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Reconsiderations

April 2005

Chekov & Tolstoy

by Anthony Daniels

On two stories in which we “see encapsulated the tragic predicament of modern man.”

After he had written Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reacted against literature. He wanted henceforth to be a moral philosopher, a prophet, a sage, and a saint, rather than an artist. (How often we mistake the nature of our own gifts!) And many people subsequently fell under his didactic spell, even—for a time—Chekhov, a man one normally thinks of as being peculiarly unsusceptible to the siren-call of sages and saints. Chekhov the disciple—it sounds strange in the light of our image of him, but such, for a time, he was.

In 1886, Tolstoy published his first substantial work of fiction for nearly twenty years, the novella The Death of Ivan Illych. He started to write it after he received Turgenev’s famous deathbed letter: “My friend,” wrote Turgenev, who was then very weak, in great pain and only a short time from death, “return to literature! … My friend, great writer of the Russia ...

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Anthony Daniels's most recent book is In Praise of Prejudice (Encounter Books). Hewas born in 1949. After qualifying as a doctor, he worked in what was then Rhodesia, followed by South Africa, before returning for three years training as a psychiatrist in London’s East End. Three and a half years in the Gilbert Islands were interspersed with some South American wandering, and then between 1984 and 1986 he worked in Tanzania. His first book, Coups and Cocaine, was followed by Fool or Physician, subtitled ‘the memoirs of a sceptical doctor.’ Zanzibar to Timbuktu, his trek across Africa by public transport was published to great acclaim in 1988, and was a runner-up in the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 23 April 2005, on page 31

Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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