The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Realisms 133

BlessedboyarLev.”7 Itwould havesanctifiedhis wisdom andmadeit irresistible, equal to those leg-iron scars that lent such authority to Dostoevsky’s word. But as a radical activist devoted to social reform, Gorky saw only part of the truth. Dostoevsky had been tied to his time; his scars were historically determined and thus inevitably dated. Tolstoy’s relatively “empty,” unpersecuted life freed him up to become a carrier for ideas valid for all people of all times. And this is what Tolstoy craved. The one section of The Brothers Karamazov that Tolstoy admired (his bedside reading during the last month of his life) was Book Six, “The Russian Monk,” Alyosha’s compilation of peak life-moments and homilies from his mentor, the Elder Zosima.

The two men chose never to meet, but much lore circulated about their opinions of each other. Dostoevsky deplored Tolstoy’s tendency to write “landlord novels” set in an historical period irrelevant to the teeming present. Gorky recalls Tolstoy saying that Dostoevsky lacked the courage to create healthy heroes; indeed, he “didn’t like healthy people. He was convinced that since he himself was sick, the whole world must be sick.” “It’s odd that so many people read him,” Tolstoy later remarked. “I can’t understand why. It’s difficult and futile – all those Idiots, Adolescents, Raskolnikovs, and the rest, things aren’t like that, it’s all much simpler, more understandable.”8 After Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, Tolstoy wept. But nevertheless he wrote soon after to their common friend, Nikolai Strakhov: “one cannot place on a pedestal for the instruction of posterity a man who was all struggle.”9 These two biographical trajectories – Dostoevsky’s labor-camp martyrdom and return to life, and Tolstoy’s pure trans-historical moral outrage – are the most influential literary variants of a “righteous person” [pravednik] in the Russian literary canon.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), with one-half Tolstoy’s life span to work with, matured as a writer in the all-but-blinding aura of both great novelists. Although he had a marked “Tolstoyan period,” Chekhov took a different path. For him, bigness of form and excessive energy in articulating an idea – or in carrying out an idea – already bordered on the fraudulent. Bodies, voices, ideas, and intentions in Chekhov’s world are more quickly exhausted. Pretensions to pan-humanity (Tolstoy) or to messianic struggle (Dostoevsky) were to him equally flawed. In Chekhov’s life, the most important extra-literary events were training as a doctor, traveling to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island north of Japan in 1890, and dying, for fifteen years, of tuberculosis. An urbane, confident, ironical man, he remarked in 1894, in a letter to his friend Aleksei Suvorin, that he had cooled toward Tolstoy: “Reason and justice tell me that there is more love for mankind in electricity and steam than there is in chastity and abstaining from meat.”10 Chekhov did not seek to propagate a Word. But no writer could ignore the legacy of Russia’s two massive novelists.