Books: The Doctor & the Sage

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TOLSTOY: A LIFE OF MY FATHER (543 pp.)—Alexandra Tolsyoy—Harper ($5).

CHEKHOV: A LIFE (431 pp.)—David Magarshack—Grove Press ($6).

Count Leo Tolstoy believed that "gymnastics do not interfere with running an estate." His serfs disagreed. "You come to the master for orders," complained the village elder, "and the master in a red shirt is hanging upside down from a pole; his hair is all hanging around, his face flushed. You don't know whether to listen to orders or stand and gape."

Most Russians found themselves in the elder's predicament when Tolstoy, his face more flushed than ever, started pole-hanging in the sphere of politics and morals. Some listened passionately to his revolutionary edicts; other gaped and wished the old man would stick to art. Anton Chekhov, who was born (1860) 32 years after Tolstoy, started by listening, but eventually decided that he could do better gymnastics of his own.

Alexandra, youngest of Tolstoy's daughters, has written the umpteenth story of her father's life, coincident with the publication of a new, grand-scale biography of Chekhov. Author Tolstoy was her father's secretary, and her book is a useful, bulky filing cabinet of Tolstoyana, though empty of literary substance. David Magarshack is a pundit of the Russian drama who has already written a life of Producer Stanislavsky and a study of Chekhov's plays. His huge, valuable Chekhov resembles Tolstoy only in that it, too. is more a receptacle for facts than a vehicle of literary criticism.

Aristocrat in a Blouse. Apart from a penchant for beards, these two great men are a fascinating study of human contrasts. Tolstoy was a son of the minor aristocracy who entered manhood as an artillery officer (he fought at Sevastopol) and ended it trying to be as much like a peasant as possible. The more he saw of contemporary society, the more he despised it; the more he wrote, the more contemptuous he became of "style" and "art." "The patient's special obsession," he wrote, in a mock case-history of himself, "is that he believes it possible to alter the lives of others by means of the word. General symptoms: dissatisfaction with the existing order, condemnation of everyone except himself."

People flocked to visit the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. They met, instead, a bearded, bearish moralist who had put all such vanities behind him. Most of the trouble in the world, pious Leo Tolstoy believed, was caused by man's passion for burying the Ten Commandments under heaps of verbiage. Educators, churchmen, politicians and pundits of every kind were all dedicated to the proposition that the simple truths of life, death and religion must be twisted into lies. The peasant blouse which Tolstoy loved to wear was not a cover for his body; it was his challenge to a tailored world.