Books: The Doctor & the Sage

TOLSTOY: A LIFE OF MY FATHER (543 pp.)—Alexandra Tolsyoy—Harper ($5).

CHEKHOV: A LIFE (431 pp.)—David Magarshack—Grove Press ($6).

Count Leo Tolstoy believed that “gymnastics do not interfere with running an estate.” His serfs disagreed. “You come to the master for orders,” complained the village elder, “and the master in a red shirt is hanging upside down from a pole; his hair is all hanging around, his face flushed. You don’t know whether to listen to orders or stand and gape.”

Most Russians found themselves in the elder’s predicament when Tolstoy, his face more flushed than ever, started pole-hanging in the sphere of politics and morals. Some listened passionately to his revolutionary edicts; other gaped and wished the old man would stick to art. Anton Chekhov, who was born (1860) 32 years after Tolstoy, started by listening, but eventually decided that he could do better gymnastics of his own.

Alexandra, youngest of Tolstoy’s daughters, has written the umpteenth story of her father’s life, coincident with the publication of a new, grand-scale biography of Chekhov. Author Tolstoy was her father’s secretary, and her book is a useful, bulky filing cabinet of Tolstoyana, though empty of literary substance. David Magarshack is a pundit of the Russian drama who has already written a life of Producer Stanislavsky and a study of Chekhov’s plays. His huge, valuable Chekhov resembles Tolstoy only in that it, too. is more a receptacle for facts than a vehicle of literary criticism.

Aristocrat in a Blouse. Apart from a penchant for beards, these two great men are a fascinating study of human contrasts. Tolstoy was a son of the minor aristocracy who entered manhood as an artillery officer (he fought at Sevastopol) and ended it trying to be as much like a peasant as possible. The more he saw of contemporary society, the more he despised it; the more he wrote, the more contemptuous he became of “style” and “art.” “The patient’s special obsession,” he wrote, in a mock case-history of himself, “is that he believes it possible to alter the lives of others by means of the word. General symptoms: dissatisfaction with the existing order, condemnation of everyone except himself.”

People flocked to visit the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. They met, instead, a bearded, bearish moralist who had put all such vanities behind him. Most of the trouble in the world, pious Leo Tolstoy believed, was caused by man’s passion for burying the Ten Commandments under heaps of verbiage. Educators, churchmen, politicians and pundits of every kind were all dedicated to the proposition that the simple truths of life, death and religion must be twisted into lies. The peasant blouse which Tolstoy loved to wear was not a cover for his body; it was his challenge to a tailored world.

Climber from the Steppes. Unlike Count Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov was born to the blouse. His grandfather was a freed serf, his father a petty storekeeper in the steppes. The aim of the Chekhov family was to win everything that Tolstoy wanted to lose—money, social standing, polish, orthodox morality and etiquette. Like many a determined climber, father Chekhov kept his family moving up by goading them savagely. “[He] began to teach me, or, to put it more plainly, whip me,” said Chekhov, “when I was only five … He whipped me, boxed my ears, hit me over the head, and the first question I asked myself on awakening . . . was: ‘Will I be whipped again today?’ ”

Father Chekhov went broke, and the whole family (of eight) moved to “a dark basement in one of the worst slums in Moscow.” But father Chekhov’s pomposity was not humbled by disaster. One of his first acts on arriving in the basement was to pin to the wall a paper entitled: “Rules & Regulations of the Domestic Duties of the Family of Pavel Chekhov, Resident in Moscow.”

Thus, from the start, young Chekhov had his nose rubbed in all the sharpest aspects of poverty and keeping-up-with-the-Ivanovs. His brothers averted their eyes and took to drink, but Anton grew tough as steel. Long before he took his medical degree, he was the main support of the whole family, and, like Tolstoy, had learned to loathe those who tried to prettify and disguise the hard facts of life. He had also learned never to pretend to knowledge or emotions which he did not have. “I don’t understand anything about the ballet,” he once said. “All I know about it is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.”

A Trip to Siberia. The remarkable thing is that Chekhov managed to laugh in the face of hard facts. Like the young Tolstoy, he became a gay dog with a strong liking for wine and women. He also became a radical and agnostic, and he had barely begun medical practice when tuberculosis began to ruin his health.

He took up literature simply to make money. With a vigor that Balzac might have envied, this ailing young man churned out some 600 short stories in five years. Tolstoy read some of these sharp, witty dissections of human folly and raised respectful eyebrows, but Chekhov himself only scoffed. He was a doctor, he said, not a writer. “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend a night with the other.”

When, at last, Chekhov began to take his literature seriously, he used Tolstoy as his guinea pig, rewriting the great man’s stories in his own way. And, as his painful childhood memories began to recede, Chekhov also became receptive to Tolstoy’s teachings. Nonviolence, passive resistance to autocracy and force, art for morality’s sake—for some years these became Chekhov’s own messages. Like Tolstoy, he put his beliefs into practice in the form of free medical attention for the poor and a firsthand study and exposé of the Siberian prison system.

So, for a short moment, the two great men of letters stood in alliance. But the breach came soon after Chekhov returned from his Siberian tour, horrified by what he had seen. “How,” he asked, “did Tolstoy’s theory of nonresistance to evil stand up . . .? Did the convicts’ nonresistance to flogging or forced labor or blackmail or prostitution transform them or those who were responsible for them into better men? . . . On the contrary, it turned them into bigger brutes.” Soon Chekhov was warring with every Tolstoyan tenet, particularly the idea that “Christian love was incompatible with sexual love.” And just who, demanded Chekhov, were these wonderful peasants Tolstoy was always talking about? He himself had “peasant blood in my veins” and bore the marks of peasant beatings What did the count know about such things ?

A Military Ending. When at last they met—the peasant-bloused count and the well-dressed shopkeeper’s son—they wanted to like each other. Chekhov tried to forget Tolstoy’s views on art, sex and nonviolence; Tolstoy tried to forget Chekhov’s atheism and artistic refinement. Then each went his way, Tolstoy to further brooding and writing on man’s rejection of his God-given destiny, Chekhov to those triumphs of human vivisection, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard.

Their respective attitudes to life were neatly reflected in their deaths. Tolstoy died in a stationmaster’s house when running away to embrace the life of private solitude and renunciation that he had preached so long. For Chekhov, killed by tuberculosis at 44, death staged an incomparable piece of pure Chekhov. The funeral procession became entwined with that of a Russian general. Why, wondered Chekhov’s mourners, was the great artist being buried with a military band?