point of view." However, the acquaintance between Russia's two foremost living writers had just begun. In questions of literature, the artist in Tolstoy always took precedence over the moralist. Later, in their friendship, he would find many hidden virtues in Chekhov.
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Before their meeting, Tolstoy may well have read Chekhov's latest tale, The Helpmate,10 which he extolled in the highest terms. For with his mounting misogamy at this time, because of his strained relations
10 Published in March 189;, Beginning, the Miscellany of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.
with his wife, Tolstoy no doubt discovered more truth than fiction in this revelation of feminine baseness. In an amazingly few words, The Helpmate pinpoints an emotional crisis in the husband's unhappy married life when he comes to the realization that the one thing left for him to do is to divorce his giddy wife so she can join her young lover abroad, only to learn that she wants this freedom while still remaining within the marriage bond. Misha asserts that the story was based on an actual situation, which he had related to his brother, in the married life of a government official.
The central situation of Anna on the Neck,11 a general favorite with readers and a tale that has been put into the movies in Russia, is again marriage — but now treated with an element of humor in its exposure of the crass mores and morals of petty provincial officialdom. The scared, pretty young wife of a pompous bureaucrat three times her age turns the tables on him after her success at the governor's ball, which results in her husband's promotion and the Order of Saint Anna. But in the end Chekhov drives home the pathos of Russian life in this milieu. For the emancipated wife, now intent upon exploiting her social triumph, turns her back on the poverty of her young brothers and their father, a schoolteacher who has lost his wife and also his self-respect in his fondness for the bottle.
The longest story Chekhov wrote in 1895, The Murder,12 one of the few tales connected with his Sakhalin experiences, offers a vein rather uncharacteristic and rarely mined by him. For it is a grim tale of pronounced narrative interest and not a little concrete action. The fanatical orthodoxy of the peasant Matvei leads him to interfere with the sectarian faith of his two cousins. This situation, aggravated by a quarrel over their common inheritance, ends in Matvei's murder by one of the cousins in a scene of violence described with superb realism. Chekhov offers only a glimpse, but a vivid one, of the horrors of penal servitude on Sakhalin, to which one of the cousins is condemned for his part in the crime and where, by suffering, he finds his way back to the true faith of the peasant.
Potapenko, in order to illustrate his account of how contemptuously editors treated their authors and how poorly they remunerated them, tells an anecdote connected with Chekhov which he asserts was true. D. I. Tikhomirov, the well-known editor of the journal Reading for
Russian News, October 1895.
The Murder Erst appeared in Russian Thought, November 1895.
Children and a good friend of Chekhov's, pursued him for a story for his publication. He even sent him a present of several bottles of wine from his vineyard (it was poor wine, says Potapenko), and Chekhov thanked him and eventually sent him a talc. Shortly after this both of them were at a large evening gathering. When Chekhov put on his overcoat to leave, Tikhomirov slipped a package in his pocket and mumbled something. Later, when Chekhov opened the package, he found twelve roubles and a bill which itemized the honorarium for the story, substracted the value of the bottles of wine, and indicated that the remainder was twelve roubles.
If there is any truth in this anecdote, it must have reference to the only story Chekhov published in Readings for Children, the altogether charming Whitebrow (1895), the tale of a hungry she-wolf that carried off a playful puppy, mistaking it in the dark for a baby lamb, and of the amusing adventures that subsequently befell Whitebrow, the puppy. Though Chekhov had already published several pieces that could be ■described as "children's stories," in general he condemned the practice of writing specifically for youngsters. It is more expedient and direct, he said, to select medicine and apply it than to try to invent some special concoction for a sick child simply because the patient is a child. Likewise, he reasoned, it is better to selcct for children something truly artistic that has been written for adults. And Whitebrow, like his wonderful Kashtanka, meets this specification.