by Viv Groskop
Neither are we to be distracted by the joyful hedonism of Stiva’s existence, which dominates the early pages of the book. That’s far too enjoyable and, in Tolstoy’s eyes, shallow. Not long after Tolstoy finished Anna Karenina, he wrote in his legendary essay A Confession that the meaninglessness of life is ‘the only indisputable piece of knowledge available to man’. Oh, Tolstoy, you old grump. He foreshadows this thought, just as he foreshadows Anna’s death, with a classic piece of doom-mongering as soon as we meet her. On the next page, once Anna’s beauty, tenderness and inexplicably enigmatic charm have been established, Tolstoy squishes a watchman under the wheels, with some relish. ‘Cut in two pieces, they say.’ ‘Threw himself! … Run over! …’ All right, all right. Don’t go on about it. Anna speaks for Tolstoy at this point: ‘ “A bad omen,” she said.’ You don’t say.
This omen is intentional. Tolstoy knew from the beginning of the book that Anna Karenina would die in a train accident at the end, because that is what happened in real life. The year before Tolstoy started the novel, a neighbour of his had an altercation with his mistress. Her name was Anna Stepanovna Pirogova. (Rather brilliantly, her name means something like ‘Anna of All the Pies’. Surely this would have been a much better title? Even better than ‘The Book of Steve’.) In Henri Troyat’s biography of Tolstoy, he recounts that this woman was ‘a tall, full-blown woman with a broad face and an easy-going nature’. I feel this may well be code for ‘fat’ or ‘pie-filled’. Anyway. Tolstoy’s neighbour had thrown Anna of All the Pies over for a German governess. The real-life Anna (of All the Pies) took it badly, wandered the countryside distraught for three days and then threw herself under a train. (I am so tempted to add: ‘There was pie everywhere.’ But that would be insensitive.)
Anna Stepanovna Pirogova left a note: ‘You are a murderer. Be happy, if an assassin can be happy. If you like, you can see my corpse on the rails at Yasenki.’ Tolstoy went to the autopsy, which took place on 5 January 1872. Let’s just think for a moment about the sort of person who would do that and how it might have affected him … When he began writing Anna Karenina, he gave his heroine the dead woman’s first name and used her patronymic (Stepanovna) for the name of Anna Karenina’s brother, Stepan. I cannot be alone in thinking this is creepy.
So while we, the readers, don’t know the fate of Anna Karenina when we first meet her stepping off (gulp) a train, Tolstoy knows all along and plays with us by hinting at what’s in store. The first time we see Anna, of all the places Tolstoy could have chosen to reveal her, it just has to be emerging from a train carriage, doesn’t it? And, equally naturally and unavoidably, it has to be a train that has just crushed someone to death. In the early pages, the novel builds up to the first glimpse of Anna with beautiful prose and so much suspense. Tolstoy makes you spend ages unwrapping this precious gift, tearing off layer upon layer of narrative describing endless provincial balls and fur coats and taffeta dresses, only to find that the prize, when it finally arrives, is shrouded in smoke and steam, upstaged by the shouts of people who have just seen (and I quote) a ‘mangled corpse’.
Tolstoy didn’t have to foreshadow her death. But he can’t resist warning us that he’s not really sure that he has anything more to impart, other than the idea that we are basically doomed. It’s as if Tolstoy is saying: ‘Yes, I will show you the meaning of life. But first I just have to work it out for myself. In the meantime, read this novel, which may or may not contain some clues.’ I’m paraphrasing. Tolstoy would never say this. Instead, he would say something like: ‘All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life, is made up of light and shade.’ It’s Stiva, Anna’s brother, who says this. (Levin – the Tolstoy of the piece – isn’t listening, of course.) Tolstoy can create beauty and magic. But he is like the Wizard of Oz, all smoke and mirrors, and pretending and grandiosity. Underneath it all he is just a man on the brink of a breakdown who wants to eat a lot of eggs.
Anna Karenina, both the character and the novel, embodies the questions Tolstoy spent his whole life trying to answer. What shall I do with this life? What does it mean to live a good life? How will I know I’ve done the right thing? Is it all arbitrary? Or is there some grand plan for us? If it’s all arbitrary, how do we decide what to do within that? And if there’s a grand plan, where do we find it written down so that we know to follow it? It’s Levin who asks a lot of these questions in Anna Karenina. But it’s Anna who has to live them out.
There is a grand plan, and Tolstoy wrote it down in his work. Except it isn’t a very good plan. It’s easy to read his novels and think, ‘Wow. Tolstoy does not have a clue about life. All his characters just flounder around, often betraying their friends and occasionally noticing a beautiful sunset.’ (As we will discover later, this is basically the plot of War and Peace.) But once you have read a lot of him, you start to think, ‘Oh. Tolstoy knows a lot about life. He depicts people who are a mess because that’s normal, honest and real.’ This is both heartening and, at the same time, deeply frustrating.
I often wonder whether part of Tolstoy’s struggle with figuring out what we are here for is connected to his relationship with other people. Understanding people was a burden to Tolstoy. He was a solitary character who spent many hours alone, writing. And yet, despite the arguments he had with his family when he was much older, he also loved to be surrounded by his children, read stories to them and chase them around the dinner table. Anna Karenina is a testament to how observant he was in everyday family life. He was a man who noticed all the intimate details. He loves to mention his affection for the hair on women’s upper lips; he makes fleeting mention of birth control (in a conversation between Dolly, Stiva’s wife, and Anna); and he cares about sore nipples after childbirth (Dolly mentions this). He had a longing for connection with other people which was at odds with his intellectual self. I think, rationally, he wanted to be able to judge others, including himself. But he was unable to because he had too much heart and empathy. As he says of the saintly Levin and the hedonistic Oblonsky: ‘To each of them it seemed that the life he was leading was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.’ You have to be able to understand other people to think like this. If only Tolstoy had extended the kindness that he extended to his characters in his ‘frivolous’ novel to himself. But, still, this is one of the most charming things about Tolstoy: the gap between the intimidating nature of his reputation and the more reassuring, human facts of his biography.
What, though, about the enduring mystery of the most famous opening line in literary history? ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Is it just a clever bit of wording? Or is there something deeper about happiness to be found here? It is a great piece of advice, as long as you don’t take it too literally. Tolstoy spends eight hundred pages illustrating exactly what he means by it. The traits of a happy life are predictable and constant. In Tolstoy’s estimation, they would include having a family life (Tolstoy believed it was important to have children), living productively (whatever this means to you – although Tolstoy would probably think that you should do quite a lot of hoeing as part of this) and being at peace with your lot in life (something Tolstoy himself did not really achieve). Despite being prolific and deeply engaged with his work, he was not a materially ambitious person and, long before A Calendar of Wisdom, was always making lists of ways he could improve himself spiritually: ‘Each person’s task in life is to become an increasingly better person.’
So, while it’s easy to predict the common traits that cause happiness, unhappiness is unique, he concludes. The takeaway? We are better off concentrating on the things that have worked for everyone else, rather than concentrating on our individual misery. Copy people who look as if their lives have worked out. Talk to them. Emulate them. Follow them. Don’t try to impress people by sleeping around, contracting lots of venereal diseases and then having to tell your bride-to-be about it. This is a compassionate way of looking at life. Don’t t
hink too hard about happiness. When it comes, enjoy it. Try not to get fixated on the causes of your unhappiness.
Anna Karenina regrets her suicide while she is in the very act. Just as she is pulled under the wheels, she says, horrified: ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ We get it. There’s not much point in her asking these questions now. She had her chance. She blew it. Tolstoy’s message? We need to make sure we ask these questions. But not quite so late.
In the end, Tolstoy appears to be asking something about literature itself. Is it really the job of novels to tell us how to live? Sadly, in his own life, he came to the conclusion that Anna Karenina had showed him how not to live: he did not want to be the person who wrote entertaining, complex novels. In coming to this realization, he failed to follow his own advice and, instead of being like other happy people, he became uniquely unhappy in his own fashion. The final message of Anna Karenina? It’s all very well looking for answers, but life is, essentially, unknowable. We must search desperately for meaning. Sometimes we will come close to it, but most of the time we will be disappointed and then we will die. Sorry about that. Did I mention that not all the lessons would be cheery? Come on, this is Russian literature we’re talking about, after all.
2. How to Face Up to Whatever Life Throws at You: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
(Or: Don’t leave your wife while she’s pregnant)
‘How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?’
The strange thing about learning a new language is that the more you learn, the more you start to pick up clues about the psychology of the people who speak the language. When I first went to Russia in 1992 and was starting to speak enough Russian to understand what people were saying to me, I was astonished to find that they genuinely spoke about ‘fate’ the whole time, like something out of a bad Bond film. It was so weird that, initially, I thought I was imagining it or misunderstanding the words. ‘Why? You ask why? No reason. It’s fate.’ ‘You are in Russia at an important historical moment. It is your fate.’ And often: ‘Drink it. It’s your fate, Vivka.’ Yes, I finally had a group of friends who had gifted me ‘Vivka’ (Little Viv) as my very own personal diminutive. My elderly landlady once misheard this as ‘Veepka’ (Little VIP, as the initials VIP are pronounced ‘veep’ in Russian) so I was also known as that: Vivka, Veep (VIP) or Vipulya (Tiny Little VIP) or Vipulenka (Dearest Teeny Tiny Little VIP). This was all extremely odd, as these names were used completely earnestly and not as a joke. I just got used to people shouting, across a room, ‘Dearest Teeny Tiny Little VIP, come over here!’
After a while, I even became unaware of this and thought it was normal. There is so much strangeness to the Russian language that you give up noticing it. Along with ‘fate’ and being called Dearest Teeny Tiny Little VIP, the concept of ‘soul’ came up constantly in everyday conversation. The answer to anything difficult to explain? ‘It is the Russian soul.’ The best kind of music, theatre or writing? ‘You can feel it in your soul.’ The highest compliment? ‘You have a Russian soul.’
People would genuinely say these things in conversation, in passing. And not just people who were a bit odd and ridiculously intense – although a lot of people I met during the early 1990s were both those things. Everyone. Fate and soul are big things for Russians. They feel them. They regard them as intensely real. I was initially sceptical about their existence. But then I realized how useful they are. ‘Soul’ is perhaps close to what we might call instinct. Ignore it at your peril. ‘Fate’ is what we call reality. It’s good to accept both.
The greatest expression in literature of these twin feelings is Pasternak’s epic novel Doctor Zhivago. Yury Zhivago has the most Russian of souls, and he does what he can to survive his fate. The novel opens with a funeral scene, as brief as it is depressing. Yuri’s mother is being buried. He is ten years old. As the coffin is lowered, the earth scattered and the grave filled, Yuri climbs up on to the mound, raises his head as if he is about to howl like a wolf, and bursts into tears. This is classic Pasternak. Set a scene, decorate it with certain picturesque elements and unleash the feelings. Whenever I think of Doctor Zhivago, I think of that funeral scene and of the only Russian funeral I attended. It was the experience I would return to in my memory whenever I thought about my relationship to Russia. I have never felt more foreign at any moment in my life, before or since.
The day I would first experience the Russian idea of ‘fate’ started ridiculously early, with a dull, distant banging on the door at 5.30 a.m. The sound reached me vaguely, as if I were under water. I was still fast asleep and dreaming strange, feverish dreams. A year after I had been christened Tiny Little VIP during the summer of my first trip to Russia, I returned to St Petersburg for my university year abroad, to teach English and, hopefully, become fluent in Russian. Before leaving, I had watched The Shining. This was a terrible mistake. First, I hate horror films and find myself very easily haunted by them in the best of circumstances. Second, the hostel where I was staying, in north-west St Petersburg, looked very much like the guesthouse featured in the film, with its long, poorly lit corridors and flickering overhead lighting. If you were going to kill someone, cover your traces, then write ‘Red Rum’ on a mirror in Cyrillic, this would have been an extremely good place to do it. I was full of apprehension, anxiety and a sort of terrified awe about living in a place that felt more like a 1970s information film about Communism than a real place. I had sweaty dreams where Jack Nicholson shouted at me in Russian.
The atmosphere was already psychologically charged. So it did not help that no one in charge of our group of a dozen fresh-faced would-be teachers of English seemed to have any idea what was going on. We were told that we would soon be meeting with ‘a Methodist’. We had visions of Bibles and prayer books. Our group leader said she had no idea why things suddenly seemed to have taken on a religious dimension, but she didn’t like to ask too many questions. It later turned out that the Russian word ‘methodist’ simply means someone who trains you in teaching methods; it has nothing to do with the Methodist faith of John Wesley. As we awaited further instruction, I navigated the mostly empty local shops, acquiring menthol cigarettes, vast quantities of toilet paper (anticipating a shortage, as it seemed the only thing to be freely available) and a rather beautiful Soviet hand-stitched bra for a very small amount of roubles. Meanwhile, a friend died. Not a close friend. But a friend, nonetheless.
That early-morning knock at the door was not unexpected. Several days earlier, the news had reached me that a young Russian woman I knew had killed herself. She would have been eighteen or nineteen. I was twenty at the time. Masha was not someone I knew intimately, but I considered her a friend and I was fond of her. Out of our group just arrived from the UK, I was one of the few who already had friends in St Petersburg, people I knew from three visits to the city over the previous year. I had first visited Russia the year before, in a last-ditch attempt to understand Russian, having almost failed my exams at the end of my first year at university.
Life was extraordinarily hard for the young Russians I befriended in the early 1990s. And it wasn’t easy for them to have me as their friend. I represented something exotic and exciting. For some people, I was, potentially, a source of money or treats or – what everyone really wanted – jeans, ideally Levi’s. I once had an awful conversation with one of my students when I was teaching English, when he asked me what I was getting my (Ukrainian) boyfriend for Christmas: ‘Jeans,’ I replied, without thinking. There was an inevitable pause while we both considered the fact that I probably shouldn’t have admitted to this. He shot back meaningfully: ‘I could also do with some jeans.’ Awkward. I knew that the relationship I had with some of these friends was artificially intimate because of my status as a foreigner. But we liked each other and had some good times together. Still, it was a strange and unbalanced relationship. One thing I was ill equipped for in this context, both linguistically and emotionally, was a death, especially the suicide of som
eone my own age.
My immediate reaction was shock and sadness for Masha’s mother (whom I had met only once) and concern for the other friends who had known her since childhood. One response I had was also fairly pragmatic: ‘All their lives are depressing. And Masha was one of the happy ones. This will give them ideas.’ It also struck me, rather unfairly, that this incident was indicative of Russian life. I had gone through British life for two decades without knowing anyone who had committed suicide. I had barely been in Russia two weeks and one of the dozen people I knew had killed herself.
I had mixed feelings about Masha’s death, and about attending her funeral. I worried that it would be inappropriate for me to go, as someone who wasn’t among her closest friends and as someone who was a foreigner, an outsider. On the other hand, though, I knew that having a foreigner there would probably carry some kind of kudos which would be attractive to her friends and her family, and that there would be other friends who would want me to go. It might be some kind of consolation. Or it might be an imposition. It was impossible to know how to behave. It became obvious that everyone expected me to go and that it would cause offence not to. (Along with ‘fate’ and ‘soul’, the concept of causing offence is huge in Russia. The refusal of the tiniest thing can be countered with: ‘You are offending me.’)
