The Anna Karenina Fix

by Viv Groskop

  Tanya was a good person to know if you had dysentery. She was medically qualified, had access to certain medications and came to look after me in person, insisting that I swallow packets of black powder that I later realized were something not dissimilar to ground-up coal. I did not know that charcoal is a medieval remedy for stomach complaints. Some things you have to learn by experience. Or even by repeatedly ingesting powdered coal.

  She read Akhmatova poems to me and performed weird rituals over my body (clothed, I hasten to add), running her hands above me as if she could sense a presence, closing her eyes and humming, then flicking the ‘evil’ away. I thought it was extremely odd, but I didn’t want to question her authority. I also wanted to pretend to be Russian and not be a lily-livered foreigner. (In fact, unbeknownst to me, she was turning me into a charcoal-livered foreigner.) So I made out to her and to myself that I thought all this was totally normal. I later realized what she was doing was very similar to reiki, the alternative remedy now much beloved of Hollywood types. So, Tanya was ahead of her time. After about a week of intense pain and suffering and consuming large quantities of coal which passed straight through me, I eventually got over the dysentery. But not before paying $150 cash for a visit from an American doctor who prescribed some antibiotics.

  After this, I discovered that Tanya attended poetry evenings where she and others would recite Akhmatova from memory in an intense, dramatic style. It was perhaps the most Russian of all Russian things I had witnessed. Being theatrical, ambitious and increasingly imagining myself to be Russian in the depths of my soul, I decided that I, too, must become a part of this, and I asked her to coach me in the reading of an Akhmatova poem. Reading Akhmatova’s poetry to yourself is like splashing your face with cold water. Learning her verses by heart and reciting them in a room of devotees is like dancing naked under a waterfall.

  I would spend long afternoons at Tanya’s apartment contorting my vowel sounds to perfect a recitation which was as lyrically, authentically Russian as possible. She nodded solemnly and occasionally tutted when I stumbled over a word. I suspect it was like trying to teach the policeman from the 1980s TV series ’Allo ’Allo to read Shakespeare. (This man was English but pretending to be French, even though his French (rendered in English) was terrible: ‘Good moaning. I was just pissing by your door …’) I knew I was mangling Akhmatova’s lyrical renderings of ‘hard grains of swirling snow’ into something that sounded like ‘hart grans of swoolly snook’, but we persevered. When we rehearsed at Tanya’s apartment, her five-year-old son would sit playing with a toy truck in the corner. Without fail, every time I left the flat, half an hour later he would murmur to her mournfully, knowing that I was from England: ‘I guess she must be flying over us right now.’ He imagined that every time I visited I flew over from England in an aeroplane, then flew back again. In fact I lived about four metro stops away.

  Because of its simplicity, Akhmatova’s poetry is easy to commit to memory, even for an idiot foreigner like me. The only challenge was making it sound Russian enough to be read aloud without offending Akhmatova’s legacy. When Tanya and I finally went to our first public recital of Akhmatova’s poetry, I had practised for months, and delivered my lines in as natural a Russian way as I could possibly muster, casting aside all thoughts of French/English policemen: ‘Nothing is changed; against the dining room windows, hard grains of snow still beat …’ Tanya kissed me at the end. ‘You got away with it.’ We drank a toast. Not ‘to the lovely ladies’. But ‘to Akhmatova’. I hope she would have been proud. In many stories about her life, Akhmatova asks for vodka when everyone else is drinking wine. Lydia Chukovskaya writes: ‘She always asked for vodka and always drank two or three glasses, her habitual toast being, “Let’s drink a toast that we shall again sit down together and that we shall meet again.” ’ See what I mean? That’s proper optimism.

  4. How to Survive Unrequited Love: A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev

  (Or: Don’t fall in love with your best friend’s wife)

  ‘Love of every kind, happy as much as unhappy, is a real calamity if you give yourself up to it completely.’

  I found out about Turgenev’s existence at a crucial moment. There had been a very small leap between me obsessing over Anna Karenina in my mid-teens and deciding that learning Russian was my destiny. There was, unsurprisingly, an even smaller leap between me becoming obsessed with learning Russian and me becoming obsessed with unsuitable men who spoke Russian. This culminated, during my year abroad, in my acquaintance with a man whose name – Bogdan Bogdanovich – translated as God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift. In many ways, he lived up to his name.

  He was a man whom I loved with the passion that Anna Karenina first felt for Vronsky, but he regarded me with as much affection as Levin held for the ladies who stank of eau de vinaigre. This is where Turgenev comes in. No one writes better about unrequited love. Real life is about quiet, slow, awkward moments of humiliation. And what greater humiliation is there than loving someone far, far more than they love you? This is the kind of embarrassing self-inflicted fever that Turgenev, arguably the most English of all the Russian writers, is brilliant at describing. In A Month in the Country a man falls in love with his best friend’s wife. I didn’t covet anyone’s spouse. But I did fall in love with a man who didn’t really want to belong to me.

  In August 1994, I was twenty-one years old and spending the summer by the Black Sea, Odessa, Ukraine. It was the last few months of my year abroad. That summer was a blur of strong cigarettes, black bread, tea and jam, whispered invitations on a Saturday night: ‘Just one little rumochka’ (a shot glass of moonshine). ‘Come on – davai – fifty grams.’ I spent a lot of time drinking samogon (‘the fire itself’), eating pig fat and being in love. He was in a rock band. He was the lead guitarist. They played songs in terrible English with titles like ‘I’m Not Drunk, It’s Only F***ing Funk’. I was his groupie. He was my world. We went to his gigs together. We went to other people’s gigs together. We went everywhere together. We kissed. We laughed. We ate pig fat. Pig fat is a big treat in Ukraine. I had got used to eating huge slabs of it on hunks of black bread. I loved a bit of pig fat. There was only one problem in paradise. I was drunk a lot of the time, but I was never too drunk to know that God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, did not love me in the same way that I loved him.

  Somewhere buried inside me was a homesickness for England and, buried deeper still, the knowledge that I was falling deeper into a situation where I was going to have to choose between two worlds. The closer it got to September, the more I didn’t want to go home. The drunker I got, the more I loved him. The drunker I got, the more Russian I felt. The drunker I got, the happier I was to stay … and the deeper I fell in love with someone who was very much not the right person and who didn’t love me back. It was that horrible feeling of wanting something you know you shouldn’t want and isn’t going to do you any good at all, but still wanting it anyway.

  Anna Karenina was no help in solving this problem. She and Vronsky have loads of problems, but an unevenness of feeling is not really one of them. Luckily, as well as ploughing my way through Tolstoy with a dictionary at the time, I happened to be reading Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country in translation. It is a cruelly hilarious cautionary tale about unrequited love. Turgenev himself experienced this unhappy state for more or less the entirety of his sixty-four years. From around the 1840s to the end of his life in 1883, Turgenev adored the married opera singer Pauline Viardot. The exact nature of their relationship is hotly debated. But it would seem to me to be one of the most extreme examples of one-sided love in history. Certainly, she loved him to some extent, but he was definitely the weaker partner in the couple. Turgenev represents his complicated feelings about this state of being through the unfortunate character of Rakitin.

  No character illustrates Turgenev’s state of hopeless anticipation better than the mournful, resigned, comically self-pitying Rakitin. To imagine his adorable face, t
hink of Ralph Fiennes at his most apologetic and subservient. (He played Rakitin in a 2014 Russian film version. He does the best job he possibly can, having learned Russian in three months in order to play the role. But they still had to overdub his voice with a native actor, as Russian audiences couldn’t understand what he was saying.) Rakitin is described as a thirty-year-old ‘friend of the family’. You have to wonder if Turgenev was making his own little joke here, as he frequently referred to himself as a ‘friend of the family’ when explaining his connection to Viardot. I now can’t hear the expression ‘friend of the family’ without thinking that the person is trying secretly to intimate that they are having an affair with someone in the family. Which is awkward, as it’s a fairly common expression to describe a completely innocent relationship and now, whenever I hear it, I adopt an involuntary expression that says, ‘Oh, no one believes you. There is clearly something else going on here. “Friend of the family”, indeed.’

  Rakitin is the ultimate doomed lover, convinced that no one has ever loved anyone as much as he loves the woman who will never love him (who is, unhelpfully, although actually helpfully as regards proximity and social availability, his best friend’s wife): ‘It’s my belief … that love of every kind, happy as much as unhappy, is a real calamity if you give yourself up to it completely.’ He gives himself up to the calamity anyway – of course.

  Written as ‘a comedy in five acts’, the play is set at the country dacha of the Islayev family. The husband, a wealthy landowner, Arkady, is thirty-six. His wife, Natalya Petrovna, is twenty-nine. Yes, Turgenev lists the exact ages of the protagonists. It’s common to give age guidelines for characters in plays (Chekhov does it, too), but it’s unusual to do it for every single one, as Turgenev does. It makes you feel like he’s making a bit of a point. He wants to underline the age differences and generational rivalries.

  This is already a mildly disastrous love triangle between two old friends (Islayev and Rakitin) and Islayev’s wife, Natalya. Largely indifferent towards her husband, Natalya is not interested in Rakitin either, although she toys with him a little, as he’s better company than the man she is married to. There can’t just be one pocket of misery, though. With two men already pining for a woman who doesn’t return their affection, why not even things out with an attractive twenty-one-year-old tutor, Alexei Belyaev, imported into the house to teach the Islayevs’ ten-year-old son, Kolya? Of course, Natalya is going to fall in love with him. And he won’t love her back. Or will he? This is the dramatic tension in the comedy. Naturally, Natalya needs a rival: seventeen-year-old Vera, the family’s ward, taken in as an orphan and so close to marriageable age that a proposal is imminent from Bolshintsov (aged forty-eight), a neighbour and friend of the family doctor Shpigelsky (aged forty). (Turgenev really does give an age to every single person on the cast list. This is either very annoying or very helpful to casting directors.)

  More instances of unrequited love are added into the mix so that, in the end, it’s a merry-go-round of people sighing over people looking the other way. Islayev and Rakitin love Natalya. She doesn’t love them. Natalya and Vera love Belyaev. He probably doesn’t love either of them. Bolshintsov loves Vera. She does not love him. Even the servants are caught up in this, Shakespeare-style: the German tutor has an eye for Katya, the maid, who is really not that into him.

  Reading this play helped me enormously, as I could see the comedy of my own situation. It’s horrible when you love someone madly and they just think you are vaguely tolerable. It’s almost worse when they seem to go along with the idea of having a relationship with you (as God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, appeared to do) but they also seem somehow reluctant. An outright nyet would be more humane. I could see that it was unenviable and tragic that I had ended up in a relationship with the perfect boyfriend and yet he had entered into this relationship almost as if coerced. And yet somewhere deep inside me, I did realize that it was funny on some level. It was hard to know which one of us was more ridiculous: was it me, loving someone who clearly thought very little of me, or him, wasting his time with an English girlfriend he didn’t like that much and who frequently wore an oversized Aran sweater knitted by her Northern Irish grandmother because she thought it made her look like Debbie Harry. (In fact, it made me look like a bag lady. You can see now why the passion of God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, was not ignited.)

  Turgenev combines the horror and the comedy of this situation like no one else. A Month in the Country has an almost Shakespearean feel, with people running around the birch forest sighing after each other and no one getting what they want. The key focus, though, has to be Rakitin. And Turgenev admitted that this character represented him. There is little in the play to indicate Rakitin’s physical state, but you can imagine him making big saucer eyes at Natalya, looking at her like a puppy and generally behaving like a lovesick teenager. (Put him in an oversized Aran sweater and he could be me.) Most of his scenes in the play are with Natalya, so we mostly get to see him almost exclusively in this state, as if he’s incapable of existing in any other way. Being the victim of unrequited love defines his identity. In the scenes where Natalya is not present, Rakitin behaves and speaks much more like a normal, rational person. This is Turgenev’s idea of self-parody: he knows that love – and especially unrequited love – makes fools of us all. And he knows what it is like to be one of those fools.

  Reading the play, I realized that Rakitin’s unrequited love is so extreme that it represents the best ever argument for not bothering with this miserable one-sided state. ‘You wait!’ Rakitin says, in the love rant to his rival Belyaev in the final act of the play. ‘You will know what it means to be tied to a petticoat, to be enslaved and poisoned – and how shameful and agonizing that slavery is! … You will learn at last how little you get for all your sufferings …’ We have to remember, of course, that this is a comedy. And it’s possible to get a laugh out of Rakitin’s condition. But there’s also something poignant here. Is this Turgenev talking? Is this how he felt all his life, up against Viardot? If he was writing this character to parody himself or to convince himself to change, he did not succeed. He only wrote this play several years into his acquaintance with Viardot. He had another three decades of it to go.

  The reader knows the truth, though, whether about Turgenev or Rakitin. A mysterious force has not tied them to the petticoat. No. They have tied themselves there. And they rather like it. Realizing this made me blush. I also liked loving someone who did not love me that much. It was safe. I knew where I stood. There would be no unpleasant surprises. It was one of those moments where you feel a writer has seen straight into your soul. Your stupid, self-defeating, woolly Aran soul.

  Perhaps one of the most astonishing things about Turgenev is just how long he went on being a fool in love. He must have enjoyed it, too. It was virtually his identity, and he seemed to attain some measure of control in being with someone who didn’t love him back and was never going to leave her husband. Maybe he liked the predictability of it. That’s one of the things about unrequited love (and I know myself well enough to know this is true for me): while it hurts in theory, it also protects you from hurt. When you fall in love with someone and they love you back, there is the chance for disappointment and disillusionment. There is the risk of rejection. With unrequited love, this isn’t a problem: you have been rejected before anything has even started. Unrequited love, once discovered, is ultimately an expression of masochism. Maybe it even represents a fear of intimacy. If you’re not afraid of intimacy, why not love someone who can love you, too? It’s so much easier to be madly in love with someone with whom there is no chance whatsoever of it working out.

  Much later on in life, I learned that I needn’t have identified with Turgenev so readily. There is no point in feeling sorry for him. Although he was madly in love with the on-off mistress who would never give up her other life for him, this didn’t stop him from having plenty of other ladies on the go. Not a bit of it. As Yarmolinsky wr
ites in his biography, Turgenev thought he was a better writer ‘when the page was warmed by the glow of a casual affair’. The biographer adds, ‘One should approach every woman as a potential mistress: variety, not satisfaction, is what talent feeds upon.’ (Yarmolinsky’s words, not Turgenev’s. But still. Turgenev’s relationship with Viardot did not prevent him from having at least one other child with another woman.) Maybe this is where I went wrong. I could have loved God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, and felt tortured and unloved but still had loads of other boyfriends. It did not occur to me for a second that variety might have solved my problem. I would have assumed it would make it worse. That is possibly why I am not a Russian playwright.

  The more I learned about Turgenev, though, the more I understood that I very much liked him as a person (despite his philandering, which, I suppose, we must write off as pretty normal for a nineteenth-century aristocratic writer). As well as Pauline Viardot never loving him as much as he wanted, he didn’t really get that much love back for his work either. A Month in the Country had a reception which can best be described as lukewarm. The great director Stanislavsky called the play ‘boring and unstageable’ even after he had cast himself in it as Rakitin. How insulting is that? You’re in a play you’ve chosen to stage and you’re playing the lead, but you still think the play is awful. This was to be Turgenev’s lot in life: never quite appreciated for the talent he had.

  However, there was a moment of sublime recognition, and it came during his lifetime. As the biographer and translator Rosamund Bartlett has pointed out, there was a time when Turgenev was known as the one and only great Russian writer. In the 1880s, Turgenev was more popular in translation and more famous a name than Tolstoy. Bartlett quotes from the British literary periodical the Saturday Review in 1905: ‘We remember mentioning his [Tolstoy’s] existence to an American novelist of first rank, a great admirer of Turgenev, who did not seem inclined to believe that people would soon come to realize the greater power of Tolstoy.’ The novelist cited was almost certainly Henry James. To underline what is being said here: Turgenev is more worth reading than Tolstoy. That’s a pretty good recommendation.