work
Kholstomer
also: Холстомер, Strider, The Story of a Horse
Tolstoy's late story (drafted in the 1860s, completed and published 1886) narrated from the point of view of an old piebald gelding named Kholstomer; Chekhov invokes it here as the measure of Tolstoy's real worth as an artist, valuing "one little filly" from the story above the whole apparatus of Tolstoy's moralizing afterwords and didactic letters.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 8 September 1891. Moscow. §6 one little filly out of "Kholstomer"
Tolstoy's late story narrated from the point of view of an old piebald gelding, completed and published in 1886. The image -- a single minor equine detail from \emph{Kholstomer} outweighing the entire apparatus of Tolstoy's philosophizing ("all its holy-fool afterwords and letters to governors' wives") -- is the letter's real thesis about Tolstoy: Chekhov's objection is never to Tolstoy's art, which he rates this highly, but specifically to Tolstoy the moralist and doctrinaire, a distinction Chekhov draws again and again across the correspondence of this period.