by Viv Groskop
There’s something deeply reassuring in the relentless nature of Tolstoy’s own search for happiness. This was a man who was known at university as ‘Lyovochka the bear’, because he was so bad-tempered. But we can see from the outside that he led a full and fulfilled life: a long marriage, a big family, an extraordinary literary legacy and a legion of followers for his spiritual philosophy. Yet he lived with such honesty and integrity he could not help but admit that for much of his life he was tortured by his own inadequacies and his inability to come to terms with life’s injustices. In spite of the pain of this, he never gave up trying. One of the defining moments of his life had come at the age of five, when his beloved brother Nikolai told him he had found the secret to life and inscribed it on a green stick which he had buried in the ground. When this stick was uncovered and the secret known, it would put an end to all death and all wars. Tolstoy took this extremely seriously and spent his life meditating on that stick and trying to find it, both literally and metaphorically. When he was buried at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, it was on the patch of ground where Nikolai was supposed to have buried the stick. He never did find out what was written on it. Although, in a way, he never needed to, as he wrote everything that the stick could have had written on it in his novels.
Perhaps Tolstoy had all kinds of reasons for struggling to find peace of mind. He might also have had his own secrets we can never know about. The character of Natasha in War and Peace is said to be based not on Sofya Andreyevna, his wife, but on her younger sister Tanya (who almost married one of Tolstoy’s brothers). Given that Natasha is representative of idealized womanhood (in a way that Anna Karenina cannot be said to be), that might have been a very uncomfortable fact for Sofya. Tanya, like Natasha, could perform Russian dances, had a beautiful, clear singing voice and loved attending balls. According to one account, Tanya once told Tolstoy she was concerned she was outstaying her welcome with the family. He told her not to worry, she was earning her keep by ‘posing for her portrait’. He was observing her in order to create a fictional character out of her. There’s no suggestion of anything more than this, yet I can’t help but think about Sofya Andreyevna transcribing that novel by hand, knowing that the main female character was based not on her but on her sister. Similarly, according to Aylmer Maude’s biography, Sofya had herself written a short novel – which she destroyed – that supposedly held the inspiration for Natasha Rostova’s relationship with her mother in War and Peace. Those two facts must be extremely annoying when you are copying out someone else’s novel seven times and you discover that a) the heroine is very much like your younger sister and b) a major relationship in the novel is very similar to something you wrote. But I’m speculating here.
All this detail is unimportant when it comes to understanding War and Peace in theory. But for me it’s been crucial in humanizing the author of a book with such a gargantuan reputation. It’s a case of separating the genius from the man. Recognizing the gap between Tolstoy’s wishful thinking about the perfect life and the reality of the life he actually led has been a huge comfort. Anna Karenina was what gave me my first addictive fix of Russianness, reeled me in and left me hooked on romantic, big ideas that allowed me to escape the confines of childhood and a family who didn’t seem to want to know much about their identity. Over time, all of that unravelled and proved to be as much of a fiction as any Russian novel. And yet, as I came to War and Peace in later life, with children of my own and a whole other family that I have built for myself, I found a way for these stories and philosophies to ‘fix’ me as a person, both in the sense of mending me (because it’s always comforting to know that other human beings are just as messed up as you are, even Tolstoy) and in the sense of ‘fixing’ or ‘stabilizing’ my identity. I will never be a beautiful and dramatic woman (although I seem to have unwittingly cultivated an upper-lip moustache which would have driven Tolstoy wild with desire). I will not attract the attention of a handsome, dark stranger in a flurry of snowflakes at the station. I am not and will never be Russian. But I am comfortable in my identity as someone who will always love stories and find solace in them.
My own life moved further away from Russia the more I became enmeshed in family life. I also realized that in focusing so heavily on the identity I felt had been denied to me, I’d turned away from looking at the things I was really drawn to in life. After that email from my unknown uncle in Canada, things were settled, even if they had been resolved in a way that made me feel small. I had been stupid for wanting to be different, for wanting to ‘prove’ something about my roots. I had become addicted to chasing a dream. Giving up on it was sobering. I preferred it when I could say, ‘I don’t know where my name comes from. But there’s no reason why I couldn’t be Russian …’ So the lesson in War and Peace is apt: what matters in life is being comfortable with what you have and who you are.
Meanwhile, my extremely English husband made it his business to track down all the information he could about my ancestors. Whether this was motivated by his own curiosity to know the truth or out of empathy for me, I don’t know. I think a bit of both. The strange thing is, I would never have gone after all the official records and census documents that he went after. I had had enough of knowing. I knew my uncle had not got it wrong. It had been confirmed by too many people. And so that was that. I had very little desire to find out any more. My fantasy had been exposed and I wanted to forget the whole thing.
Over the next few years, though, Simon collected the facts. According to the census, Gershon Groskop came to Stockton-on-Tees in 1861. He had a son called Ashkel. Then Ashkel had a son called Levi. (I still marvel that the word ‘Jewish’ was not uttered once during my childhood.) Levi was my great-grandfather. He died a few years before I was born. My father knew him as a child. I will probably never know what made Gershon leave Łódź, why he chose England and not another destination and why, when he arrived, he pretty much stopped being Jewish immediately: he married a young Englishwoman, cutting out the female line. We don’t know what he was running away from or running towards in the 1860s. He left a place with a population of around 15,000 that swelled to 500,000 before the Second World War, of whom around 200,000 were Jewish. When the Soviet army liberated Łódź from the Nazis in 1945, only 877 Jews were left alive. Maybe none of Gershon’s descendants were involved in all that. Maybe they had all already gone abroad by then, just as he had. But it’s something I think about.
In England, he cannot have had an easy life as an immigrant: he was a rag-and-bone man when he first came over here. The respectability of selling things did become a family trait and informed my grandfather’s pride about owning his own shop. I have a picture from the late nineteenth century of some of my relatives selling nougat from a market stall. I often wonder whether Ashkel and Levi would have spoken any Yiddish, the language of their father and grandfather. My grandfather seemed to have no knowledge of such things, although my grandma used to say she could remember her father-in-law, Levi, muttering to himself in a strange language and wearing a skullcap. I don’t know if that was fanciful on her part or something that she realized only once the obvious truth had been spoken out loud. Certainly, no one talked about these things before the email from the Canadian uncle. In the light of my enthusiastic but pointless quest for an identity, ‘Groskop’ itself turned out to be an extraordinary example of nominative determinism. A friend who speaks Yiddish later told me that Groskop (‘big head’) could mean many things: arrogant, big-headed, large of brain, intellectual. Or it could just mean stupid. My full name translates as ‘Lively Fathead’. Oh, the irony.
A long time after all this, I figured out another piece of the puzzle. I knew I’d been attracted to Russian through the literature and through my weird name. But I had always wondered why it had to be Russian. Why had I tuned into that? Where did it come from? There was no reason for me to pick up a copy of Anna Karenina, in particular. There was no real reason for any of it. Why hadn’t I decided my name was Dutch and
become interested in, say, Rembrandt, and tried to become a painter? (This would have made about as much sense as what I did do.) Much later, in a conversation with my father, I realized that my grandparents had a Russian woman as a next-door neighbour when they had been living in the grocery store they ran when I was a child. This woman – I couldn’t picture her – would most likely have been one of the first customers for the peg dolls I used to sell for five pence, sitting on top of the shop counter. She must have had an accent. She must have been unusual. She would have stuck in my mind. And I would have asked where she was from. And she would have said: ‘Russia.’
This was the place where I had gone to live shortly after my sister was born. I was three years old and away from my parents for the first time. My most striking memories of my childhood are of this time. I would not have known anyone ‘foreign’ until that moment, and I did not meet a single other Russian person apart from this woman until I went to university and was taught Russian. I can’t know for sure, but I think something about her nudged something in me. Or a memory of her sparked something off when I read something … I can’t know. If I ever had a memory of her, it has gone. But she is the only connection in my past to Russia, and the one I formed in my subconscious. It must all go back to her.
The funny thing is, I later discovered that there is a wonderful blurring of origin in all the documents relating to Gershon Groskop. I don’t imagine he would have been literate or particularly able to speak much English. All the census documents carry his replies to the question of where he comes from. It will have been noted down by another person, so I have to wonder whether they prompted him or changed what he said to something they could understand. But he never says: ‘Łódź, Poland.’ Because he would not have thought of that as being where he came from: Poland did not regain its independence until 1918. I imagine his identity would have been Jewish and his language would have been Yiddish. But here – astonishingly, in black and white on the official documents – is what Gershon liked to answer when he told people where he was from: ‘Russia’, ‘Prussia’ and ‘Prussian Russia’. He was never, strictly, Russian, and neither, strictly, am I. But the territory we come from formed part of the Russian empire. So, even though I was wrong, I was right after all. Prussia is close enough. Now all I need to do is grow some thicker eyelashes and I’ll virtually be Anna Karenina after all.
Of course, I realize now that none of this matters. It’s good to know where you come from in the past, but it’s more important to know who you are right now. And the two are not the same. Gershon and I have somehow come full circle. He clearly decided – probably subconsciously – that if he was going to start a new life, he was going to let go of his old identity and be British. There was no need to mention that he was Jewish. Within a few generations, it had become the truth. I went the opposite way, trying to erase his attempts to assimilate. We were both just trying to make life easier for ourselves – and more meaningful. Isn’t that what everyone tries to do? He wanted to belong somewhere. So did I. My truth was no better – and no worse – than his. Neither of us had it quite right. He wasn’t British, and I’m not Russian. We can meet in the middle. Because we are all a sum of the people we come from. And yet we’re also nothing to do with them. Much more than our history, we are an expression of the things we have seen, the books we have read, the people we have known and loved in this lifetime. Tolstoy knew this better than anyone, and it was the one truth he championed with the same passion he reserved for his occasional slice of lemon tart. ‘Everything that I understand,’ he wrote, ‘I understand only because I love.’
Recommended Reading
This reading list details all the translated texts I worked from and gives a summary of many of the secondary sources I drew on. Anything I mention here is included because I recommend it. One book in particular forms the backdrop to this whole project. It is an essential read for anyone who loves the Russian classics: Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Granta, 2012). I interviewed Elif Batuman for the Daily Telegraph in 2011, and it was that conversation which galvanized me to develop the ideas in this book, which had been brewing since I took my undergraduate degree in Russian in 1995. For wonderful background on Russian fiction in translation, I must recommend David Remnick’s legendary 2005 New Yorker essay ‘The Translation Wars’, which explains why the best translators see their work as similar to the restoration of great paintings, why Tolstoy was better paid than Dostoevsky and why the words ‘f***ing bastards’ should not appear in War and Peace.
Introduction
The edition of Lev Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom referred to is the 2015 Alma Classics paperback, translated by Roger Cockrell.
1. How to Know Who You Really Are: Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy
I’ve worked from the 2000 Penguin Classics edition, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, although I also make reference to the first edition of Anna Karenina I ever read, Rosemary Edmonds’s 1978 translation, also Penguin Classics. (This is the one with Kramskoi’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman on the cover.). See also A Confession by Lev Tolstoy from the Penguin Books Great Ideas series (2008), translated by Jane Kentish. This chapter – and the idea for this book – was inspired partly by Pavel Basinsky’s wonderful biography Leo Tolstoy: Flight from Paradise (Glagoslav, 2015), translated by Huw Davies and Scott Moss. A friend gave me a copy of the book in Russian when it first came out in 2010. I was then lucky enough to interview Pavel Basinsky at the London Book Fair in 2014 for the PEN Literary Salon. I’ve also drawn on some of the stories and anecdotes A. N. Wilson recounts in his excellent biography Tolstoy (Atlantic Books, 2012) and on Henri Troyat’s biography Tolstoy (Penguin, 1970), translated by Nancy Amphoux.
2. How to Face Up to Whatever Life Throws at You: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
I used the 2002 Vintage edition of Doctor Zhivago, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari. A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak – The Memoirs of Olga Ivinskaya (Collins and Harvill Press, 1978), translated by Max Hayward, was hugely useful for background.
3. How to be Optimistic in the Face of Despair: Requiem by Anna Akhmatova
I worked from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (Canongate, 2000), edited with an introduction by Roberta Reeder and translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. This is a spectacular edition of Akhmatova. I also recommend Twentieth-century Russian Poetry (Fourth Estate, 1993), edited by Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward (with Daniel Weissbort), foreword by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, for an excellent introduction to Russian poetry in general.
I am a bit of an Akhmatova geek (I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on ‘Poem Without a Hero’) and so I recommend a lot here: The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin by György Dalos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), translated by Antony Wood; Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet by Roberta Reeder (St Martin’s Press, 1994); Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova by Elaine Feinstein (Vintage Books USA, 2007); Remembering Anna Akhmatova by Anatoly Nayman (Henry Holt & Co., 1993), translated by Wendy Rosslyn; Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage by Amanda Haight (Oxford University Press, 1990); and The Akhmatova Journals by Lydia Chukovskaya (HarperCollins, 1994). I also found Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope (Harvill Press, 1971), translated by Max Hayward, hugely helpful for background.
4. How to Survive Unrequited Love: A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev
I used a very easily available (and cheap) edition of A Month in the Country: A Comedy in Five Acts, the one from CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (2015). It’s the Constance Garnett translation. I’ve drawn on material from the 2000 Bloomsbury edition of Turgenev’s Letters, edited and translated by A. V. Knowles. I’ve also used anecdotes from Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s Turgenev: The Man, His Art and His Age (Orion Press, 1959); Robert Dessaix’s beautiful travelogue Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (Scribner, 2005); and Turgenev: A Life by David Magarshack (Faber and
Faber, 1954).
5. How to Not be Your Own Worst Enemy: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
I worked from the 2003 Penguin classics edition of Eugene Onegin, translated by Charles Johnston. Very few books have given me as much pleasure and as many laughs as The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship by Alex Beam (Pantheon, 2016). For more on the background to the relationship between Wilson and Nabokov, see Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971 (University of California Press, 2001), edited by Simon Karlinsky.
6. How to Overcome Inner Conflict: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I worked from the 1993 Vintage edition of Crime and Punishment, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ is in his collection Russian Thinkers (Hogarth Press, 1978), which also has useful chapters on Turgenev and Tolstoy. I heartily recommend Ronald Hingley’s biography Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978). Also useful: Dostoevsky and the Woman Question by Nina Pelikan Straus (Palgrave Macmillan, 1994); Dostoevsky’s Greatest Characters: A New Approach to ‘Notes from the Underground’, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov by Bernard J. Paris (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Dostoevsky: Works and Days by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (Funk and Wagnalls, 1971).
