Anna is frightened, because she can’t seek a divorce if it means cutting herself off from Seryozha. “Don’t judge me!” is the subtitle, practically, of this section and little speech:
“It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything. You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m suffering.”LII
She goes and sits next to Dolly, looks in her face, takes her hand and asks what she thinks.
Before Dolly replies, Anna continues:
“I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am…”LIII
She turns away and cries. We, with Dolly, understand and hear and feel her unhappiness. Then she returns to her rooms, takes her morphine, and goes happily to bed with Vronsky.
The next day, with Dolly about to leave:
Only Anna was sad. She knew that now, from Dolly’s departure, no one again would stir up within her soul the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.LIV
In the installment’s last chapter, we are let in further than Dolly was and are shocked to learn what Anna can barely acknowledge to herself: suicide is an ever-tempting alternative to her suffering:
And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her.LV
But books, my dear readers, will save us all, won’t they?
Unfortunately, no: I realize that sometimes reading is just a mindless compulsion: a way to pass the time and not think; nobody in this book reads the way I’m reading Anna Karenina:
Walks, conversation with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital, and, most of all, reading—reading of one book after another—filled up her time.LVI
The scholar Eikhenbaum writes: “Obolensky recalls Tolstoi’s words in 1877: ‘The very best books are English; when I bring English books home with me I always find new and fresh content in them.’ In spite of his secluded life at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoi used to receive the latest foreign works very quickly. S. Urusov was amazed: ‘I do not understand; who is your bookseller from whom you receive everything both better and quicker than we do from ours?’ ”LVII The answer: Gautier. The Jubilee editors explain in a footnote that “Vladimir Ivanovich Gautier (1813–1887) was the owner of an old bookstore and library, established in 1799 by his father Ivan Ivanovich Gautier-Duffas, […] on Kuznetsky Most. Tolstoy ordered foreign books and periodicals through him”LVIII; and so does Anna Karenina: “I got a box of books yesterday from Gautier’s. No, I shan’t be dull.”LIX
Anna is also living under the dread of Vronsky’s disapproving look. She remembers the one that he had upon leaving for the political meetings; she expects it now that he’s about to arrive, and then, late in the chapter, she sees it again. She’s not imagining it, but she’s looking for it. It’s really there.
Anna does frustrate Vronsky. He does everything right, everything honorable. He tells her:
“Don’t you know that I can’t live without you?”LX
He says just what a romantic hero would say. Anna on the other hand has become so difficult that she can’t stop herself from saying and doing things that she immediately knows she shouldn’t have.
She is, for example, upset being left alone while Vronsky has things to do in the world:
“If you go to Moscow, I will go, too. I will not stay here. Either we must separate or else live together.”
“Why, you know, that’s my one desire. But for that…”
“We must get a divorce. I will write to him. I see I cannot go on like this.… But I will come with you to Moscow.”
“You talk as if you were threatening me. [She is! I don’t blame Vronsky, but he shouldn’t have said anything. He should have just nodded.] But I desire nothing so much as never to be parted from you,” said Vronsky, smiling. [What should he have said? He said the right words, but we know that he would at this moment rather be anywhere in the world. Should we lie directly against our very strong feelings? The other person is being completely unreasonable. To make the situation stop, should we lie? I don’t blame Vronsky (I keep saying), but he should’ve said nothing. Because he does speak he cannot help but show his feelings to Anna—who reads him as if she were Tolstoy reading him. Even in a panic of jealousy and despair, she reads Vronsky accurately.]
But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.
She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.
“If so, it’s a calamity!” that glance told her. It was a moment’s impression, but she never forgot it.LXI
She understands what Vronsky means better than he does. And Tolstoy provides here again another glimpse into the future—“she never forgot it.” The idea of Vronsky being fed up with her is what she’s going to carry with her to the suicide.
* * *
That first day of March, Strakhov wrote offering the very help that Tolstoy was going to want with proofreading and revising the novel: “I offer you again my services, if they’re convenient and needed. With great joy I’ll do for you anything; I count myself your debtor.”LXII
Tolstoy was so occupied writing and revising the “Epilogue” (which was rechristened upon publication as Part 8) and doing the corrections for the March issue, as well as dealing with a medical problem, that he hadn’t had for a while one of his typical days of sending out a bushel of letters. In early March, however, he wrote Strakhov and Fet. He apologized to Strakhov for not having written or answered: “I was and am very busy, but worst of all that from the New Year (while on skis having an injury to the head from a tree by the walkway), I began having surges to the head, confusing my working. But I really want to write and as much strength as there is, I do write.”LXIII
If only Tolstoy had continued writing little autobiographical Azbuka stories for children, he could have composed “The Count and the Tree”! Had he been distracted? Slippery ice? He never saw the tree? Under my management of Yasnaya Polyana, that tree—or one of its descendants—would have a plaque installed below it: “Hereabouts Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy clonked his head while skiing in 1877. Thank God it did not kill him!” (Strakhov immediately replied that he was worried about Tolstoy’s head. Strakhov also observed that Anna Karenina was greater than any novel by Dickens or Balzac.LXIV)
Tolstoy’s letter to Fet remarked on the long time since he had heard from him; he asked Fet to write: “Botkin has calmed me concerning my wife; the children are healthy. Only I am ill with surges to the head, but now it’s better. It was burdensome enough that it hindered working.”LXV (There was no allusion to buying or selling horses in this note to Fet or in the next one.) His conversational fluidity resumed in the next week’s letter to Fet:
I’m dictating this letter to Seryozha because I have a headache. […]
I didn’t receive your long letter, and you wouldn’t believe how upset I am at the thought that it has gone astray. I started to write via Seryozha more as a joke. The children came in after lessons and I made Tanya take down a letter in French to Gautier, and Seryozha turned up and I began dictating to him. It’s true that I have a headache and it stops me working, which is particularly annoying, because the work is not just coming, but has come to the end. There’s only the epilogue left. And that is occupying me very much.LXVI
Let’s notice again what a modern father Tolstoy was. He taught Tanya by dictating in French and he included the boy in the dictation game (like an afterthought, the way Stiva includes Grisha) and, after Seryozha’s exit, Tolstoy
resumed the letter himself:
I read through the first part of Virgin Soil and skimmed through the second. I was too bored to finish it. Eventually he [i.e., Turgenev] makes Paklin say that it’s Russia’s misfortune in particular that all the people who are well are bad, and the good people are unwell. That is my own, and his own, opinion of the novel. The author is unwell, and his sympathies are with people who are unwell, and he doesn’t sympathize with those who are well, and so he calls what he is himself and therefore what he likes, good, and says: “What a misfortune that all the people who are well are bad, and the good people are unwell.”
The one thing at which he is such a master that your hand shrinks from touching the subject after him is nature. Two or three strokes and you smell it. There are 1½ pages of such descriptions all told, and nothing else. The descriptions of people are only descriptions of descriptions. […]LXVII
Tolstoy was emphasizing here a characteristic we almost always see in his fiction: a description has to be as if seen and felt by a character. Tolstoy saw no use for fine writing that was divorced from immediate individual conscious perception.
Now that he was finishing Anna Karenina, now that he was apparently finished with the philosophical readings that occupied him in the dark times described in Confession, his usual literary observations were popping up more frequently.
He wrote Fet once more in March: “You write that in the Russ Herald they published [Alexei] Tolstoy, but your ‘Temptation’ lies there. There are no other such stupid and dead editors. […] My head is better now and as much as it’s better that much more I work. March, the beginning of April, are my best work months, and I continue to be in excitement that what I’m writing is very important, even though I know that in a month I will be embarrassed to remember this.”LXVIII He encouraged Fet and his wife to visit.
He wrote Strakhov to not be mad that he hadn’t written: “Now I can say that I’m finished and hope in April to publish the last part, and I very much await and ask for your judgment.”LXIX Tolstoy meant that he wanted Strakhov’s opinion of Part 7, not of the Epilogue, which he was writing and was not actually “finished” with.LXX
* * *
On March 28, the first half of Part 7 (Chapters 1–16 in the book edition) was published.
In summary, Levin is out of sorts in Moscow at Kitty’s parents’ house, where everyone awaits the birth of his and Kitty’s baby. Levin goes out on the town with Stiva. At a club, Stiva not only reconciles Levin to Vronsky and Vronsky to Levin, but convinces Levin to accompany him on a visit to Anna, who is lonely and unhappy because of her social isolation.
The scene where Levin meets Anna has become for me one of the most important in the novel, because it dramatizes Tolstoy’s revelations about his own creation. Oddly, it’s not a scene that everyone remembers. When I remind fellow readers about it, it doesn’t always ring a bell, even though it’s the first and only time that the two protagonists of the novel meet. It’s curious that they’ve never met before and it’s not important to the plot that they meet, and nothing changes for either of them because of the meeting. But Tolstoy, with the novel’s end in sight, seemed to want to see what would happen when his protagonists came face to face. It was not part of his earlier draft plans, and we’ll find that after this meeting Levin almost completely disappears from Anna’s consciousness—and she from his.
Levin encountering Anna spans three chapters, starting with the end of Chapter 9, when Stiva and Levin arrive at Anna’s apartment. On the other side of the dining room, in a half-dark study, there are two lamps, one of which shines on Mikhailov’s “full-length” portrait of Anna.
Until I started writing this section, I hadn’t even imagined Anna in the painting at full-length. Not necessarily life-size, but head to toe. What kind of shoes is she wearing? We only know that the dress that she is wearing is not the blue dress she is wearing when Levin meets her. Do we imagine a Joshua Reynolds–like gigantic portrait? No. By our knowledge of Mikhailov, from our familiarity with the Russian paintings Tolstoy admired, we can guess that the painting is not double-sized or playful or imaginative; it’s serious, as serious as Tolstoy, and as penetrating as Tolstoy’s portrayal of her. It catches her beauty, which is the easier part; everyone has seen that. Most importantly, it catches, for lack of a better word, her essence. She never comments on the portrait herself, but there it is, on the wall, a preview of her, an insight to her, for any of her occasional visitors:
Another lamp with a reflector was hanging on the wall, lighting up a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could not help looking at. […] Levin gazed at the portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively forgot where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.LXXI
Levin is transfixed. He has still not met her, but he is taken by the artistic presentation of her. It’s Tolstoy, however, not Levin, who seems to declare of the woman in the portrait that “She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.” Tolstoy is speaking as an artist on art. Art can make beauty absolute. But then Tolstoy lets his fictional self, Levin, have an experience that he, the author, can’t have, an encounter with the “living woman”:
“I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the portrait. Anna had come from behind the treillage to meet him, and Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the portrait, in a dark blue shot gown, not in the same position nor with the same expression, but with the same perfection of beauty which the artist had caught in the portrait. She was less dazzling in reality, but, on the other hand, there was something fresh and seductive in the living woman which was not in the portrait.
Is this Levin’s perception, though? Is he thinking about the artist who “caught” her beauty? Unlikely. There’s something the painter Mikhailov caught (and that Tolstoy himself had caught) and then something beyond it, “something fresh and seductive” (or, as Rosamund Bartlett translates it, “new and alluring”).
Chapter 9 ends with Chapter 10 completely continuously following. We’re back to Levin’s dazzled perceptions. Tolstoy separates himself from Levin here to show Levin’s bewitchment:
She had risen to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him; and in the quiet ease with which she held out her little vigorous hand, introduced him to Vorkuev and indicated a red-haired, pretty little girl who was sitting at work, calling her her pupil, Levin recognized and liked the manners of a woman of the great world, always self-possessed and natural.
“I am delighted, delighted,” she repeated, and on her lips these simple words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva and for your wife’s sake.… I knew her for a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!”
She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood. […]LXXII
Reflecting on childhood is where Levin’s imagination seems to go further than Tolstoy’s. We understand Levin’s bewitchment better, more clearly, than Vronsky’s. Tolstoy never gives us confidence that Vronsky knows her. Karenin, despite all his limitations as a man and husband, does actually know her; Levin instantly thinks he knows her; Mikhailov, the artist, catches her. We don’t even see Vronsky’s ambition to know her.
He just cockily takes for granted that he knows her.
We’re all in with Levin, who, when Stiva reenters the scene, is caught re-looking at the portrait. Levin, Stiva, and Vorkuev (a publisher) agree that the portrait’s great!
Anna and Levin reengage in conversation. They talk about art—French art. But it’s nothing of importance, of resonance. It’s the pleasure of social conversation. When Anna turns to Stiva to ask about Vronsky, Levin observes her. He can’t hear her, but he watches her animated features:
“Yes, yes, this is a woman!” Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment before in its repose— suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting something.
What does she recollect? Is it an image or a feeling? The memory of despair? The fate from which she is trying to distract herself?
Here we readers are way ahead of Levin; he doesn’t suspect her terrors, as we do.
Because of the presence of her ward, the English jockey’s daughter, the topic of education comes up and Anna engages Levin with her eyes to ask him for understanding:
And she glanced again at Levin. And her smile and her glance—all told him that it was to him only she was addressing her words, valuing his good opinion, and at the same time sure beforehand that they understood each other.
He does understand, but he’s not seeing deeply into her because he’s dazzled. Except for a moment, she’s not so intent on Levin that she can’t get distracted herself, but he’s so intent on her that he never looks away:
Creating Anna Karenina Page 37
