by Viv Groskop
Tolstoy saw these quotes as a guide to life at a time of crisis: a gathering of ‘a circle of the best writers’ whose ideas would lead to salvation. As Roger Cockrell, translator of the latest edition of the Calendar in English, writes, Tolstoy’s overall aim is ‘to urge us all to strive, through unrelenting effort, for self-improvement’. I am not saying that Tolstoy is Oprah Winfrey with a beard. (Well, I am saying that a bit. And in any case, it’s just fun to think of the two of them together.) But he had an instinct for the sort of thinking that would become hugely popular a century later. And he had a strong conviction that the only way to fight back against the pressures of modern life was to define the right life lessons and apply them to yourself. This book follows the same impetus and aims to channel the Oprah side of Tolstoy. It’s what he would have wanted. Please, no overeating while reading it. Neither Oprah nor Tolstoy would like it.
The Russian classics are, admittedly, not the most obvious place to look for tips for a happier life. Russian literature is full of gloomy people wondering how on earth they have ended up in the appalling predicament in which they find themselves, looking around desperately for someone else to blame and then realizing that, in fact, they were right in the first place: life really is extremely inconvenient and annoying, and we are all just waiting to die. But they also teach us that it can, crucially, be survived. And it can be enjoyed, beautifully. While Tolstoy looked for answers in his time in didactic philosophy and religious texts, many of us seek comfort in reading about the lives of others, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The pithy sayings in The Calendar of Wisdom are useful, inspiring and sometimes even life-changing, but it is great works of literature that really change us as people, by showing us the inner lives of others and by revealing our common humanity. These works allow us to imagine different versions of ourselves, only without having to kill any old ladies (Crime and Punishment), have a friendly conversation with Satan on a park bench (The Master and Margarita) or throw ourselves under trains (Anna Karenina). Warning: there might be a few spoilers in this book, which is surely to be forgiven when most of these works have been around for well over a hundred years.
It’s no surprise that Tolstoy himself didn’t use fiction as a basis for the advice in his self-help book. We can’t expect Tolstoy to admit the usefulness of novels. In the latter part of his life, he had a huge spiritual crisis and all but renounced Anna Karenina and War and Peace as the writings of a sinful, frivolous fool. No wonder he turned to the Bible. But I want to argue the opposite of what Tolstoy came to believe. Philosophy and religious writings may have their place. And self-help aphorisms from the Greeks always bring solace. But it is in literature – whether novels, plays or poetry – that we really see who we are – and, perhaps even more importantly, who we don’t want to be.
But, first, an important disclaimer. This is not an intellectual book. It is not a work of primary research. It is not an academic thesis on Russian literature. It’s not supposed to be the last word in interpreting Russian literature. There will be no footnotes, although I’ve tried to make it as clear as possible where I’m quoting from, and there’s a detailed reading list at the back of the book. Instead it’s a guide to surviving life using some of the clues left in these great classics. It’s an exploration of the answers these writers found to life’s questions, big and small. And it’s a love letter to some favourite books which at one point helped me to find my identity and buoyed me up when I lost it again. It’s also about the times in life when you behave like an idiot, which, for some reason, for me have been remarkably frequent and don’t seem to be getting less so as I grow older.
Russian literature deserves more love letters written by total idiots. For too long it has belonged to very clever people who want to keep it to themselves. It’s just not true that in order to read the Russian classics you have to be part of some kind of secret society of special people. You definitely don’t have to know any Russian or have any plans to ever learn Russian, even though, with me, it was an obsession with studying Russian that pushed me towards these books. You don’t even need to know any Russian history, although you will certainly pick up a lot of it in passing. And you don’t have to fuss about whether you’ve got the right translation. Or whether you’re missing the entire point. Or whether you need to be sitting next to a samovar. It’s accessible to all of us.
I have two university degrees in Russian, and I spent a long time acquiring fluent Russian, using a combination of iron discipline and bison grass vodka. But even after all this, I am no expert. I am a shambling amateur who wants to encourage other shambling amateurs. These books have brought a lot of joy and hope to me, which is something I would never have expected and which endlessly surprises me, as I grew up in a house where we were very much not the sort of people who sat around saying, ‘But don’t you think Nikolai would have been better off with Sonya in War and Peace?’ (Frankly, who would want to live in that household?) What I have learned about the Russians is that there is no need to be afraid of them. And there is certainly no need for them to be seen as uniquely ‘serious’ and ‘academic’, which we all know are synonyms for ‘dusty’ and ‘boring’.
It’s time to take all the doubt and fuss and snobbery and pretence out of this kind of reading. This book is a celebration of the art of reading on its own terms, which is always the most personal thing, and about giving yourself licence to read how you want to read, without feeling that there’s always someone else who knows more than you and that maybe you don’t really get it. However you get it, you’ve got it right. I say: read these classics in part if you can’t face the whole thing. Don’t be afraid not to finish or to come back years later. Read them slowly, without stressing over whether you’re understanding every detail. Read them in bed, read them on the bus, read them in the place that Vladimir Putin would call ‘the outhouse’. (He once gave a memorable speech in which he assured his people that Russia’s enemies were not safe anywhere, even in the outhouse. Please find yourself the safest possible outhouse, which Putin cannot know about, and treat yourself to a few pages of Three Sisters.)
As well as shedding some light on some of life’s most difficult moments by using examples from these eleven classic Russian works, I’ll be looking at some examples from the lives of the writers who wrote them, too. Frequently, there’s a mismatch between what the authors seem to advocate in their books and what was going on in their lives. Tolstoy is the classic example. Many of the contradictions, nuances and intricacies of Anna Karenina and War and Peace can be explained by Tolstoy’s later spiritual collapse. When he wrote these books, he empathized hugely with his characters and showed the truth of their lives and feelings. Later on, he felt torn about whether this was a good use of his time and stopped writing those kinds of novels. To know that he was conflicted makes these books even richer with meaning.
The gap between the life of the author, the life of the reader and the text itself has always puzzled me. The thing the reader and the writer have in common is that they’re both real and they’re both living the life of a human being. They know how difficult life can be. And they know it’s almost impossible to express human experience accurately, vividly and believably. However, these two people meet each other on the page, thanks to the story. The story is the stand-in for human experience. It’s pretend, it’s make-believe. The contract between the writer and the reader says that the writer must agree to make the reader believe in this made-up story. And it’s through this agreement that those two people have a meeting of minds and ‘discuss’ human existence. This is an extraordinary contract, and it’s one that is particularly deep in Russian literature.
I’m interested in what these books can teach us about life without us actually having to live through the things described in them. Novels are a way of trying on other people’s lives, judging, forgiving, understanding them. They are as good at showing us how not to live as they are at showing us how to live. In fact, they’re often better at the former. As
many critics have noted, the first line of Anna Karenina is intensely memorable and reads beautifully. But the truth of it is not really proved in the novel: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ In the novel itself, there are no happy families. If Tolstoy wanted to show us one, he could have done. But he doesn’t. Instead, he shows us a host of unhappy families, who, ironically enough, do often share things in common: the inability to communicate, the feeling of always thinking that someone else has something better than you, the idea that there must be more to life than this. If anything, Tolstoy’s lesson is this: ‘How Not to Live’. These are sometimes cautionary tales rather than manuals for living. Maybe that’s more real and memorable and therefore more useful than any self-help manual.
Because life is not simple and Russian literature is definitely not simple, there are several outliers in the list of eleven classics featured here. Several don’t count as novels. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse form; Akhmatova’s Requiem is a set of ten poems; Chekhov’s Three Sisters is a play, as is Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. Gogol might even argue that Dead Souls is an epic poem. (It isn’t really. It’s clearly a novel.) So, while this is a book mostly about fictional worlds, it’s more precisely about classics of their time and what they have to teach us about life for all time.
There are many books that could have had a place in this list. But I have had to leave out a lot of great works (Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry) in order to avoid this book being as long as War and Peace itself. Apologies to Russophiles whose favourites are not present. Of all the books I most wish were here, one is certainly Gogol’s The Overcoat. For me, this is a short story the plot of which sums up Russian literature in a nutshell. It’s about an insignificant copying clerk who saves up for an overcoat. He saves up for a long time. A very long time. On the day the overcoat finally comes into his possession, it is stolen from him. Shortly afterwards, he falls ill and dies. That is Russian literature’s idea of a life lesson. You have been warned.
1. How to Know Who You Really Are: Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy
(Or: Don’t throw yourself under a train)
‘All the charm, all the beauty and all the diversity of life are made up of light and shade.’
I came across Anna Karenina when I was in my early teens. It coincided with a time in my life when I was becoming desperate to know more about my origins. As a child, I do not remember a time when I thought that my name was anything other than profoundly weird, unexplained and, ultimately, unexplainable. To come across people with similarly odd names was, to me, deeply comforting. I was never put off by the strangeness of the names in Russian literature. They felt familiar. I felt solidarity with them. I did not mind that I couldn’t say them aloud with any confidence because I had grown up not speaking any language other than English. But I had, however, lived with an unpronounceable name, and I knew it was not that big a deal, even if other people said it was. ‘Viv Groskop. What kind of name is that?’
Growing up in Somerset in the south-west of England, I come from a family that considers itself ordinary, normal and British. Definitely British. I was told this repeatedly as a child. There was nothing in our family history to suggest we were remotely foreign. My grandad was born in Barry, in South Wales. My grandmother was born in Manchester. My dad was from London. My mother and all her family were from Northern Ireland. No one was born abroad. Did I mention there were no foreigners in our family? My great-grandparents on my mother’s side were all from Northern Ireland. On my father’s side, they were born in Wales or the north of England. As a young child, I knew some of my great-grandparents. There were no foreigners. As you can see, I think I have made it clear that there were no foreigners in our family.
Everything we did was British. Or English. Best not to ask the difference between the two. Mostly British, as my grandad liked to emphasize his Welshness on occasion. And no one wanted to make my mum, born in County Antrim, feel left out. I spent a lot of time with my (paternal) grandparents as a child. My grandad, a grocer for thirty years, had a pathological dislike of all things foreign, especially food. Things like lasagne, minestrone and garlic were ‘foreign muck’. Favourite foods in our house were the sorts of foods you would worship if you were the owner of a grocery shop that prided itself on its selection of processed foods: Angel Delight, Bird’s Custard, tinned marrowfat peas. These were much safer than foreign muck.
The only thing to disrupt this picture of canned, processed, unquestionable Britishness was the small matter of our name – to me, quite a puzzle: to be undeniably British and yet be called Groskop. Early on, it struck me that something didn’t quite add up. This was even before I found out that most of my grandfather’s family had changed the spelling of their name from Groskop to ‘Groscop’. Now, we were the only people called Groskop. Another mystery. You are not fooling anyone, Groscops, I would think to myself, careful to change the spelling when I was addressing Christmas cards to elderly relatives, at the same time thinking how odd it was.
The Groscops’ cunning disguise always struck me as rather desperate. They had changed their name from something foreign-sounding but plausible to something foreign-sounding and implausible. Meanwhile, we, the Groskops, bore the title with some quiet measure of pride – we hadn’t sold out and become Groscops! – but, seemingly, zero curiosity.
My family had no sensible answers about the origin of our name. My grandad would talk about it, if pressed, from time to time, only so that we could tease him about the name ‘definitely not being German’. He was in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and was happy for the name to come from anywhere at all on the face of the earth so long as it was not Germany. I soon gravitated towards languages at school and quickly worked out that he was right: it couldn’t be German. We would be Grosskopf. (‘Bighead.’) And we were not Grosskopf. This, at least, I decided, was some mercy. Then Dutch was mentioned as a possibility. But again, the spelling didn’t seem right. There was even a crazy idea that we were South African. The name came from Afrikaans, supposedly similar to Dutch. I struggled to believe this.
The lack of information made me obsessive about origins and names. When I was four years old, we acquired a cat, a cute little tortoiseshell thing. I was allowed to name her. I called her Jane. She brought me a lot of comfort, even though I later became aware that I had saddled the cat with a feline name just as unlikely for her as my human name was for me. (Who calls a cat Jane?) For years, I dreamed of having the surname Smith. This to me was a wonderful, beautiful name, one no one would ever mispronounce or spell incorrectly. And no one would ever ask where you came from.
It wasn’t until I was about twelve or thirteen that I picked up a copy of Anna Karenina. I got it in a charity shop, I think, in the mid-1980s. It was an old Penguin Classic. The cover features the painting that has come to be the most frequent stand-in for Anna Karenina: Ivan Kramskoi’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman of 1883. I loved that picture, but the name sold the novel to me first. Karenina. A name that is simple and yet one that people hesitate to pronounce. I knew some people said it as ‘Carry Nina’, but you should say it ‘Kar-ray-ni-na’, with the emphasis on the ‘ray’. I fell in love with her name. And then I fell in love with her face. The moment I saw this stunning woman, all velvet coat, alabaster skin, fur-trimmed beret and air of mystery, my spotty, chubby, insecure adolescent self thought: ‘This is the me I have been looking for. Definitely not German, Dutch or South African. But why not Russian?’ It was a half-thought that was to change the course of my life.
The identity of the model in the Kramskoi painting is unknown and, to protect the blushes of my twelve-year-old self, we will overlook the fact that she was most likely a prostitute. Although Kramskoi never said the woman was meant to be Anna Karenina, it’s entirely possible that he read the novel and had her in mind when he painted the portrait, whether consciously or not. He had pai
nted Tolstoy in 1873, when the novelist was just starting to write the novel. We can’t know for sure, though, that this is her. Nevertheless, it says a lot that many people have wanted to see Anna Karenina in this picture. We want the Unknown Woman to be real. Especially those of us who have wanted to be her.
This isn’t a great ambition, incidentally, as it is doomed to failure. On first reading, I became obsessed with the thickness of Anna Karenina’s eyelashes. Tolstoy loves the details of women’s faces. He writes of Anna having eyelashes so thick that they make her grey eyes look darker. Inspired by this bewitching beauty, I started using an eyelash curler to achieve a similar effect. If you’ve never seen an eyelash curler, it’s like a miniature medieval torture instrument and must be employed with great care and skill. One day, I got a bit distracted and sneezed while using it. I had pulled out all my eyelashes on one side, giving me a naked eyelid and a lopsided squint. It took about a year for them to grow back. Much later on, I discovered that, in an earlier draft, Tolstoy had given Anna Karenina a hairy upper lip. That would have been easier for me to work with, and a lot less painful than the accidental eyelash removal. Liza in War and Peace also has a moustache. Clearly, Tolstoy had a fetish.
