To Kia Penso and Max Schott
Foreword
by Boris Dralyuk
It may at first seem somewhat paradoxical that Viktor Shklovsky, who as a youthful firebrand of formalist criticism in the 1910s and ’20s railed against the naively biographical approach to the study of literature, went on to write a substantial, perceptive biography of Leo Tolstoy in 1963.I In truth it is no paradox: it’s a concession to reality, which Shklovsky never really denied. Once they are written, literary works may enjoy a high degree of autonomy—standing outside of and, ideally, outlasting their creators—but they are, nevertheless, the works of human beings, produced in a given place at a given time and pervaded by an infinite number of outside influences. It may be useful, when analyzing literary devices or structures, to declare the author dead and buried, but a fuller understanding of any work—and especially of its creation—requires the resurrection of its creator and his milieu.
In Creating Anna Karenina, Bob Blaisdell manages to do precisely that, painstakingly reconstructing the artistic laboratory in which this great novel was conceived, and, more impressively still, bringing to life Tolstoy himself. Drawing on letters and memoirs, on drafts and proofs, Blaisdell doesn’t merely piece together a history, he places us inside the author’s process, with its fits and starts, its bursts of inspiration and stretches of frustration. The result an intimate portrait and a journey of discovery. This sense of intimacy, this thrill of discovery set Blaisdell’s surprisingly gripping book apart from the ever-growing pack of monographs on Tolstoy’s masterpiece.
For readers of Anna Karenina who have never read a scholarly work about it, Blaisdell offers plenty of critical insight. Refreshingly, the insight is all his own. He has clearly read and absorbed tomes upon tomes of scholarship, but even when he might agree with one thinker or another, his judgment is rendered directly, without appeals to authority, in lively sentences that drive the point home—for example:
One trouble with Tolstoy’s essays and discourses is that in the midst of them Tolstoy seems to think they’re more important, more true than his art. They’re consistent but rigged, as they argue but they don’t discover. Expository prose brought out Tolstoy’s tendency of emphatically agreeing with himself. In his artistic productions, on the other hand, his sympathy and engagement with the imagined people and situations couldn’t be settled as an argument could; writing fiction induced his deepest attention and feeling.
The opinion isn’t new, but it is has seldom been expressed more engagingly, with such a winning combination of discernment and sympathy. This, too, is expository prose, but as in the best examples of the genre (certainly not Tolstoy’s), the reader feels the author’s mind move across the page, making discoveries as it goes.
From the very beginning, Blaisdell makes no bones about his devotion to Anna Karenina—his “book of books”—or about his deep admiration for its author, which borders on awe. But he is not in the least deluded about the messy, drawn-out act of composition, which doubles and redoubles on itself, or about the imperfect humanity of Tolstoy. Indeed, he is aware that the flaws are what fire the work. Had Tolstoy’s argument with himself been settled before he started, had his opinions been fixed, the fiction would have lain flat—if it ever emerged at all. As Tolstoy himself knew, creation requires “the energy of delusion.”I By this he meant the false belief in one’s own power, in the importance of one’s work, but borrowing the phrase for the title of a book of his own in 1981, Shklovsky extends the meaning: “The energy of delusion—the energy of searching freely—never left Tolstoy. […] He comes up with a flawed sketch of [a historical character for War and Peace], even though it contains the real facts and the real traits. [… T]he energy of trials, experiments, the energy of investigation compels him to describe again—a different person. This takes him years.”I
Readers less learned than Shklovsky may have intuited this much, but, until now, no one had undertaken to trace the years-long trials, experiments, and investigations that brought a “different person,” an Anna Karenina unlike the one Tolstoy had first envisioned, into existence. The central mystery of Creating Anna Karenina is indeed the emergence of that person, and its central revelation is the complex relationship between her and her “adoptive” father. As Blaisdell puts it, with customary vigor: “Anna was the character Tolstoy kept discovering, the one whose fate made him anxious and unhappy, the one whose momentum toward suicide gave her author terrifying visions of his own impulses.”
Over the last half decade, I have had the pleasure of editing Bob’s work for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has become one of our go-to contributors, weighing in on everything from Ulysses S. Grant to Karl Ove Knausgaard, but we have particularly come to value his takes on the Russian masters—and especially on Tolstoy. In 2018, praising Viv Groskop’s The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, Blaisdell limned the traits of that volume’s ideal reader: “you would have to have the confidence to know what you like, and to believe that books are like life, meant to be talked about, and that the lives of authors who have written world classics are inherently fascinating.”I The same holds, of course, for the ideal reader of this book. And it is unquestionably true of the creator of Creating Anna Karenina, to whom all such readers owe a debt.
I For a clear rejection of the purely biographical approach, see, for instance, Shklovsky’s “Letter to Tynyanov” in Third Factory, introduced and translated by Richard Sheldon (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), p. 61: “One must write not about Tolstoy, but about War and Peace.” The 1963 biography was translated into English by Olga Shartse and published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1978.
II Letter to N. N. Strakhov, April 8, 1878, PSS 62: 410-412.
III Viktor Shklovsky, The Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, intro. and trans. by Shushan Avagyan (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), p. 37.
IV Bob Blaisdell, “Tolstoy Untangled: On Donna Tussing Orwin’s ‘Simply Tolstoy’,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 25, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article /tolstoy-untangled-on-donna-orwins-simply-tolstoy/.
A Note on the Spellings of Russian Names
Let me offer a word about the various spellings from the English-language sources I have quoted. Transliterating Russian into English has evolved in the 134 years since Anna Karenina was first translated into English. The name Tolstoy sometimes used to appear as Tolstoi. The Cyrillic x is now customarily rendered as kh. Constance Garnett, whose translation (titled Anna Karenin, not Karenina) from 1901 is the one I have quoted throughout, renders the painter Mikhailov as Mihailov, which to my ear is closer to the Russian pronunciation than the potentially confusing and overemphasized k in kh. Rather than regularize my sources, I use the spellings each author or translator uses. In my own translations from Tolstoy’s letters and Russian sources, I try to conform to the conventions of the ALA-LC transliteration system, unless, for instance, the name through popular usage has more or less settled itself (e.g., Vronsky rather than Vronskiy; in the “Scientific Transliteration” system, sensible but odd-looking to most native English speakers, the spelling of Yasnaya Polyana becomes Jasnaja Poljana).
Introduction
When reading a work, especially a purely literary one, the chief interest lies in the character of the author as expressed in the work.
—Leo Tolstoy, diaryI
“I have nothing to hide from anyone in the world: all may know what I do.”
—Leo Tolstoy to his brother-in-law Stepan BersII
When Tolstoy started writing Anna Karenina, he was forty-four. He guessed that he would finish the novel, conceived as only a novella, in two weeks. Anna Karenina took him more than four years. Even after sketching
out the plot, it took him several months to reconceive Anna’s character. The driving motivation for him to commit to it as a serialized novel was that he was keen to buy horses; once the serialization started, however, nothing and no one, not even wild horses, could keep him on deadline. Several times he gave up or threatened to give up on the project. In about thirty of those fifty-three months he doesn’t seem to have done a lick of work on it. He agonized over the procrastination, but his artistic engagement with Anna’s character and her inevitable suicide probably tormented him even more.
When Tolstoy was in his seventies and was asked to reduce literature to one book, he chose David Copperfield. Ever since I read Anna Karenina for the first time when I was eighteen, my choice has been Anna Karenina. I read it at least twenty times in various translations before I decided to cut to the chase and learn Russian. After ten years I was able to read it in the original. Now, after repeated readings in Russian, it remains my book of books. This biographical study is the result of my quest to find out everything possible to know about what Tolstoy was doing during that period spanning the composition of this unprecedented novel. What sort of life was he living while writing—and while avoiding—the novel? During those four years, the challenges of the novel nagged at him through thick and thin, illness and health, death and birth, heaps of despair and moments of satisfaction. His biography is important because that novel is important.
In all the Russian and English biographies of him, the narrative of his Anna Karenina years has been recounted far too fast and loose. Even though many of his day-to-day movements and activities have been accounted for, I wanted to know them with the immediacy and depth that he continually gives us of his fictional people and places. But except in letters now and then, Tolstoy rarely described his own everyday life. It turns out that if we want to know what he, the artist, was thinking and feeling when he created Anna Karenina, the best source is that work itself.
Writing fiction was continually unsettling for him; the novel made him conscious of depths and fields of his thoughts and feelings. As he wrote, reread, and revised, to his surprise, despite that Anna was of a type he expressly despised, an adulterer living in high society St. Petersburg, he suddenly found her a new, real, sympathetic woman. From the point of view of the character Konstantin Levin meeting Anna for the first time, Tolstoy revealed his own personal artistic revelation:
While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her—her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and was also sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand her.III
And then, now that this extraordinary character had his sympathy and understanding, Tolstoy was faced with his own existential crisis. If she had everything—social standing, intelligence, beauty, love of her child, a steady marriage, vitality—how could she kill herself? Why did he, who also had everything (except beauty), find himself suicidal? It was as if he had walked into her bad dream and was sharing her fate. In his identification with her, her suicide became ominous.
The first chapter of this book shows Tolstoy trying to induce a state in which he could launch himself into a historical epic about the era of Peter the Great. The momentum he hoped would occur, as it had in the years of writing War and Peace (1863–1869), did not happen. He couldn’t give it legs. He had recently satisfied himself with a work of great effort and the finest of touches, his children’s primer known as the Azbuka. He had probably taken that project as far as it could go, though in the next two years, even after having started Anna Karenina, he would have to do a reconfiguring of it to make it popular. He was proud of the New Azbuka, but writing for the literacy instruction of children did not bring him to a critical realization of his own life, as Anna Karenina would.
Of the surviving manuscripts of drafts of Anna Karenina, some can be roughly dated, others can’t. In the transcribed manuscripts of redacted drafts, the editors show us that we have to settle for only the date after or before Tolstoy could have written a chapter or scene, and other times we can’t even know that. Despite those mysteries, we are always the lucky recipients of what he did publish, the glorious evidence that he left us on the hundreds of pages of what some of us think of as the world’s greatest novel. Sofia Tolstaya recopied some of the drafts as her husband wrote them, and she witnessed startling (and occasionally disappointing) transformations in his revisions. We can see that he made corrections on one set of galleys after another. He was fiercely meticulous about and protective of the writing when he was in its midst, but once the galleys were good to go, he was notoriously sloppy about the proofreading and often asked for help in completing that task.
A few years ago, as I proceeded through the letters from and memoirs about the mid-1870s, I often felt as if I were watching him the way his wife and friends watched him, wondering why he wasn’t writing. There he was, instead, going off to the Samara steppe to drink mare’s milk and buy horses or into the local woods to hunt. It continues to be surprising and pleasing to read of his interactions with his many children; but it’s also hard to see him and Sofia grieve over the deaths of close family members. At times he was short-tempered about the novel and while writing or trying to write it, he denounced it. We can sometimes imagine, in the face of contradictory evidence, that the novel might not survive his disgust with it. His friend Nikolai Strakhov and Sofia regularly worried that he really was going to abandon it.
* * *
There are various origin stories of Anna Karenina, but the only one that pans out is the grisly real-life incident that occurred at the Tolstoys’ local train station a year before he started the novel: “The fourth of this January [1872] at 7 in the evening an unknown young woman, well dressed, arriving at the Yasenki Moscow-Kursk railway in Krapivensky county, walked up to the rails at the time of the passing of the freight train number 77, crossed herself and threw herself on the rails under the train, and was cut in half. An enquiry has been made about the incident.”IV
Tolstoy and Sofia knew the “unknown young woman” of the news article: Anna Stepanovna Pirogova was the thirty-five-year-old mistress and housekeeper of one of the Tolstoys’ closest neighbors, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Bibikov, a forty-nine-year-old landowner and widower.
Sofia soon wrote her sister Tatyana Kuzminskiy about it. Tatyana had spent many months at the Tolstoys’ Yasnaya Polyana estate: “You remember, at Bibikov’s, Anna Stepanovna? Well, that Anna Stepanovna was jealous of Bibikov for all the governesses. Finally, of the latest, she got so jealous that Aleksandr Nikolaevich got angry and quarreled with her, and the consequence of which was that Anna Stepanovna left him altogether and went to Tula. For three days she was lost to sight; finally in Yasenki, on the third day at 5:00 o’clock in the evening, she appeared at the station with a bag. There she gave her driver a letter to Bibikov; she asked him to get and bring her tea and gave him one ruble. Bibikov didn’t accept the letter and when the driver returned again to the station he found out that Anna Stepanovna had rushed under a car and the train crushed her to death. Of course she did this on purpose. The investigators came… and they read this letter. In the letter it was written: ‘You are my killer; you will be happy with her if murderers can be happy. If you want to see me, you can view my body on the rails at Yasenki.’ What a story! For a few days we’ve been going around like crazies, getting together and explaining it. Bibikov is quite calm, says Levochka [Sofia’s pet name for her husband], and that his nerves are strong, he’ll get by. Levochka and Uncle Kostya went to look when they did the autopsy.”V
Sofia’s tone suggests that she didn’t see this event as a tragedy, and apparently neither did her husband. Tolstoy never wrote about or was quoted speaking about Pirogova’s suicide, but he certainly
told Sofia about it. In addition to letters Sofia wrote to her sister, she noted in her diary: “Lev Nikolayevich saw her, with her head crushed, her body naked and mutilated, in the Yasenki barracks.” Tolstoy was sensitive and impressionable, but if a war, a guillotining, an autopsy, or a famine was happening nearby, he wanted to see it for himself. Sofia continues: “He was terribly shaken. He had known Anna Stepanovna as a tall, stout woman, Russian in face and character, a brunette with grey eyes, not beautiful but attractive.”VI
When Anna Karenina makes her first appearance in the novel, in a scene Tolstoy wrote two years later, she dazzles us and Vronsky as she exits her train from St. Petersburg in Moscow:
Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage, and at the door of the compartment he stopped short to make room for a lady who was getting out.
With the insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady’s appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society. He begged pardon, and was getting into the carriage, but felt he must glance at her once more; not that she was very beautiful, not on account of the elegance and modest grace which were apparent in her whole figure, 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 round, she too turned her head. Her shining grey eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him, and then promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as though seeking someone. In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.VII
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