Lectures on Russian literature

by Vladimir Nabokov

  *

  VN bracketed for reconsideration but did not delete: "Of course he is an incomparably more civilized person than squire Rodolphe, Emma's coarse lover; but still there are moments when, during his mistress' tantrums, he might be ready to say mentally, with Rodolphe's intonation, 'You are losing your time, my good girl.' " Ed.

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  Though one of the greatest love stories in world literature, Anna Karenin is of course not just a novel of adventure. Being deeply concerned with moral matters, Tolstoy was eternally preoccupied with issues of importance to all mankind at all times. Now, there is a moral issue in Anna Karenin, though not the one that a casual reader might read into it. This moral is certainly not that having committed adultery, Anna had to pay for it (which in a certain vague sense can be said to be the moral at the bottom of the barrel in Madame Bovary). Certainly not this, and for obvious reasons: had Anna remained with Karenin and skillfully concealed from the world her affair, she would not have paid for it first with her happiness and then with her life. Anna was not punished for her sin (she might have got away with that) nor for violating the conventions of a society, very temporal as all conventions are and having nothing to do with the eternal demands of morality. What was then the moral "message" Tolstoy has conveyed in his novel? We can understand it better if we look at the rest of the book and draw a comparison between the Lyovin-Kitty story and the Vronski-Anna story. Lyovin's marriage is based on a metaphysical, not only physical, concept of love, on willingness for self-sacrifice, on mutual respect. The Anna-Vronski alliance was founded only in carnal love and therein lay its doom.

  It might seem, at first blush, that Anna was punished by society for falling in love with a man who was not her husband.

  Now such a "moral" would be of course completely "immoral," and completely inartistic, incidentally, since other ladies of fashion, in that same society, were having as many love-affairs as they liked but having them in secrecy, under a dark veil.

  (Remember Emma's blue veil on her ride with Rodolphe and her dark veil in her rendezvous at Rouen with Léon.) But frank unfortunate Anna does not wear this veil of deceit. The decrees of society are temporary ones ; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality. And now comes the real moral point that he makes: Love cannot be exclusively carnal because then it is egotistic, and being egotistic it destroys instead of creating. It is thus sinful. And in order to make his point as artistically clear as possible, Tolstoy in a flow of extraordinary imagery depicts and places side by side, in vivid contrast, two loves: the carnal love of the Vronski-Anna couple (struggling amid their richly sensual but fateful and spiritually sterile emotions) and on the other hand the authentic, Christian love, as Tolstoy termed it, of the Lyovin-Kitty couple with the riches of sensual nature still there but balanced and harmonious in the pure atmosphere of responsibility, tenderness, truth, and family joys.

  A biblical epigraph: Vengeance is mine; I will repay (saith the Lord).

  (Romans XII, verse 19)

  What are the implications? First, Society had no right to judge Anna; second, Anna had no right to punish Vronski by her revengeful suicide.

  Joseph Conrad, a British novelist of Polish descent, writing to Edward Garnett, a writer of sorts, in a letter dated the 10th of June, 1902, said: "Remember me affectionately to your wife whose translation of Karenina is splendid. Of the thing itself I think but little, so that her merit shines with the greater lustre." I shall never forgive Conrad this crack. Actually the Garnett translation is very poor.

  We may look in vain among the pages of Anna Karenin for Flaubert's subtle transitions, within chapters, from one character to another. The structure of Anna Karenin is of a more conventional kind, although the book was written twenty years later than Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Conversation between characters mentioning other characters, and the maneuvers of intermediate characters who bring about the meetings of main participants—these are the simple and sometimes rather blunt methods used by Tolstoy. Even simpler are his abrupt switches from chapter to chapter in changing his stage sets.

  Tolstoy's novel consists of eight parts and each part on the average consists of about thirty short chapters of four pages. He sets himself the task of following two main lines—the Lyovin-Kitty one and the Vronski-Anna one, although there is a third line, subordinate and intermediary, the Oblonski-Dolly one that plays a very special part in the structure of the novel since it is present to link up in various ways the two main lines. Steve Oblonski and Dolly are there to act as go-betweens in the affairs of Lyovin and Kitty and in those of Anna and her husband. Throughout Lyovin's bachelor existence, moreover, a subtle parallel is drawn between Dolly Oblonski and Lyovin's ideal of a mother which he will discover for his own children in 97

  Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

  Kitty. One should notice, also, that Dolly finds conversation with a peasant woman about children as fascinating as Lyovin finds conversation with male peasants about agriculture.

  The action of the book starts in February 1872 and goes on to July 1876: in all, four years and a half. It shifts from Moscow to Petersburg and shuttles among the four country estates (because the country place of the old Countess Vronski near Moscow also plays a part in the book, though we are never taken to it).

  The first of the eight parts of the novel has as its main subject the Oblonski family disaster with which the book starts, and as a secondary subject the Kitty-Lyovin-Vronski triangle.

  The two subjects, the two expanded themes—Oblonski's adultery and Kitty's heartbreak when her infatuation for Vronski has been ended by Anna*—are introductory notes to the tragic Vronski-Anna theme which will not be so smoothly resolved as are the Oblonski-Dolly troubles or Kitty's bitterness. Dolly soon pardons her wayward husband for the sake of their five children and because she loves him, and because Tolstoy considers that two married people with children are tied together by divine law forever. Two years after her heartbreak over Vronski, Kitty marries Lyovin and begins what Tolstoy regards as a perfect marriage. But Anna, who becomes Vronski's mistress after ten months of persuasion, Anna will see the destruction of her family life and will commit suicide four years after the book's start.

  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is

  unhappy in its own way.

  "All was confusion in the Oblonski house [in the sense of

  'home,' both 'house' and 'home' being dom in Russian].†

  The wife had discovered that the husband had an affair

  with a French girl, who had been a governess in their

  house, and she had declared to her husband that she could

  not go on living in the same house with him. This situation

  was now in its third day, and not only husband and wife,

  but all the members of the family and the household, were

  conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there

  was no sense in their living together, and that the stray

  people brought together by chance in any inn had more in

  common with one another than they, the members of the

  family and household of the Oblonskis. The wife did not

  leave her own rooms, the husband had not been in the

  house for three days. The children ran wild all over the

  house; the English governess had quarreled with the

  housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to find a new

  place for her; the chef had walked off the day before just at

  dinner-time; the woman who cooked for the servants and

  the coachman had given notice.

  Nabokov's outline of the plot for Anna Karenin, part one.

  "Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch

  Oblonski—Steve as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o'clock in the

  *
/>
  In a sentence that he later deleted VN adds: "It should be noticed that Anna who with wisdom and grace brings on the reconciliation and thus performs a good action, simultaneously performs an evil action by captivating Vronski and breaking up his courtship of Kitty." Ed.

  †

  "Dom—Dom—Dom: the tolling bell of the family theme—house, household, home. Tolstoy deliberately gives us on the very first page the key, the clue: the home theme, the family theme." This sentence is drawn from a page of notes for the start of this section. For a more elaborate statement, see VN's Commentary Note Number 2. Ed.

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  morning, not in his wife's bedroom, but on the morocco upholstered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and pressed his cheek against it; but all at once he gave a start, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

  'Yes, yes, how did it go?' he thought, recalling his dream. 'Yes, how did it go? Ah, yes. Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt [in Germany]; no, not Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on tables made of glass, and the tables sang, Il mio tesoro —not Il mio tesoro though, but something better, and there were some sort of little decanters, and these were at the same time women, too.' "*

  Steve's dream is the kind of illogical arrangement that is hastily brought about by the dream producer. You must not imagine these tables as merely covered with glass —but made completely of glass. Wine-decanters, of crystal, sing in Italian voices and at the same time these melodious decanters are women—one of those economic combinations that the amateur management of our dreams often employs. It is a pleasant dream, so pleasant in fact, that it is quite out of keeping with reality. He awakes not in the connubial bed but in the exile of his study. This however is not the most interesting point. The interesting point is that Steve's light-hearted, transparent, philandering, epicurean nature is cunningly described by the author through the imagery of a dream. This is the device for introducing Oblonski: a dream introduces him. And another point: this dream with singing little women is going to be very different from the dream about a muttering little man that both Anna and Vronski will see.

  We are going to pursue our inquiry as to what impressions

  went to form a certain dream that both Vronski and Anna

  had in a later part of the book. The most prominent of

  these occurs on her arrival in Moscow and her meeting

  with Vronski.

  "Next day at eleven in the morning, Vronski drove to the

  station to meet his mother who was coming from

  Petersburg and the first person he came across on the

  great flight of steps was Steve Oblonski who was expecting

  his sister by the same train. [She was coming to reconcile

  Steve and his wife.]

  " 'Hallo there,' cried Steve, 'whom are you meeting?'

  " 'My mother,' answered Vronski. . . . 'And whom are you

  meeting?'

  " 'A pretty woman,' said Steve. 'Oh,' said Vronski.

  " 'Shamed be who thinks evil of it,' said Steve. 'It's my sister

  Anna.'

  " 'Ah, that's Karenin's wife,' said Vronski.

  " 'Know her?' asked Steve.

  The opening pages in Nabokov's teaching copy of Anna

  Karenin.

  *

  The passages quoted by VN in these lectures represent his revision of the Garnett translation of the novel, and his occasional abridgements and paraphrases for oral reading. Ed.

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  " T think I do, or perhaps not, I am not sure.' Vronski spoke heedlessly with a vague recollection of something formal and dull evoked by the name Karenin.

  " 'But,' Steve went on, 'my celebrated brother-in-law, you surely must know him?' . . .

  " 'Well, by reputation, by sight. I know that he is clever, learned, churchy or something. But you know that is not in my line,'

  added Vronski in English. . . .

  Nabokov's corrections for the first pages of Garnett's translation of Anna Karenin.

  "Vronski followed the conductor to the car where his mother was, went up the steps and at the entrance of the section he stopped short in the vestibule of the car to make room for a lady who was coming out. With the instinct of a man of the world he at once classified her as belonging to the highest society. He begged her pardon, retreated and was about to proceed on his way when he felt he must glance at her again; not because she was very beautiful, not because of her elegance and subdued grace but because in the expression of her charming face as she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked back at her, she too turned her head. Her sparkling eyes that were grey but looked darker because of her thick lashes rested with friendly attention on his face as though she were recognizing him, and then promptly passed away to the passing crowd where she was looking for someone. Vronski had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face and flitted about her brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her red lips. She seemed to be brimming over with something that gleamed against her will in her eyes and her smile. Then deliberately she put out the light in her eyes but it was still there on her lips glimmered against her will in her faintly susceptible smile. . . ."

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  Vronski's mother who had been traveling with this lady, who is Anna, introduces her son. Oblonski appears. Then, as they are all going out, there is a stir. (Rodolfe saw Emma for the first time over a basin of blood. Vronski and Anna meet also over blood.)

  "Several men ran by with frightened faces. The station master too ran by in that cap of his which was of such an unusual color [black and red]. Obviously something unusual had happened. " They learned presently that a station guard either drunk or too much muffled up in the bitter frost, had not heard the train as it started to back out of the station and had been crushed. Anna asks if something could be done for his widow—he had a huge family—Vronski immediately glanced at her and said to his mother he would be back in a minute. We find later that he had given two hundred rubles for the man's family. (Mark the muffled-up man being crushed. Mark that his death establishes a kind of connection between Anna and Vronski. We shall need all these ingredients when we discuss the twin dream they have.)

  "People coming and going were still talking of what had happened. 'What a horrible death,' said a man who was passing by.

  'They say he was cut in two pieces.' 'On the contrary, I think it is the easiest, the quickest,' said another [and Anna marks this]. 'How is it no safety measures are taken?' said a third.

  "Anna seated herself in the carriage and Steve saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and she had difficulty restraining her tears. 'What is it, Anna?' he asked. 'It's an omen of evil.' 'Nonsense,' said Steve." And he goes on to say how glad he is that she has come.

  The remaining important formative impressions for the dream come later. Anna has met Vronski again at the ball and danced with him—but that is all for the moment. Now she is on her way back to St. Petersburg, having reconciled Dolly and her brother Steve.

  "'Come, it's all over [her interest in Vronski], and thank God!' was the first thought that came to Anna, when she had said good-bye for the last time to her brother, who had stood blocking up the entrance to the car till the third bell rang. She sat down in her plush seat beside Annushka [her maid], and looked about her in the twilight of the [so-called] sleeping-car.

  'Thank God! Tomorrow I shall see Sergey and Aleks, and my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual.'

  "Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day, Anna took pleasure in preparing herself for the
journey with great care. With her small deft hands she opened and shut her red handbag, took out a little pillow, laid it on her knees, and carefully wrapping up her legs, made herself comfortable. An invalid lady was already settling down to sleep in her seat. Two other ladies began talking to Anna, and a stout elderly lady who was in the act of wrapping up her legs snugly made observations about the heating of the train [a crucial problem with that stove in the middle and all those icy drafts]. Anna said a few words, but not foreseeing any entertainment from the conversation, she asked Annushka to get out the small traveling lantern, hooked it onto the arm of her fauteuil, and took out from her bag a paper-knife and an English novel [of which the pages were uncut]. At first her reading made no progress. The fuss and bustle were disturbing

  [people walking down the passage along the doorless sections of that night coach]; then when the train had started, she could not help listening to the sound of the wheels; then her attention was distracted by the snow beating on the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled conductor passing by [an artistic touch this, the blizzard was blowing from the west; but it also goes well with Anna's onesided mood, a moral loss of balance], and the conversations about the terrific blizzard raging outside. And so it went on and on: the same shaking and knocking, the same snow on the window, the same rapid transitions from steaming heat to cold and back again to heat, the same passing glimpses of the same figures [conductors, stove-tenders] in the shifting dusk, and the same voices, and Anna began to read and to understand what she read. Her maid was already dozing, with her mistress's red bag in her lap, clutching it with her broad hands, in woolen gloves, of which one was torn at a finger tip [one of these little flaws that correspond to a flaw in Anna's own mood]. Anna read but she found it distasteful to follow the shadows of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move herself with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech herself; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden to the hounds, and had teased her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her pluck, Anna too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and she toyed 101