Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  But worst of all is the fact that Olga Andreyevna [Golokhvastov’s wife] is ill. There can be no situation more awful for a husband’s health than the illness of his wife. I have experienced this condition this year and continue to experience it. My wife has been dangerously ill. All winter she was sick and weak and now she is in bed again, and you tremble every moment lest the situation should get worse. This situation is particularly painful for me because I don’t believe in doctors or in medicine, or in the fact that human remedies can make a scrap of difference to a person’s state of health, that is to his life. Owing to this conviction which I can’t alter, I call in all the doctors, follow their prescriptions and can’t make any plans. It’s very likely that we shall go abroad soon, and probably to Italy, which is so repulsive to me, but less so than Germany. In Europe it seems to me that I could only live in England, but people go away from there for their health, and there’s no point in going there. Generally speaking my wife’s illness, the death of my aunt who died at our house this winter, and the death of our newly born little girl all made this winter very hard for me. The only comforts are the children who, thank goodness, are growing up nicely, and my work in which I’m immersed up to my eyes.

  He was, he claimed, “immersed”—and was annoyed that Golokhvastov wasn’t.

  Tolstoy was continuing to describe what seemed to be his odd relationship to doctors and treatment. He didn’t like doctors or “believe in” them, but he decided he had to do what they said. Doctors were the only experts he regularly deferred to and perhaps he resented them for that. (It’s a shame Tolstoy didn’t ever study medicine, or even, as Chekhov pointed out in response to Tolstoy’s fumings about sex in The Kreutzer Sonata, read up on human physiology.LX)

  Tolstoy closed his letter by scolding Golokhvastov once more (“You don’t have the first comfort [children], but you must provide yourself with the second”) and by wishing Golokhvastov’s wife “good health, for her sake as well as for your own.”LXI

  He received a letter from Alexandrine now in which she fretted: “It was rumored here that Anna will kill herself on the railroad tracks. I do not want to believe that. You are incapable of such vulgarity.”LXII

  No, Alexandrine (who sounds here like Karenin’s friend Lidia), it’s not because of vulgarity that Anna kills herself. Or if we don’t want to bicker over that point with her, let’s retreat to the original idea and plan of the novel. While Tolstoy famously said he didn’t know that Vronsky was going to shoot himself until Vronsky did so, we know that he knew from the start that Anna was going to kill herself. I sympathize with Alexandrine not wanting Anna to kill herself. It’s shocking, but that’s where Anna was headed. That’s why it’s disturbing. On the other hand, if Vronsky had managed to kill himself with that shot to his chest, we would’ve shaken our heads and muttered: “What an idiot!”

  Sometime in the third week of March, Tolstoy wrote Alexandrine, but not in answer to her protest over Anna’s rumored death. He apologized for having sent to her, perhaps accidentally on purpose, a letter to Urusov about belief. “Thank you very much for praying for me. Although I’m unable to believe in the efficacy of prayer, I’m glad, because this proves your affection for me and because, although I don’t believe, I can’t say for sure that it’s useless. And perhaps it’s even true. In any case I know that the more I think, the less I’m able to believe, and that if I come to do so, it will be by a miracle. So please don’t try to persuade me. There’s no question but that I think ceaselessly about the problems of the meaning of life and death, and think just as seriously as it’s possible to think. There’s no question either but that I desire with all my heart to find solutions to the problems tormenting me, and don’t find them in philosophy; but it seems to me impossible that I could believe.”LXIII

  Soon he would believe.

  We know from Confession how unhappy he was. We know that he wanted relief, however it could come. He was suffering, but he knew that he had to figure it out from inside—or by “miracle.”

  We find out a lot from Tolstoy’s letters about his life and thoughts, but the best we can sometimes do with his letters to Alexandrine is wince, as we might at Karenin’s conversations with Lidia. We know that in the earliest drafts of Anna Karenina Karenin had a sister; she was a confidante and friend. Karenin needed a sister like Tolstoy’s sister.

  In the second half of March, Maria wrote her brother about her suicidal thoughts and about the circumstances that she shared with Anna Karenina:

  Sweet dear Levochka, I’m so annoyed with myself that it’s to write to you on business; I didn’t answer Sonya’s letter and your note, because I could not write anyone, I positively could not. I’m in such a disgusting moral situation, the loneliness is so terrible for me, with constant worry that like a sword hangs over me and about which I think day and night, so that I’ve never been so scared. Thoughts about suicide have begun chasing me, and positively pursue me so relentlessly that this has become a kind of sickness or insanity. Don’t think that anything unusual happened, but simply nothing sticks, nothing comes of it; it’s only that I think—I built it all again anew, it’s not that, everything is not right—I don’t know, I positively don’t know. I thought about traveling to Russia and living there in the winter, as much as health allowed, but it would be necessary again for her [Maria’s out-of-wedlock daughter ElenaLXIV] to return, but to where—again I don’t know. I tried to take her myself—I can’t, but then I make myself so wild from everything and I spin around, I cannot give up my daughter to a stranger… […] I haven’t seen that a woman of our circle, if she was not with a middle-brow, take to herself an unlawful child and alone, without support, be able to have enough courage to say: “Here, be curious, this is my unlawful child,” I can’t, and the other way out, like the death of one of us, I can’t see.

  You see what I can’t write to anybody. I wait with impatience for when I will receive the money, and right away I’ll go to Russia; more than anything I want to see you. Your postscript touched me to tears, how if I want to live with you and help Sonya and share her concerns and relieve your soul, but no, my cross won’t allow it.

  God, if all the Anna Kareninas knew what awaited them, how they would run from momentary pleasures that never were and can’t be pleasures, because all that is unlawful can never be happy. […]

  The answer to all the difficult situations in life is in the New Testament. If I had read it more often, when I was undeservedly unhappy with my husband, then I would have understood that it was a cross that He had sent me […].LXV

  Concerning his own sister, Tolstoy was Stiva: tactful, sympathetic, helpful. His friends and family seemed to associate Tolstoy only with Levin’s character, but he was also partly like Stiva and sometimes, unfortunately, like Karenin and sometimes, to his own terror, very much like Anna.

  * * *

  On March 31, Russian Herald subscribers began receiving the March issue with Part 4, Chapters 18 to 23 (the book chapters), and Part 5, Chapters 1–6.

  Let’s imagine reading those chapters ourselves.

  Following the melodramatic fake-death-of-Anna episode that concluded the February issue (Part 4, Chapter 17 in the book), Vronsky goes home and, in a fit of humiliation, shoots himself in the chest. His brother’s wife, Varya, takes charge of his recovery. With Anna ill and Vronsky wounded, Karenin finds himself the master of the house again and more or less takes charge of Anna and Vronsky’s baby. Anna comes back to herself; she obviously still loves Vronsky and can’t love Karenin. Everyone sees that their life together is unbearable for them both. In Part 4, Chapter 21, Stiva visits Anna and sees that she needs to divorce Karenin.

  Someone could write a book on “Stiva’s smile.” Anna is so very low that she thinks she couldn’t feel worse. She sees death as a way out, but Stiva won’t let her express that thought:

  “I have heard it said that women love men even for their vices,” Anna began suddenly, “but I hate him for his virtues. I can’t live with
him. Do you understand? The sight of him has a physical effect on me, it makes me beside myself. I can’t, I can’t live with him. What am I to do? I have been unhappy, and used to think one couldn’t be more unhappy, but the awful state of things I am going through now, I could never have conceived. Would you believe it, that knowing he’s a good man, a splendid man, that I’m not worth his little finger, still I hate him. I hate him for his generosity. And there’s nothing left for me but…”

  She would have said death, but Stepan Arkadyevitch would not let her finish.

  “You are ill and overwrought,” he said; “believe me, you’re exaggerating dreadfully. There’s nothing so terrible in it.”

  And Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled. No one else in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s place, having to do with such despair, would have ventured to smile (the smile would have seemed brutal); but in his smile there was so much of sweetness and almost feminine tenderness that his smile did not wound, but softened and soothed. His gentle, soothing words and smiles were as soothing and softening as almond oil. And Anna soon felt this.LXVI

  It’s as if Tolstoy himself was charmed by Stiva. Anna, however, is not awed or amazed by or reflective about Stiva’s grace; she takes it as characteristic of her brother:

  “No, Stiva,” she said, “I’m lost, lost! worse than lost! I can’t say yet that all is over; on the contrary, I feel that it’s not over. I’m an overstrained string that must snap. But it’s not ended yet… and it will have a fearful end.”

  “No matter, we must let the string be loosened, little by little. There’s no position from which there is no way of escape.”

  “I have thought, and thought. Only one…”

  Again he knew from her terrified eyes that this one way of escape in her thought was death, and he would not let her say it.LXVII

  Her brother listens to her! He doesn’t miss a trick. He uses the image she spoke and undoes it. We’re as chilled and frightened and anxious as he is—we fear or know that she’s the taut string that is indeed going to snap.

  Stiva, just as Tolstoy did for his sister Maria more than ten years before, offers to negotiate for the divorce. Tolstoy had not been able to persuade his ornery brother-in-law, but smooth Stiva manages to talk Karenin into it. In the last chapter of Part 4, Vronsky goes to Anna and they agree, even without a divorce, to go to Italy. The only regret that Anna feels is leaving Seryozha behind.

  Part 5 resumes with the planning for Levin and Kitty’s wedding. Levin finds that there are details large and small that he needs to take care of. Giddy with happiness on his wedding day, Levin spends time with his friends and half-brother, but then he panics and goes to Kitty to be reassured that she really loves him. Later that day, Levin is late for the wedding; he and Stiva have to wait at his hotel for his proper clothes to be found by his servant, who has packed them to send them ahead. The last three chapters cover the wedding.

  I remember this wedding more vividly than my own, but my familiarity with Kitty and Levin’s has made it boring. I now consider the wedding scene as Tolstoy’s gift to Sofia for having copied and recopied so many drafts of this novel’s many chapters.

  “So, Mr. Biographer,” you might say, “maybe don’t read the wedding parts again! Why crab about it? Tolstoy didn’t mean anybody to read the book compulsively!”

  “True, but why then does so much else hold up? Why is nothing and no one else, except maybe Varenka and Kozneshev, consistently boring to me now? How can the rest of the novel hold up so well, like new!, over repeated readings?”

  I’ll attempt to answer those questions.

  A couple of decades ago, when I allowed myself to acknowledge that the wedding was boring, I realized that I was much more curious about what Anna’s wedding had been like. I’m still more interested in anything about Anna than I am in whatever Tolstoy seems to be presenting as normal and good in Kitty and Levin, the contrasting couple. And, anyway, the more I learned about Tolstoy and Sofia’s wedding and marriage, the less I believed in the rosiness of Levin and Kitty’s wedding. In the novel, the wedding is a set-piece, a functional piece, but it doesn’t matter. Of course I’m aware that many readers love it! The image of Levin and Kitty standing there in the formal Russian wedding makes them swoon. I used to like it, too.

  Anyway, try this experiment: read the whole novel twenty-five times and see if the wedding doesn’t begin to dull on you.

  If it’s still good, you win.

  * * *

  In My Life, Sofia describes the “Beginning of Lev Nikolaevich’s Moral Transformation.” Though seemingly attuned to everything going on in him and with her children, she couldn’t pin down a moment or incident that precipitated a real change in him: “In 1876 this need for faith was only dimly awakened in Lev Nikolaevich. I don’t remember—indeed, it would be hard to trace—just when he suddenly came out and started fervently professing his Orthodox faith with all its rituals.

  “It is my opinion that Lev Nikolaevich always had a faith in God in his soul. But this quick transformation to ecclesiastical Orthodoxy somehow escaped me.”LXVIII

  This seems a brilliant and modest summation of her husband’s “moral transformation.” She must have been aware of the biographical speculation about it, and here, as the primary witness, she confesses that on the one hand the change was unnoticeable and yet one day there it was, full-blown, with Tolstoy trying to conform his behavior and thinking to Orthodoxy.

  To his sister-in-law Tatyana, Tolstoy wrote in early April:

  I’m writing you, my dear friend Tanya, a few words just to express my offended feelings because of your stupid and indecent words about me: that I won’t be able to stand your visit. Truly, this was offensive to me and very unpleasant. I love you and Sasha and your children and the older I get the more I value my attachments, and the thought that you will be with us is one of those thoughts that, you know, you remember: “Uh, what is this that will be pleasant? Right, the Kuzminskiys will be here.”LXIX

  He was saying all the right things, but if he was as depressed as Confession presents him to have been, was he only hoping that he would feel up to it?

  Or do we simply call into question again the “truth” of Confession? In it, he does not discuss or dramatize domestic life, so perhaps that explains how his coloring of his thoughts is unnaturally consistent and dark. We know that he was involved in family life during the period described in Confession; we know he was also writing the novel, and that he was an active father, occasionally minding the children on his own, and that he was a sportsman frequently hunting, and a businessman intently wheeling and dealing about publications and horses. So Confession, variously dated by Tolstoy himself, has to be given fluctuating weight as a documentary record. As a chronicle of his experience, it is less vivid and revealing than Anna’s whirling tumble into despair. On the other hand, it continuously shows how familiar her despair was to him.

  On April 6, Sofia wrote her uncle Kostya that the novel “seems to have stopped.”LXX Indeed, it was stopped in its tracks. Tolstoy would not get working on it again for more than seven months.

  What killed its momentum?

  Gusev points us to an April 8 letter from Strakhov to Tolstoy: “Just as earlier Strakhov wrote Tolstoy more than once that he placed his artistic productions higher than his pedagogical articles, now he writes Tolstoy that he places his artistic productions immeasurably higher than his philosophical discourses.”LXXI Most of Strakhov’s letter is a discussion of philosophers, among them Schopenhauer and Hegel. But as Strakhov was arguing with Tolstoy, he was also trying to cajole Tolstoy back to the most important matter at hand, Anna Karenina:

  I am most convinced that the results that you get [from writing philosophy] will be a hundred times poorer than what is contained in your artistic productions. Judge, for example, whether what I can see spread through your work is not endlessly higher than what Schopenhauer or Hegel—or anyone else you like—says about life.LXXII

  That is, philosophy doesn’t hold a cand
le to Tolstoy’s art. Is it possible that anyone would disagree with Strakhov’s assessment?

  One trouble with Tolstoy’s essays and discourses is that in the midst of them Tolstoy seems to think they’re more important, more true than his art. They’re consistent but rigged, as they argue but they don’t discover. Expository prose brought out Tolstoy’s tendency of emphatically agreeing with himself. In his artistic productions, on the other hand, his sympathy and engagement with the imagined people and situations couldn’t be settled as an argument could; writing fiction induced his deepest attention and feeling.

  In his final paragraph Strakhov pointed out the unprecedentedness of the novel:

  Anna Karenina raises such excitement and such bitterness, which I don’t remember in literature.LXXIII

  It doesn’t seem that Tolstoy had received Strakhov’s April 8 letter when he wrote Strakhov on April 8–9; he was out of sorts with the novel and seemed annoyed with Strakhov himself:

  Thank you, dear Nikolay Nikolayevich, for sending Grigoryev [that is, a book on the late poet and critic A. A. Grigoryev that Strakhov had edited and introduced]. I read the introduction but—don’t be angry with me—I feel that I could never read it all through if I were incarcerated in a dungeon. This is not because I don’t appreciate Grigoryev—on the contrary—but because criticism is to me the most boring of all things in the world. In clever art criticism everything is the truth, but not the whole truth, and art is only art because it is whole.

  I feel with alarm that my summer condition is coming on: I’m disgusted with what I’ve written, and now there are the proofs for the April issue and I’m afraid I shan’t have the strength to correct them. Everything in them is bad, everything needs to be revised and revised—everything that’s been printed—and I need to cross it all out and throw it away and disown it and say, “I’m sorry, I won’t do it again,” and try to write something new, something not so clumsy and neither one thing nor the other. This is the condition I’m in now, and it’s very pleasant. […] And don’t praise my novel. Pascal made himself a belt of nails which he pressed his elbows against every time he felt that praise gave him pleasure. I need to make a belt like that. Be a true friend to me: either write nothing about my novel or only write and tell me everything that’s bad about it. And if it’s true, as I suspect, that I’m getting feeble, please write and tell me.