The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (17 page)

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!”

How could Chekhov not have sought treatment? How could he not have recognized his symptoms—especially when he spent weeks nursing his own brother Nikolai, who died of tuberculosis in 1889? I was reminded of a production of
Uncle Vanya
, the first play I ever saw in Russian, put on some years ago in Moscow. The actor playing Dr. Astrov had been a television star, famous for playing Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes series on Soviet TV. Watching Dr. Astrov smoke a pipe, pore over maps, and rail against deforestation—watching Dr. Astrov fail to notice the really important thing, that Sonya was in love with him—I had been struck by his similarity to Dr. Watson. Doctor, I thought, you
see but you do not observe! For all your scientific enlightenment, you always misread the signs.

At six o’clock the next morning, the twenty-five International Tolstoy Scholars boarded a chartered bus to Moscow. Nobody seemed to know how far Melikhovo was from Yasnaya Polyana, how long it would take to get there, or whether there would be any stops along the way. Leena, an intense, auburn-haired young woman who was writing a dissertation about Tolstoy and Schopenhauer, was particularly concerned about the subject of bathroom breaks. “The bus will bump,” she observed. “There is no toilet on this bumping bus.”

Leena and I made an insurance pact: if either of us had to go to the bathroom, we would march to the front of the bus together and request a stop.

The bus raced along the highway to Moscow. Through the birch forests that flickered past my window, I glimpsed the same north-south railway line that had carried Tolstoy from Shamardino toward Astapovo.

About an hour north of Tula, Leena slipped into the seat beside me. “It is time,” she said. “Remember your promise.”

“I remember,” I said, preparing to get up, but Leena didn’t move. “I just got my period,” she said, staring straight ahead. “It’s ten days early. It’s not the right time.” I made some expression of sympathy. “It is the wrong time,” she said firmly, and then stood up.

We walked to the front of the bus. The driver didn’t acknowledge our request in any way, but something about his shiny, shaven head indicated that he heard us. A few minutes later the bus lurched off the road and skidded to a stop in a gas station.

The women’s bathroom was located fifty yards behind
the gas pumps, in a little hut on the edge of the woods. The door appeared to have been boarded over, but the boards were decayed and hanging from their nails. The enormous textologist went in first. She reemerged almost immediately, preceded by a kind of muffled splintering sound.

“Into the woods, girls,” the textologist announced. We dispersed into the scraggly woods behind the gas station. The woods were full of garbage. Why am I here? I thought, looking at a vodka bottle that lay on the ground. It’s because of Chekhov, I answered myself.

Back on the bus, the driver was cleaning his nails with a pocketknife. Leena came back after a minute or two. She said that she had been bitten by one of God’s creatures.

“He made a lot of them,” I observed, of God and his creatures.

I don’t know how long we had been waiting in our seats before it suddenly began to seem odd that the bus hadn’t left yet. I became aware of some external commotion. Just outside my window, the conference organizer—a brisk Canadian, who had written a well-received book about Tolstoy’s representation of peasant life—was opening the luggage compartment. Her round, bespectacled face was set in a resolute expression, as she dragged out a suitcase and began carrying it away.

Looking around, I suddenly noticed the absence of several International Tolstoy Scholars: a military historian and his wife, the tennis scholar from Yale, and the expert on
The Living Corpse
. Leena and I got off the bus to investigate.

“I told him to just throw them out,” the conference organizer was saying. “He insists on taking them with him. I’m at least going to find double bags.” She strode off in the direction of the gas station, carrying a big plastic bag that appeared to contain some heavy object.

“It’s going to be so awful when he opens the suitcase,” said the military historian’s wife.

It emerged that Vanya had had an accident, and was refusing to throw out his pants. He wanted them to be put into his suitcase, in a plastic bag. The military historian and the tennis scholar were in the men’s toilet, trying to reason with him. Leena had turned completely pale. “It’s the tyranny of the body,” she said.

The conference organizer came back, with her double bags.

“We must not go to Melikhovo,” Leena told her. “It is not the right time.”

The conference organizer looked Leena in the eye. “We planned to go, so we are going to go.”

Back on the bus, the driver was complaining about how he was going to be late. Instead of dropping us off in Moscow he was going to leave us at the outermost metro stop of the outermost suburbs.

“He is a bandit!” someone shouted, of the bus driver. There were murmurs of agreement. One by one, the remaining passengers returned to the bus. Last was Vanya, whose pale eyes roamed over the two aisles of International Tolstoy Scholars. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, clinging to the handrail as if climbing out of a swimming pool. “Ladies and gentlemen, I must apologize for the delay. I am an old man, you see. A very old man.”

When the bus started again, a wave of sleepiness passed over me. I had stayed up late the previous night, reading a biog-raphy of Chekhov. I learned that, no matter how hard you tried to think about Chekhov here, you kept falling over Tolstoy. There was no way around it, and in fact the thing
seemed to have been fated before they were born. In 1841, Chekhov’s serf grandfather purchased his family’s freedom from their master, a nobleman called Chertkov—who was none other than the future father of
Vladimir
Chertkov, the Dark One, the beneficiary of Tolstoy’s secret will! (Chekhov’s grandfather paid Chertkov’s father 220 rubles per soul; Chertkov père, apparently not a bad guy, threw in one of Chekhov’s aunts for free.) No wonder Chekhov didn’t believe in the immortality of the soul. In the moment the money changed hands, his own grandfather had been a Gogolian “dead soul”: a serf who had been paid for even as,
qua
serf, he ceased to exist.

I also learned that Tolstoy had seen
Uncle Vanya
during its first run in Moscow, when the role of Astrov was played by Stanislavsky himself. The only positive impression retained by Tolstoy from this production was of the sound of a cricket chirping in the final act. A well-known actor had spent an entire month acquiring precisely this skill, from a cricket in the Sandunov public baths. Nevertheless, his masterful chirping was not enough to counterbalance the overall terrible impression left on Tolstoy by
Uncle Vanya
. “Where is the drama?” Tolstoy once shouted, when the play was mentioned. He even harangued the actors, telling them that Astrov and Vanya had best marry peasant girls and leave the professor’s wife in peace.

Tolstoy’s diary entry for January 14, 1900, reads, “I went to see
Uncle Vanya
and was outraged. I wanted to write my play,
The Corpse
.” Tolstoy started work on
The Living Corpse
that month.

I dreamed I was playing tennis against Tolstoy. As Alice in Wonderland plays croquet with a flamingo for a mallet, I was playing tennis with a goose for a racket. Lev Nikolayevich
had a normal racket; only I had a goose. I served the ball, producing a flurry of fluffy gray down. Tolstoy’s mighty backhand projected the ball far beyond the outermost limits of the tennis lawn, into the infinite dimension of total knowledge and human understanding. Match point.

I handed my goose over to Chekhov, who was next in the line of Tolstoy’s opponents. Sitting on the edge of the lawn, watching the Tolstoy-Chekhov game, I suddenly realized, with a shiver, the identity of the living corpse.
It was Chekhov
. Tolstoy had written that play about Chekhov, whom he had always intended to outlive.

I woke to the crunching of gravel. We had reached Melikhovo, where we were offered the choice of a full or abridged tour. “We want the full tour,” the conference organizer said grimly, pulling out her video camera. Our tour guide, a pensioner with hair dyed a strange tangerine color, took twenty minutes to guide us from the ticket booth to the front door. “Respected guests!” she shouted. “We are now located in the backyard of the neighbor of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov!”

Inside the house, I felt nothing. Yasnaya Polyana was Tolstoy’s ancestral estate, and the center of his universe; it makes sense to visit Yasnaya Polyana. Chekhov had no ancestral estate. He bought Melikhovo, a house infested at that time by bedbugs and roaches, from a destitute artist; seven years later, when tuberculosis obliged him to seek a milder climate, he sold the land to a timber merchant and moved to Yalta. Melikhovo was just a stage for Chekhov—almost a stage
set
. The neighboring estates were owned by social outcasts: the body-building grandson of a Decembrist rebel; a fallen countess and her much younger lover.

No single room in Chekhov’s house was large enough to contain the entire body of International Tolstoy Scholars. We
shuffled along a dark corridor. The guide gestured toward various rooms, too small to enter.

We passed to a tiny “
parloir
”: “the scene of everlasting, interesting conversations.”

“Did Chekhov play the piano?” someone asked.

“No!” the guide exclaimed, with great emphasis. “He absolutely did not play!”

I noticed a pocket of space around the
Living Corpse
scholar, who looked a bit forlorn. I approached him but inadvertently stepped back because of the smell.

Somewhere in the shadows that lay ahead, the guide was shouting, “Here is the beloved inkwell of the great writer!”

I extricated myself from the dark forest of shoulders, hurried down the narrow hallway, and exited into Chekhov’s garden. The garden was empty but for the conference organizer, who was making a video recording of Chekhov’s apple trees, and the Malevich scholar, who stooped to pick up an apple, stared at it, and took an enormous, yawning bite.

I walked quickly, trying to recapture the spark of mystery. Perhaps, I thought, Tolstoy had been killed by the “corpse”—by Gimer, who was supposedly dead two years at this time, but had anyone actually seen the body? “
Now
who’s the corpse!” I imagined Gimer muttering, setting down the teaspoon—all I had to do was think of a motive. But somehow this time the motive wasn’t forthcoming. My heart wasn’t in it anymore. I found myself remembering “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the first and last story in which Watson has no trouble and no fun applying Holmes’s method: “It was, alas, only too easy to do.” Two sets of prints lead to the waterfall, and none lead back; nearby lies the alpenstock of the best and wisest man he has ever known.

Later, of course, Conan Doyle recants. Holmes’s death and Watson’s bereavement turn out to be a temporary illusion, and real life starts again: the late nights, the hansom rides, the peat bogs, the thrill of the chase. But can things ever really be the same between the doctor and the “living corpse”? Will there not come a time when Holmes has to tell his friend that all the murderers they apprehended were but the pawns of a far greater force, untouchable by human justice—a force even capable of acting independently, with no human agent?