When Anton Chekhov died on 15 July 1904 in the distant German town of Badenweiler at the age of 44, having suffered from tuberculosis his entire life, the 76-year-old Tolstoy was profoundly shocked. In his diary, he wrote of an irreplaceable loss to Russian literature, and in conversations with those close to him, he confessed to feeling a “physical emptiness” after the departure of his younger colleague. It is said that Chekhov’s final words, spoken in German to his doctor, were: “Ich sterbe” (“I am dying”). He then drank a glass of champagne, lay on his side, and quietly passed away. When Tolstoy was told of these circumstances, he pensively remarked that it was entirely in Chekhov’s spirit—to depart without grand words or gestures, with a glass of champagne.
Their first significant meeting occurred in 1895 when the 35-year-old Chekhov visited Yasnaya Polyana, where the 67-year-old Tolstoy received him with remarkable warmth. During this visit, an interesting and telling episode unfolded: Tolstoy was reading excerpts from his novel “Resurrection”, and Chekhov, well-versed in the judicial system (partly due to his Sakhalin expedition), noticed an inaccuracy in the legal procedure, where the heroine was sentenced to an unreasonably short period of hard labour. Tolstoy not only took no offence at the observation from his “junior colleague” but also corrected the error in the final version of the novel.
They seemed to have nothing in common: on one side, a titled count, a “seasoned titan” of Russian literature, born during the reign of Nicholas I, descendant of an ancient noble lineage, owner of a luxurious estate; on the other, the son of a former serf, a modest doctor perpetually embarrassed by his own fame; one a prophetic moralist, the other an observer. Even the historical connection between their families bore a symbolically paradoxical character: Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf belonging to the father of Chertkov—Tolstoy’s closest friend and follower. One could say that in these two figures, two Russias converged: Tolstoy’s patriarchal, aristocratic Russia, dying with “The Cherry Orchard”, and Chekhov’s new, non-aristocratic Russia. Despite their differences, judging by their letters, diaries, and observations of contemporaries, the writers respected one another, visited each other during illness, admired each other’s genius, and also critiqued each other’s creativity and life positions.