Long before their first encounter, Chekhov seems to predict the outcome of his interaction with Merezhkovskii. In his wonderful story Doma (‘At Home’, 1887), Chekhov depicts the confrontation between a father, a well-respected lawyer named Bykovskii, and his six-year-old son Serezha, who was caught smoking by his governess. After Bykovskii fails in his attempts to educate Serezha on the dangers of tobacco, the lawyer tells the boy a fairytale. The boy is so moved by his father's story that he promises his father to leave the tobacco alone.

Bykovskii recounts the tale while embracing his son and looking warmly into the boy's eyes. This story, along with the highly emotional manner in which Bykovskii tells it to Serezha, reveals the father's own fears and insecurities, his own longing for love and affection. The son responds to this revelation with love and sympathy in his turn, thus confirming a beautiful moment of communication, harmony and love.

The lawyer, however, fails to recognize what it was about the tale that made it succeed. When he muses on what has happened, he does not really understand, and reasons away his confusion with a pragmatic, pseudoscientific explanation, claiming that a factual truth in order to be effective must be dressed in some beautiful artistic form: the magic moment of human interaction is lost, drowned in banal verbiage.

This dialectic between internal communication and external misunderstanding reflects the dynamics of Merezhkovskii's relationship with Chekhov. On some level, Merezhkovskii seems to understand and appreciate Chekhov's art.