Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy was not deaf to Chekhov’s sarcastic detachment. He enjoyed reading the story aloud, laughing himself and making everyone around him laugh. Many memoirists recall that he was never successful in reading his own prose, but performed the works of the authors he loved brilliantly and that he especially enjoyed comic literature. However, whenever he read ‘The Darling’ to family members and friends he invariably ended up in tears. He had found in Chekhov’s Olga the female ideal he longed for – a woman incapable of self-assertion who would willingly merge with him in one spiritual being. Later Tolstoy made a point of including the story whole in his Cycle of Reading, a personal commonplace book in which he tried to collect the best achievements of spiritual wisdom and moral beauty. In an afterword Tolstoy explained that, in his view, Chekhov had intended to condemn the ‘Darling’, Olga, but

a god of poetry forbade him to do it and ordered that she be blessed, and he did bless her by involuntarily covering that sympathetic creature in such a miraculous light that it will forever remain an example of what a woman may be to be happy herself, and make happy those with whom fate had united her. (CW, XLI, p. 377)

For all he admired Chekhov’s short stories, Tolstoy could never reconcile himself to the plays, which, from Tolstoy’s point of view, lacked coherent plots and dramatic situations. Chekhov loved to tell his friends that Tolstoy had once said to him: ‘I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse.’ Worried that his interlocutor was offended by his bluntness, Tolstoy took his hand, looked into his eyes and said, ‘Anton Pavlovich, you are a fine man,’ and then smiled and added, ‘But your plays are still bad.’¹¹

Chekhov believed that Tolstoy’s frequent praise for his contemporaries always carried a whiff of condescension and Shakespeare was the only author whom he regarded as a worthy rival. At least, Shakespeare was the only writer Tolstoy chose to refute in a special essay that offered a devastating analysis of King Lear, singling out psychological improbabilities, the incoherent plot, bombastic language and the dubious morality of the tragedy.

Drama always fascinated Tolstoy, but it was only in 1886 that he was able to make serious progress on a dramatic project. The Power of Darkness, his first major play, shows that Tolstoy did not idealize peasant life. The plot, based on an actual criminal case, included adultery, murder, infanticide and the spectacular public repentance of the murderer, which was vaguely reminiscent of Crime and Punishment.

Alexander III initially approved the tragedy, but was later convinced by Pobedonostsev to change his mind and ban stage performances. The Power of Darkness was first performed in Paris, followed by productions in nearly a dozen major European cities. The first professional production of the play in Russia did not take place until 1902, when Konstantin Stanislavsky directed and played the main role at the Moscow Art Theatre. Eleven years earlier Stanislavsky had already directed an amateur performance of Tolstoy’s comedy The Fruits of Enlightenment, which ridiculed the spiritualism that was fashionable in Russian society in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The two most important of Tolstoy’s dramatic works did not appear on stage or in print during his lifetime. He started both in the 1890s, then put them aside to concentrate on Resurrection. He resumed work on them in 1900, probably influenced by the first production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which he had seen that January at the Moscow Art Theatre. Tolstoy had left the theatre disappointed and certain that he could produce a more successful dramatic work of art. He nearly completed both dramas, but never tried to publish or stage either of them. The Living Corpse, the most theatrically successful of Tolstoy’s plays, was published in the posthumous edition in 1911 and performed the same year at the Moscow Art Theatre, co-directed by Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.

The main character of the play, Fyodor Protasov, ruins his family by squandering money on Gypsy singers. To free his wife and let her remarry a decent and loving suitor, he fakes his own suicide and disappears. This deceit is uncovered and both spouses are put on trial, Fyodor for fraud and his former wife Liza for bigamy. Eager to cut the knot that ties them both together and, no less importantly, understanding that the court’s verdict will return him to his family, Fyodor actually kills himself.