The Living Corpse was based on the true story of an alcoholic called Gimer who had faked his own suicide and been sentenced to Siberia. The Moscow Art Theater very much wanted to stage it, but Tolstoy kept demurring. “It has seventeen acts,” he said. “It needs a revolving stage.” The real reason for Tolstoy’s refusal came to light only much later. Gimer, it seems, had somehow learned that there was a play written about him and, upon his return from Siberia, presented himself at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy took the unhappy man in hand, persuaded him to give up drink, and even found him a job in the very court that had convicted him. In light of Gimer’s real-life “resurrection,” Tolstoy abandoned the staging of The Living Corpse.
The strange story has an even stranger epilogue. As Tolstoy lay in a fever, in 1908, a visitor brought him news of this Gimer’s death. “The corpse is now really dead,” quipped the visitor—but Tolstoy had completely forgotten not only his former protégé but also the existence of the play. Even when the plot was recounted, Tolstoy had no recollection of having written such a thing: “And I am very, very glad that it escaped my mind to give place to something else.” The central question of Vanya’s talk was “Who is the living corpse?”
The argument twisted and coiled, glinting in the sun. At one moment it seemed that Tolstoy’s Fyodor was actually Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had lived through the firing squad and survived the House of the Dead. Then it turned out that Fyodor was really Fyodorov, the philosopher-librarian who believed that the universal task of mankind was to harness the forces of science in order to abolish death and resurrect all dead people. Still later, it seemed the living corpse was actually Anna Karenina, who had died an adulteress in Anna Karenina and returned a mother-in-law in The Living Corpse. Then there was Jesus Christ, whose tomb was found empty after three days and nights: what was Tolstoy’s God, if not a living corpse? And what was Tolstoy?
The banquet that night lasted until ten or eleven. Entertainment was provided by students from the Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy: boys aged six to fifteen, already able to play the accordion with all the mannerisms of genial, nostalgic old men.* Even the tiniest of the boys, playing on a doll-size accordion, smiled knowingly, nodded, and even winked at the audience.
I had stopped at the dormitory first, where I took a shower and put on a linen dress. Many of the International Tolstoy Scholars congratulated me on my change of costume. Some of them had really thought that I didn’t own any other clothes. A White Russian from Paris shook my hand. “You should change three times this evening,” he said, “to make up for lost time.”
At dinner, many toasts were proposed. An unknown man in a sports jacket recited a particularly long, pointless toast; later, I learned that he was Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson.
We had to get up early the next morning for the last event of the International Tolstoy Conference, a field trip to Anton Chekhov’s former estate. Melikhovo lay directly along the three-hour route from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow. In this respect, the field trip made a certain amount of logistical sense. Nonetheless, after five days of total devotion to Tolstoy, master of the Russian novel, it felt strange to drop in so breezily on Chekhov—master of the Russian short story and an altogether different writer—simply because one happened to be passing through the neighborhood.
And so, after the banquet, when the participants went to their rooms to pack their suitcases—mine, of course, had never been unpacked to begin with—I went onto the balcony to think about Chekhov. The air smelled like plants and cigar smoke, bringing to mind the marvelous story that begins with a young man’s arrival, late one spring night, at the country estate of his former tutor, a famous horticulturalist. There is the nip of frost in the air, and the horticulturalist and his daughter are in a panic that the orchards might freeze. The daughter has resolved to stay up all night, supervising the bonfires. All night long, the young man and the daughter pace, coughing and weeping, through the rows of trees, watching the workers who stoke the smoldering bonfires with manure and damp straw. I tried to remember how the story ends. It doesn’t end well.
Chekhov was nine years old when War and Peace was published. He admired Tolstoy tremendously and longed to meet him; at the same time, the prospect of this meeting filled him with such alarm that he once ran out of a bathhouse in Moscow when he learned that Tolstoy was also there. Chekhov did not want to meet Tolstoy in the bath, but this apparently was his inescapable destiny. When at last he worked up the nerve to go to Yasnaya Polyana, Chekhov arrived at the exact moment when Tolstoy was headed to the stream for his daily ablutions. Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chindeep water, Tolstoy’s beard floated majestically before him.
Despite his lifelong hostility toward the medical profession, Tolstoy took an instant liking to Chekhov. “He is full of talent and undoubtedly has a very good heart,” he said. “However, he does not seem to have any very definite attitude toward life.” Chekhov had only a poorly defined attitude toward life, this strange process that brought one eye-to-eye with the floating beard of the greatest crank in world literature. Today, the stream where they bathed is partly obstructed, and full of vegetable life. One of the International Tolstoy Scholars, who insisted on sitting in it, came out completely green.
Chekhov, grandson of a serf, never saw the point of Tolstoyanism. Why should educated people lower themselves to the level of peasants? The peasants should be raised to the level of educated people! Nonetheless, Chekhov remained in awe of Tolstoy to the end of his days. “He is almost a perfect man,” Chekhov observed once. And, another time: “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death. It would leave a great void in my life.” In fact, Tolstoy outlived Chekhov by six years.
Ever since he was a medical student, Chekhov had experienced episodes of coughing blood. He dismissed them as bronchitis or the flu, but everyone knew the real cause. One night in 1897, while dining with his editor in Moscow’s best restaurant, Chekhov suffered a severe lung hemorrhage. Blood poured from his mouth onto the white tablecloth. He was rushed to a private clinic and diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis in both lungs. He survived the attack but was, for some days, extremely weak and unable to speak. Only family members were admitted to see him. Then Tolstoy turned up, wearing an enormous bearskin coat. Nobody had the nerve to tell him to leave, so he sat at Chekhov’s bedside and talked for a long time about the “immortality of the soul.” Chekhov listened silently. Although he did not believe in the immortality of the soul, he was nonetheless touched by Lev Nikolayevich’s solicitude.
The last meetings between Tolstoy and Chekhov took place in Yalta, where Chekhov had gone to die. One day in Yalta, Tolstoy put his arm around Chekhov. “My dear friend, I beg of you,” he said, “do stop writing plays!” Another time, when the two writers were gazing at the sea, Tolstoy demanded, “Were you very profligate in your youth?” Chekhov was speechless with embarrassment. Tolstoy, glaring out at the horizon, announced, “I was insatiable!”