Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Reading notes

• The Duel §20 Tolstoy

  Lev Tolstoy, whose moral seriousness Laevsky invokes to console and justify himself, though Samoylenko admits he has never actually read him.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 5–6 October 1888. Moscow. §5 Tell him to stop reading "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"

  A joking reference to Tolstoy's 1886 novella about a man's slow death from illness, dryly appropriate reading matter to warn a rheumatic invalid off of; linked to the entity for Tolstoy himself as no separate entity for the novella exists in this corpus.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 8 February 1889. Moscow. §4 Tolstoy's heroes

  Leo Tolstoy, cited generally for his manner of characterization, in support of Chekhov's argument that a hero's 'ready-made' origin is no flaw in itself.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 11 March 1889. Moscow. §10 Lev Tolstoy

  Named in the advertisement as one of the pedagogical/moral authorities a prospective governess must be imbued with; his views on physical labor and simplified living are invoked, and by implication gently mocked via the ad's earnest tone, alongside the other named writers.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 4 May 1889. Sumy. §13 he took Tolstoy and Saltykov to the next world

  SENSITIVITY AND DISAMBIGUATION FLAG. "Tolstoy" here is Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Chekhov is reacting to a FALSE, RUMORED death: Tolstoy in fact lived until 1910, more than two decades after this letter, and this is one of the periodic false death-rumors that circulated about him during his lifetime. This is emphatically NOT a report of a real death and must not be treated as one in any downstream apparatus or summary -- do not alter's summary or timeline on the strength of this passage. Contrast the very next name in the same sentence, Saltykov (see the separate note below), whose death reported in the same breath was real. The pairing of one rumored and one real death is itself the substance of Chekhov's grim joke (\"God acts wisely... reconciled what had seemed irreconcilable\") and should be preserved, not smoothed into two equivalent facts.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 4 May 1889. Sumy. §13 this rejoicing strikes me as a great atrocity.

  Chekhov reports, with evident and unsoftened disgust, that some people -- he specifies women in particular later in this same section -- were celebrating Tolstoy's (rumored) death as the removal of a hated moral authority, language he calls "a great atrocity" (\"большим зверством\") and, two sentences later, \"utterly repellent\" (\"до чего выходит противно\"). The passage is Chekhov's own condemnation of this sentiment, not an endorsement of it -- but the report of the sentiment itself (public rejoicing at a writer's death, gendered as especially repellent when done by women) is graphic period-typical material and must not be smoothed over, softened, or omitted in apparatus, pull-quotes, or summaries. Consistent with corpus practice for unsoftened period-typical content.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 4 May 1889. Sumy. §13 utterly repellent

  "You cannot imagine how utterly repellent it becomes when women rejoice over this death" -- Chekhov singles out women's rejoicing at the (rumored) death as especially repellent to him; this gendered framing is part of the historical content of the letter and should be preserved and flagged, not softened, per corpus practice for faithful translation of unsoftened period-typical material.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 26 October 1891. Moscow. §9 Tolstoy... must have soaked himself through... with hatred for medicine

  An early instance of a complaint Chekhov, himself a trained physician, would return to and sharpen in later years: that Tolstoy's fiction and moral writing show a deep, almost visceral hostility toward doctors and the practice of medicine.

• To Ye. P. Yegorov, 11 December 1891. Moscow. §4 Надо иметь смелость и авторитет Толстого

  Chekhov cites Tolstoy's stature and moral authority as the exceptional case that could defy the administration's ban on independent relief organizing and simply proceed -- a passing but pointed comparison, since Tolstoy did in fact organize large-scale independent famine relief in Ryazan province that same autumn, an effort well known to Chekhov's Moscow circle at the time of writing.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 11 December 1891. Moscow. §13 Tolstoy, ah, Tolstoy!

  Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, whose contribution to the charitable Sbornik -- a plainspoken, practical article on running famine-relief soup kitchens -- draws this burst of superlative praise ("not a man but a mighty man of men, a Jupiter") from Chekhov, echoed by Sobolevsky's own judgment that the piece belonged in an official government gazette rather than a literary miscellany.

• To N. M. Yezhov, 7 January 1892. Petersburg. §5 не противьтесь злу, не забывайте нашего учителя Л. Н. Толстого

  "Resist not evil" (не противься злу) is Tolstoy's own formula for the doctrine of non-resistance he drew from the Sermon on the Mount and had been elaborating since "What I Believe" (1884) -- by 1892 a widely recognized shorthand for Tolstoyan moral teaching (compare elsewhere in this corpus). Suvorina's "our teacher" is arch rather than earnest: she deploys the famous precept to tell Yezhov and the others to calm down over a trinket, the mock-solemn register matching the whole passage's parody of moralizing advice.

• To M. I. Chaykovsky, 16 March 1890. Moscow. §5 in Russian art he now occupies second place after Lev Tolstoy, who has long sat in first. (Third I give to Repin, and for myself I take ninety-eighth.)

  A comic mock-official "ranking" of contemporary Russian artists across disciplines -- literature (Tolstoy), music (Tchaikovsky), painting (Ilya Repin) -- with Chekhov placing himself absurdly low (ninety-eighth) as a joke of self-deprecation rather than a literal assessment of his own standing, which by 1890 was considerable. The list is offered entirely in the spirit of the letter's playful tribute, not as literary criticism.

• To G. M. Chekhov, 29 December 1890. Moscow. §7 он составляет теперь знаменитость No 2. Номером первым считается Лев Толстой, а я No 877

  A joking celebrity-ranking: Tchaikovsky as Russia's No. 2 public figure (behind Tolstoy at No. 1), with Chekhov placing himself, self-deprecatingly, at No. 877 -- almost certainly a play on this very letter's own file number in the standard editorial numbering of Chekhov's collected letters (this is letter No. 875 in that sequence, dated three days before the joke), rather than a claim about any real public ranking. The joke's self-deprecation is characteristic of how Chekhov downplays his own already-substantial fame in family correspondence.

• To A. A. Dolzhenko, 8 May 1891. Aleksin. §8 Find the stories "The Cossacks," "Kholstomer," and "Polikushka."

  Three works by Leo Tolstoy, recommended here as shelf reading for Alyosha during his stay with the family. "Kholstomer" ("Strider"/"The Story of a Horse") is already tracked as, discussed at greater length by Chekhov in; "The Cossacks" (1863) and "Polikushka" (1863) are named only in passing here and, consistent with the corpus's treatment of brief title-drops, are not raised to separate work entities.

• Notebooks. Diaries §813 L. Tolstoy. On Art

  Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), whom Chekhov revered as a writer while remaining skeptical of the moralizing "Tolstoyism" that grew up around him (see \S1376).