by A. N. Wilson
A few weeks later, actual death returned. Sofya gave birth to a little girl called Varvara who died immediately afterwards, and not many weeks later Aunt Pelageya went the way of all aunts. As a boy, Tolstoy had never much liked her. Yet, ‘strange to say,’ he confided in Alexandrine, ‘the death of this octogenarian impressed me as never death did before. I was very sorry to lose her; she was the last link with my father’s generation and that of my mother. I was very grieved to think of her suffering and there was in her death something else which I cannot describe and will tell you eventually. No day goes by that I do not think of her. That’s quite easy for you others, the believers, but to us it is very hard.’5
To this succession of deaths in the immediate family, we have to add Tanya Kuzminskaya’s poignant loss of a five-year-old daughter, and Sergey Tolstoy’s loss of a two-year-old son, both in early 1873. Death, death and more death; marital disillusionment, and terrible boredom (the Russian word skuchat’ means both to be bored and to pine or yearn): it is against this background that Anna Karenina was composed. It was a book which, much more than War and Peace, was purely a novel, but which at the same time contains all the seeds of Tolstoy’s rejection of art. By the time he had finished it, he was confronting an emotional crisis, followed by an attempt at an artistic suicide every bit as final as Anna’s actual suicide on the railroad.
Back in the summer of 1865 (that year in which, as he had confided to Fet, he felt at the height of his powers as a writer) Tolstoy had written a remarkable statement of his artistic creed. A prolific author called Pyotr Dmitriyevich Boborykin (1836–1921), who was unimpeachably progressive and up to date in all his views, had sent to Tolstoy his novels The Forces of the Zemstvo and Setting Forth. Both were thinly disguised pieces of autobiography and contemporary propaganda for the ‘reformist’ point of view. Boborykin would certainly have accepted the notion of his mentor Chernyshevsky* that the novel is just a sugar coating to make the ideas of the author palatable. This is a view of fiction which the Tolstoy who wrote War and Peace felt obliged to repudiate. He wrote a considered letter to Boborykin, thanking him for his two novels, explaining why he thought they were so bad. In part it was because they were sloppily composed, and poorly written. But the main thing was this: ‘Both your novels are written on contemporary themes. Problems of the zemstvo, literature and the emancipation of women etc., obtrude with you in a polemical manner but these problems are not only not interesting in the world of art; they have no place there at all. Problems of the emancipation of women and of literary parties inevitably appear to you important in your literary Petersburg milieu, but all these problems splash about in a little puddle of dirty water which only seems like an ocean to those whom fate has set down in the middle of the puddle. The aims of art are incommensurate (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not even devote two hours to such a novel; but if I were to be told that what I should write would be read in about twenty years’ time by those who are now children and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my own life and all my energies to it.’6
There is such sunny common sense in all this that we might wonder how he could ever have come to abandon such a position. Ten years after the letter to Boborykin, the critic Mikhaylovsky pointed out a complete contrast between the expressed ‘ideas’ of Tolstoy, and the stuff of his life-enhancing fiction. Writing in Fatherland Notes, Mikhaylovsky expressed the view that Tolstoy was a brilliant thinker, as well as a novelist. The distinctive thing about Mikhaylovsky’s essay is that he does not dismiss all Tolstoy’s ideas (as many of his readers were beginning to do) and yearn for him to stick solely to psychological fiction. Nevertheless, Mikhaylovsky did see (and he saw it clearly, and remarkably early, in 1875) that Anna Karenina (at that stage unfinished) reveals, to an excruciating degree, the divisions and conflicts within Tolstoy himself. ‘I shall only say that in this novel the traces of the drama going on in the author’s soul are expressed incomparably more clearly than in any of his other works,’ Mikhaylovsky wrote; and again, ‘It is difficult even to imagine . . . a writer bearing in his soul such a terrible dream as Count Tolstoy bears in his.’7
These remarks are thrown out in the course of a defence of Tolstoy as an intellectual: and Mikhaylovsky’s essay is the starting point for what is perhaps the most brilliantly succinct of all studies of Tolstoy’s ideas – that of Sir Isaiah Berlin.8 Mikhaylovsky wants to kiss both Tolstoy’s right hand (with which he wrote his ideas) and his left (with which he wrote his fiction). We, who might not be in the kissing business, can nevertheless value Mikhaylovsky’s insight that Anna Karenina itself is the arena in which Tolstoy’s self-conflicts and dramas are being fought.
A lot of this is inexplicable, but one element is not. Tolstoy was never so happy as when he was writing War and Peace. Had he been able to continue to write about the past, his happiness would have continued for much longer. But what he did not realise (indeed his imagination only functioned when he did not realise it) was that he needed to write about his own past. Then the magic worked. Paradoxically it was only by an egoistical concentration on himself that he could perform the illusion and make readers love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. In War and Peace he had been rearranging and rewriting his country’s history as well as his own. In Anna Karenina, he strayed into ‘contemporary themes’. What happened was that he started to use up the experience almost before he had had it. His art had always depended – sometimes to a conscious, sometimes to an unconscious degree – on drawing from life, with all the comforting possibilities of distortion, of laundering experience, which that offered. By the time he came to describe the marriage of Kitty and Levin, however, he was using not the past but the present, and something like a short circuit occurred in his brain. It is the purpose of this chapter to chronicle some of the processes which led up to this literary phenomenon.
Like all Tolstoy’s great works, Anna Karenina was a long time gestating and growing.9 But in this case, the longer he spent on it, the more he was involved in a semi-conscious attempt to destroy the original conception, the more he was apostasising from his view that the purpose of a novel was to make people laugh and cry over it; the more he was using the thing as ‘a vehicle for establishing a correct point of view on all social problems. . . .’ The delays in writing the book were not creative delays, but destructive.
In a letter to Strakhov which Tolstoy never sent, and which was not discovered until 1949, he explained the origins of Anna Karenina. In the spring of 1873, he happened to reread Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin. ‘Not only Pushkin but nothing else at all had ever aroused my admiration so much.’10 And in particular, he was struck by the fragment ‘The guests were arriving at the country house. . . .’ At once he set to work thinking up characters and events which went with this fragment. The unsent letter shows an authentic glimpse of inspiration itself. Pushkin simply acts as the catalyst for something which has been waiting there to be released.
‘The guests,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘assembled after the opera at Princess Vrasskaya’s. . . .’ Within three weeks he was able to write to Strakhov that the first draft of the book was almost complete.
This early version of Anna Karenina is simply the drama of Anna herself. In the first conception of the book, there was no such figure as Levin, no Kitty and therefore no reference to the social and spiritual problems which so preoccupied Levin in the finished book. Most revealingly, Anna began life, in his first scribblings, as Tatyana Pushkin. The story concerns the triangle alone – the woman, Gagin (the Vronsky figure) and the unfortunate husband. Anna has none of the beauty or charm which her admirers find in the published novel. She is plain with a low forehead, almost a snub nose, and
no figure. ‘So far and a little more and she would have been misshapen.’11 An early note even adds the author’s opinion that she is a ‘disgusting woman’. The husband, who gives his consent to the divorce, rambles about, a heartbroken wretch, and dies at the end of one of these early drafts. The fate of the two lovers is uncertain. In one early version, Anna gets her divorce and settles down to a happily married life with Vronsky. About Vronsky-Gagin, by contrast, the author is uncontrolled in his admiration, praising his beauty, his charm and his many gifts. In one variant, he is actually described as a poet. All these descriptions were to be suppressed in the final version.
If it was Pushkin which set Tolstoy going, the seeds of the story itself had been sown years before. In February 1870, he had told his wife that he had the idea of writing a story about a married woman who was disgraced through a sexual scandal. His task would be to depict her ‘not as culpable, but as uniquely worthy of pity. . . .’ This idea faded. Presumably it was not unrelated to the fact that his sister, Marya Nikolayevna, had been in a similar position. As a family friend of the Berses, who had married young, Marya was looked upon as an almost aunt-like, or elder-sister figure to Sofya Andreyevna even before she married Marya’s brother. Then, in her mid-thirties, Marya had ‘gone to the bad’ in the way that two of her three surviving brothers Dmitry and Sergey had done. She was animated, attractive, passionate. Turgenev liked to hint that he had had a tendresse for her in their youth. No less impulsive than her brothers, she had run away from her husband and got herself pregnant by a Swedish viscount. The husband (no Karenin: he had been frequently unfaithful to her) died in 1865, but Marya Nikolayevna continued for a while to live in Scandinavia while the ‘scandal’ died down.
‘Malheureusement le journal se tait précisement pendant les années où Tolstoi créa ses deux œuvres principales,’* says the French edition of Anna Karenina sombrely, only half seeming to recognise that the two events might not be unconnected. The experience of his sister’s disgrace gets put into the sausage machine, and is not spoilt by being analysed too soon, as it would have been had he kept a diary through this period. Memory – with all its rich powers to distort and to save – is the mother of the muses; memory, and not reportage.
Then again, there was the incident in January 1872, only a few versts away from Yasnaya Polyana, when Anna Stepanovna Pirogova ran up the local railroad and threw herself under a train. There is a danger of isolating the suicide of Anna Stepanovna Pirogova and pushing ahead – after all, she has the same Christian name – the comparisons between her situation and Anna Karenina’s beyond any point where such a comparison would hold. Two things to bear in mind with this death, when we imagine ourselves back into that engine shed of 1872, are the extreme novelty of the railroad (whereas we take it for granted) and the absolute normality of suicide (which for us is shocking). Dostoyevsky, in a famous issue of his The Diary of a Writer, dwells on the horrific fact that there are people who commit suicide for no apparent reason. He also makes the sweepingly theological point that ‘neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea. And on earth there is but one sublime idea – namely the idea of the immortality of man’s soul – since all other “sublime” ideas of life, which give life to man, are merely derived from this one idea.’13
Tolstoy, whose nihilism went deeper than Dostoyevsky’s, and whose egotism was more self-protective, could never really see this, even though in his novels – and above all in Anna Karenina – life itself is so potently and lovingly drawn. Goldenweiser describes a conversation with Tolstoy when he was a holy old man. ‘I can’t understand why people look upon suicide as a crime. It seems to me to be a man’s right. It gives a man the chance of dying when he no longer wishes to live. The Stoics thought like that.’14
Those who draw an immediate correlation between the suicide of Pirogova and that of Tolstoy’s fictional heroine sometimes fail to notice that in the neighbour’s suicide there was a motive, in the novel there is none. Film versions and précis always try to provide Anna with reasons. They tell us that she feels intolerably torn between love for Vronsky and that for her little son Seryozha. But as she says herself she has abandoned Seryozha and been perfectly happy to do so while ‘another love’ satisfied her. The ‘decision’ that Vronsky no longer loves her is completely irrational. The core of her despair is a madness which we glimpse as she lies alone on her bed four chapters before the end, dosed with opium and watching shadows dance around the room. ‘ “Death,” she thought. And such panic seized her that it was a long time before she realised where she was and with a trembling hand could find the matches to light another candle in the place of the one that had guttered and gone out. No – anything – only to live. . . .’15 This is the sort of crazy state which Tolstoy himself was to enter during the closing stages of the novel when, as he tells us, he had to hide ropes and guns from himself for fear of yielding to temptation. His later sparring partner, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, was only one of many pens to muse upon this terrible disease which befell not just Tolstoy, but hundreds of thinking Russians at this period. Why it should have done so perhaps only a Jungian analysis of the collective unconscious could fathom. The Russians simply wanted to destroy themselves. What else explains their history in the last hundred years?
The ancients [Pobedonostsev wrote] were accustomed to place a skeleton or a skull in the midst of their banqueting halls that they might be reminded of the proximity of death. This custom has decayed: we feast and make merry and strive to banish all thoughts of death. Nevertheless, at the back of each stands death and his threatening face at any moment may appear before us.
Every morning brings news of suicides, those suicides unexplained and inexplicable which threaten to become a familiar feature of our lives. Never has there been a time when the human soul was valued at so low a price, when there reigned such indifference to the fate of men created in the image of God and redeemed by the blood of Christ. Rich and poor, learned and ignorant, age and youth which has hardly begun life, nay the very tottering infant, throw away their lives with inconceivable recklessness.16
The novel, in such circumstances, could not survive without reflecting the mores and concerns of the hour. Tolstoy’s creed of artistic independence, expressed to Boborykin, became ultimately impossible. Like Anna reading the English novel, he chose action in preference to reading; and yet, like her, was confronted by the terrible pointlessness of existence.
The railroad itself (if we revert for one more moment to the corpse of Pirogova, and Tolstoy staring at its mangled remains) has for us a less obviously spiritual connotation; but that was not so in the nineteenth century. Tolstoy was one of those who had lapped up Dombey and Son, with its many images of railroads as a destruction of ‘real life’; and what was true of Victorian England was no less true of the virgin soil of Russia.
The railroads have been called ‘symbols of modern Russia with its interrelated process of spiritual destruction and material progress’. Alexander II had been a passionate railroad builder. Before his reign, Russia had had fewer miles of railroad track than any country in Europe – only seven hundred and fifty miles in the whole of the Empire at the time of the Crimean War. The ‘boom’ in the railroads had taken place while Tolstoy was studying educational method, learning Greek, writing War and Peace, having children. By the time of Pirogova’s suicide there were over fourteen thousand miles of track in different parts of the Empire.17 Count E. F. Kankrim (Minister of Finance, 1823–44) had put his finger on precisely what was wrong with railroads, as far as the Russians were concerned. If you built them, it would encourage people to travel.18 The size of Russia to us moderns implies a challenge that we might fly all over it, or see it from the window of a car or don our tracksuits and spend a day or week on the Trans-Siberian Express. Distance for us implies distance covered. Before the advent of the railroad – and, come to that, of roads – distance was something which almost by definition could not be covered. So, when a westernising liberal in 1836 mo
aned that ‘we Russians’ were ‘solitaires dans le monde, nous n’avons rien donné au monde, nous n’avons rien appris du monde, nous n’avons pas versé une seule idée dans la masse des idées humaines’,* he was expressing exactly what the Slavophils, and the great majority of Russians, liked about their country, and still do.
In the same year that Tolstoy looked at the mangled body of Anna Pirogova, the Rector of the Riga Theological Seminary was asked to bless a new railroad bridge. In his speech, he said, ‘conflicting thoughts rise up the soul when looking on a new route like this. What is it going to bring us?. . . . Will it not in part be the expeditor of that would-be civilisation, which under the guise of a false all-humanity and a common brotherhood of all. . . . destroys true humanity, true brotherhood?’20
