To A. S. Suvorin, 8 September 1891. Moscow.
А. С. СУВОРИНУ, 8 сентября 1891 г. Москва.
Headnote
Written from Moscow on 8 September 1891, just after Chekhov had returned from the countryside and settled, unhappily, into city life again – the letter opens with him sitting at home while his family debates a cheaper apartment out toward Devichye Pole, too indifferent to the question to argue either way.
The occasional business is brisk and mixed: he rejects Suvorin’s proposed title "A Lie" for the novella in progress (almost certainly what would become *The Duel*), on the ground that unconscious wrongdoing isn’t lying at all, only error; he reports that the journalist and humorist Alexander Dmitrievich Kurepin is dying of cancer; and he closes with greetings to Suvorin’s household, playful and affectionate in the register Chekhov reserves for the Suvorins specifically.
The letter’s center of gravity, though, is the long paragraph on Tolstoy, provoked by Chekhov’s having just read the "Afterword" – the notorious postscript Tolstoy appended to *The Kreutzer Sonata*, restating its sexual asceticism in blunter, more programmatic terms than the story itself. Chekhov calls it worse than the "Letters to a Governor’s Wife" (a didactic Tolstoy tract on marriage and adultery he already held in contempt), and the imagined play – a chemist who destroys his own elixir of immortality rather than let scoundrels like himself and his wife live forever – reads as a deliberately petty, mortal answer to Tolstoy’s absolutism: mankind should not be lectured out of its evasions and compromises by a genius who has never had to answer for his own rudeness. The comparison to Diogenes turns on the same point Chekhov returns to elsewhere in these years – that fame licenses a moral highhandedness in great men that would get an ordinary person arrested. The closing measure of value, one filly from "Kholstomer" (Tolstoy’s own late story narrated by a horse) being worth more than the whole apparatus of afterwords and governess-letters, is characteristic: Chekhov prefers Tolstoy the storyteller to Tolstoy the moralist, and says so by weighing the fiction against the doctrine and finding the doctrine wanting.
Anna Ivanovna and Alexei Alexeyevich are Suvorin’s wife and son; "Alexei Petrovich," Suvorin’s old schoolmate, is otherwise unidentified in the source, and the joke wished on him – a dream of a naked Spanish woman with a guitar – is left exactly as broad as Chekhov wrote it.