ceased to trouble him for the remainder of his life.' We hear a lot about these hemorrhoids in Chekhov's letters. They evidently bothered him a good deal more than the symptoms of tuberculosis, which appeared as early as 1884, but which he was not to acknowledge as such for thirteen years. 'Over the last three days blood has been coming from my throat,' he wrote to Leikin in December 1884. 'No doubt the cause is some broken blood vessel.' And then, two years later, 'I am ill. Spitting of blood and weakness. I am not writing anything… I ought to go to the South but I have no money… I am afraid to submit myself to be sounded by my colleagues.' It wasn't until March 1897, after a severe hemorrhage at the Hermitage restaurant in Moscow, that he allowed himself to be sounded and diagnosed. Chekhov's knowing-not knowing that he had the disease that killed him was, of course, an expression of denial, but it was also a product of the cruel-kind nature of tuberculosis itself, whose course is not predictable (consumptives have been known to live to old age) and which (as Rene and Jean Dubos point out in The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society) 'waxes and wanes with long periods of apparent remission followed by periods of exacerbation.' It was also of a piece with (and may have been implicated in the formation of) Chekhov's stance of insistent uncertainty. If nothing is clear in this world, then everything is possible-even the prospect of health.
The hemorrhage at the Hermitage occurred just as Chekhov and Alexei Suvorin were sitting down to dinner. Blood began pouring from Chekhov's mouth and the flow could not be stemmed. Suvorin took Chekhov to his suite at the Slaviansky Bazaar (where Chekhov was to book Anna Sergeyevna a few years later) and summoned Chekhov's colleague Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, who could not persuade Chekhov to go to the hospital. The hemorrhage did not abate until morning, when Chekhov insisted on returning to his own hotel, the Moscow Grand (he was now living at Melikhovo and no longer kept a Moscow residence), and on behaving as if nothing had happened. On March 25, after further hemorrhages, he finally entered the clinic of a Dr. Ostroumov, where advanced tuberculosis was diagnosed. The clinic was located near the Novodevichie Cloister, in whose cemetery, seven years later-after writing Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, 'The Lady with the Dog,' 'The Bishop,' 'In the Ravine,' 'Gooseberries,' and 'Ionitch,' among other masterpieces-Chekhov would be buried.
While at the Oustromov clinic, with his characteristic inability to refuse almost any request, Chekhov read the manuscripts of two stories sent him by a stranger, a high-school girl named Rimma Vashchuk, who wanted to know whether she had 'a spark of talent.' He promptly wrote back to say he liked one of the stories, but that the other, entitled 'A Fairy Tale,' was 'not a fairy tale, but a collection of words like 'gnome,' 'fairy,' 'dew,' 'knights'-all that is paste, at least on our Russian soil, on which neither gnomes or knights ever roamed and where you would hardly find a person who could imagine a fairy dining on dew and sunbeams. Chuck it… write only about that which is or that which, in your opinion, ought to be.' Stung by Chekhov's criticism, the girl sent him an angry letter, and he, incredibly, wrote to her again from his hospital bed, to patiently explain his criticism. 'Instead of being angry, you had better read my letter more carefully,' he began. She returned an apology.
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.
Sonia shook her head. With a modest little smile, she explained that she painted herself and therefore recognized good art when she saw it. She had paused simply to register her appreciation. She painted on weekends and during vacations, specializing in still lifes and portraits. My journalist's portrait of Sonia as a latter-day Natasha Prozorov was taking shape. Her remarks about art contributed a nice Natashaesque touch. Of course, not everything Sonia said and did had this kind of value. In fact, most of what she said and did went unrecorded in my notebook. Journalistic subjects are almost invariably stunned when they read about themselves in print, not because of what is revealed but because of what has been left out. Journalists, like the novelists and short-story writers who are their covert models, practice a ruthless economy. The novice who wishes to be 'fair' to his subjects and to render them in all their unruly complexity and contradictoriness is soon disabused. The reality of characters in fiction-and of their cousins in journalism-derives precisely from the bold, almost childlike strokes with which they are drawn. Tolstoy renders Anna Karenina through her light, resolute step, her eagerness, her friendliness and gaiety, her simple, elegant dress. He confines her thoughts and actions to a range of possibility that no person in life is confined by. Chekhov's realism, as we have seen, is of a different order; his economy is even more stringent, his strokes even blunter. His Natasha is a figure about whom we know almost nothing in particular-she is simply a concentration of coarseness and bullying willfulness. In the first act, before she shows her true colors, appearing to be only a girl from the town who feels awkward in the house of her aristocratic fiance, she undergoes a small mortification. Olga, the oldest sister, points out to her that her green sash doesn't go with her pink dress, that 'it looks queer.' Natasha's taste in dress has already been deplored by Masha, in something of the way Chekhov deplored the dress of German women. But, on another level, something more serious than bad taste is at issue in Olga's reprimand, namely, bad faith, as denoted by the color green and its association with the Serpent. (According to Chekhov's stage directions, Olga addresses Natasha about the sash 'with alarm,' suggesting that she has 'recognized' Natasha.) In the story 'In the Ravine,' written a year earlier, and also about the takeover of a household by a ruthless daughter-in-law, Chekhov actually describes the woman in question as a snake. Aksinya had naive gray eyes that rarely blinked and a naive smile played continually on her face. And in those unblinking
