'Passing Judgments Without Appeal'

“On the terrace at Gaspra, looking out to the blazing sea, the two men had long talks together.”

Some meetings of great men, like the conference at nearby Yalta forty-four years later, have world-historical significance (not that Stalin is a great man). Others, like Chekhov’s visit to Tolstoy in 1901, are important simply because we’re glad they happened. Gaspra is the Crimean spa town on the Black Sea where Tolstoy lived in 1901-02. The men had met before, at Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow, and the feelings of each were complicated. Chekhov when young had been something of a Tolstoyan, but life had demonstrated that “putting on bark shoes” and “going to sleep on the stove next to the laborer” would never help achieve a more peaceful, equitable world. Tolstoy thought Chekhov’s plays even worse than Shakespeare’s, and that his younger colleague possessed “an atheist’s head, but a heart of gold.” Henri Troyat continues in Tolstoy (trans. Nancy Amphoux, 1968):

“Chekhov, dressed like a schoolmaster, with a mournful little beard, dangling eyeglass and hollow chest, struggled with his soft voice to contradict his host, as he drummed with his fingertips on the felt hat he had parked on his knees. Tolstoy sat beside him behind a cup of cold tea, looking shrunken in his peasant blouse, with a broad panama hat pulled down over his forehead, his legs encased in boots and his beard white and fluviatile, hardly listening to what the other man was saying; he talked on and on, condemning this and approving that, passing judgments without appeal.”

Troyat seems to be working from the photos taken during the Gaspra meeting (here and here). Chekhov didn’t argue with the master but neither did he curry favor. Troyat quotes Tolstoy’s oldest son, Sergey: “It is my impression that my father would have liked to be more intimate with him, to draw him into his circle of influence, but he felt an unspoken refusal, an uncrossable frontier, that prevented complete understanding.” Troyat adds: “And in the end Tolstoy, disappointed, grumbled: ‘Chekhov is not a religious man.’” Their meeting neatly defines their differences.

I bought the American edition of Tolstoy from the Book of the Month Club in 1968. I was almost sixteen and for a long time had been attracted to biography as a form. Troyat’s was the first I read in a manner that might be described as passionate.