An exercise in literary ventriloquism between Chekhov and Tolstoy

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" (...