For some years now I have been telling an anecdote, always prefacing it by announcing that it is my favorite literary anecdote, large parts of which, I have come to discover, I seem to have invented. I have not made the anecdote up out of whole cloth, but the dacron, the nylon, and the filaments of polyester in it are mine. In this anecdote Tolstoy and Chekhov are walking about Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s country estate. Tolstoy is in his standard rustic rig: loose tunic, baggy trousers held up by a hemp rope and tucked into boots that come up to his knees, a beard that resembles a triple serving of California sprouts, his famous potato nose (which was much like the actor Karl Maiden’s), and a floppy peasant hat. He is old and slightly crouched yet still sinewy and looking, as someone once described him, like a giant dwarf. Chekhov is in black suit and vest, a black round-brimmed hat pushed back off his forehead, a black goatee and mustache, a black-rimmed monocle affixed to his right eye and held to his lapel by a black string, black shoes, and no tie but a white shirt buttoned at the collar. He is bent and frail and looking, as I don’t believe anyone has ever described him, like an elongated and russified Charlie Chaplin. They stroll amid graceful poplars, slender birches, brooding willows. Tolstoy, his arm around the shoulder of his younger companion, speaks in a voice that knows no