Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Leo Tolstoy working at the round table, 1891, by Ilya Repin.XIV

  “Patient?!” exclaims the ghost of exasperated Sofia. Her exhausting labor of recopying night after night his handwritten drafts was an act of faith and love by a devoted admirer. This man, her husband, was writing for the ages, and she was his helpmate. In the mid- and late 1860s, when the War and Peace galleys would be set in type by printers in Moscow from Sofia’s recopied manuscripts, they would be sent back to Tolstoy, and “the work would begin all over again.”

  At first only corrections, omitted letters, and stops would be marked in the margins, then occasional words would be changed, then entire sentences, and then entire paragraphs would be taken out and others substituted. When he had finished with them, the proofs looked fairly clean in places and black with corrections in others. They could not be returned because no one but the Countess was able to disentangle the maze of corrections, lines, and words. She would spend another night copying. In the morning a neat stack of pages in her small, precise handwriting would be on her desk, ready to be mailed. Tolstoy would pick them up to look them over “for the last time,” and in the evening they would be back again with everything changed and covered with corrections.

  “Sonya [Tolstoy’s pet name for Sofia], darling, excuse me; again I have spoiled your work; I will never do it again,” he once said with an apologetic air, showing her the pages. “We will send them off tomorrow.”

  Often “tomorrow” dragged on for weeks and months.XV

  The biographer Tikhon Polner goes on to describe Tolstoy’s summer routines in times of contentedness, which means almost certainly before 1875:

  Tolstoy rose quite late, came out of the bedroom in a bathrobe and, with his beard tangled and uncombed, went to dress downstairs in his study. He emerged, dressed in a gray shirt and feeling energetic and refreshed, and went into the dining room to drink tea. The children were already eating their lunch. When no guests were present, he never lingered in the dining room. Carrying a glass of tea, he went back to his study. […] The Countess settled in the drawing room to sew clothes for one of the children or to finish copying a manuscript that she had not had time to get through the night before. Peasant men and women, with their children, frequently came to her with their ills; she talked to them, tried to help them, and distributed, free of charge, standard medicines, which she kept in the house [Sofia was a doctor’s daughter]. Until three or four in the afternoon complete quiet reigned in the house. “Lev is at work!” Then he came out of his study, went for a walk or a swim. Sometimes he went with a gun and a dog, sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot. At five the bell in front of the house was rung. The children ran to wash their hands. Everybody gathered for dinner. Very often Tolstoy was late. He came in much embarrassed, apologized to his wife, and poured himself a silver whiskey glass full of homemade brandy. Usually he was hungry and ate anything that was already on the table. The Countess tried to restrain him, and asked him not to eat so much cereal because the meat and vegetables were still to come.

  “Your liver will bother you again!”

  He never listened and kept asking for more until he had his fill.

  With great animation he recounted his impressions of the afternoon. Everyone enjoyed them. He joked with the children and with anyone at the table, and no one could resist his gay mood. After dinner he worked in his study again, and at eight the entire family gathered around the samovar. They talked, read aloud, played, sang, and very often the children who were in the same room were included. For the children the day ended at ten o’clock, but voices could be heard in the drawing room until much later. Cards and chess were always popular, and so were endless arguments. Tolstoy sat at the piano and the Countess played four-hands with him, trying desperately to keep time. Occasionally her sister Tatyana sang for them. […] Summer in Yasnaya Polyana was a continuous round of festivities. Their relatives were irresistibly attracted by the charming family. […]XVI

  When he had married at age thirty-four in September 1862, Tolstoy’s idea of happiness was just this: two parents, a gang of kids, activity and fruitfulness.

  His friends and family associated Levin, the costar of Anna Karenina, with Lev Tolstoy, and, at first impression, so should we. At the beginning of the novel, Levin, thirty-four, lives on an estate that even today resembles Yasnaya Polyana. At the same age as Tolstoy was in 1862, Levin undergoes the same agonies of disappointment and hope in regard to his beloved eighteen-year-old Kitty, who resembles in many ways Sofia Tolstaya in 1862, when Sofia was eighteen. On the other hand, notes Polner, “Levin lacks Tolstoy’s genius, and is therefore at times quite boring.”XVII To remind ourselves: by the age of thirty-four, the ever-fascinating, occasionally exasperating genius Tolstoy had written the superb trilogy of novellas, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, as well as other world-class novellas, stories, and pedagogical essays. Levin isn’t an artist; the book he is writing about Russian farming will be of no interest to anyone but three or four people besides himself.

  Knowing Anna Karenina as it is, with the two primary storylines devoted to Anna and Levin, it can seem surprising that Tolstoy didn’t invent the Tolstoy-like Levin for Anna Karenina until after several drafts of early chapters. It seems that he started to feel the need for a predictable character to lean on and steady himself; as the novel took hold of him, 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; by contrast, everything that Levin does and feels was familiar to Tolstoy. Episodes about Levin allowed Tolstoy to narrate through calm seas. Even if the novel becomes about Levin’s development, he doesn’t change so much as fulfill his role.

  In the mid-1860s, a few years into marriage, Tolstoy proudly announced to his confidante Alexandrine that he had found happiness:

  You remember I wrote you once saying that people are wrong when they search for a happiness that means no work, no falsehoods, no bitterness, and only serenity and bliss. I was wrong! Such happiness exists; I have known it for the last three years, and each day it becomes deeper and more serene. The material that creates this happiness is not particularly attractive: children who—excuse me—wet themselves and cry; a wife who is nursing one, leading the other by the hand, and constantly accusing me of not being aware that they are on the verge of death; and paper and ink, which are my tools for describing events that have never taken place, and emotions of people who have never existed.XVIII

  I like to keep these images of Tolstoy in mind; one is of him in the chaos and joy of young family life; the other is of him as the artist amazed and satisfied that he is making something real from his imagination. In the midst of his early domestic life, he was composing War and Peace. This is the life Sofia would remember and long for; this was the sweet privileged family life that Tolstoy would later, from guilt, try to renounce.

  Even in 1872, the Tolstoy family was the happy family supposedly like all other happy families. Sofia, twenty-eight, married ten years, had been pregnant six times and had delivered safely six times. All the children were alive and well. Tolstoy was the proud papa of a huge crew that he was expecting to get even bigger.

  His October 1872 letter to Alexandrine, interrupted a few pages ago, goes on. Most of Tolstoy’s letters are not newsy or conversationally relaxed, but this one is. In St. Petersburg, the capital, Alexandrine at this time was the governess of Tsar Alexander II’s daughter Maria, who later married the second son of Queen Victoria of England. Alexandrine never had children, but she was apparently, lately, curious about Tolstoy’s. Though a relative, Alexandrine had never been a visitor to Yasnaya Polyana and Sofia only met her husband’s longtime correspondent for the first time in 1877.

  Tolstoy reminded Alexandrine that she had given him “a subject for my letter which I would like to write on—namely my children.”

  Here they are:

  The eldest [nine] is fair-haired—and not b
ad-looking. There is something weak and forbearing in his expression, and very gentle. When he laughs, it’s not contagious, but when he cries I can hardly refrain from crying, too. Everyone says he is like my elder brother. I’m afraid to believe it. It would be too good. My brother’s chief characteristic was not egoism and not unselfishness, but a strict middle course. He didn’t sacrifice himself for anybody, but he didn’t get in anybody’s way, far less do anybody any harm. He kept his joys and sorrows to himself. Seryozha is clever—he has a mathematical mind and a feeling for art, he’s an excellent pupil, good at jumping and gymnastics; but he’s gauche and absent-minded. There’s little originality in him. He’s dependent on the physical. When he’s well he’s a very different boy from when he’s ill.

  Tolstoy’s favorite elder brother was Nikolai (1823–1860); for Tolstoy, Nikolai’s death resounded for many years. What may seem most surprising to us in this letter is how modern and involved a father Tolstoy was. At least through the 1870s, he knew his children as deeply as his wife did. He was the one they clowned and played around with; for all her attention to and worry about them, Sofia was more reserved with them. “She rarely laughed or enjoyed jokes, and as a deeply religious woman she tended to see the business of loving and caring for her husband and children as bound up with inevitable suffering, sorrow, and sacrifice. Perhaps,” speculates R. F. Christian, “this explains why the children always addressed her in the formal ‘you,’ even though she was always there to scold or reassure them, while their father, who was much more distant and inaccessible, was always ‘thou.’ ”XIX

  Tolstoy then described for Alexandrine his second son:

  Ilya is the 3rd child [six years old]. He’s never been ill. He’s big-boned, fair-skinned, ruddy-complexioned and glowing. A bad pupil. Always thinking about what he’s told not to. Thinks up games himself. Neat and tidy; possessive; “mine” very important to him. Hot-tempered, violent, pugnacious; but also tender and very sensitive. Sensual—fond of eating and having a quiet lie down. When he eats blackcurrant jelly and buckwheat porridge his lips smack.

  Perhaps that very morning those childish lips had smacked!

  Original in everything. When he cries, he’s angry at the same time, and unpleasant, but when he laughs everyone laughs, too.

  The character in Anna Karenina who takes a similarly quick bead on children’s personality traits is Aunt Anna, who knows and gauges her brother Stiva’s gang of five:

  “Merciful heavens, Tanya! You’re the same age as my Seryozha,” she added, addressing the little girl as she ran in. She took her in her arms and kissed her. “Delightful child, delightful! Show me them all.”

  She mentioned them, not only remembering the names, but the years, months, characters, and illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not but appreciate that.

  Knowing the details of the children’s lives meant so much to Tolstoy, and in the beginning of the novel it means so much to Anna and to Dolly, the mother of those five children. Dolly, not her husband Stiva, however, is the parent who keenly distinguishes the characters of the children. A sign of Anna’s future disengagement and loss of footing will occur with the birth of her second child, a girl. She will know less about her toddler than does Vronsky, the father, or even than her husband Karenin, who acts as a foster father.

  In the letter to Alexandrine, Tolstoy was fascinated and amused by his son Ilya:

  Everything forbidden has its attractions for him, and he gets to know about it at once. When still a little fellow he overheard my pregnant wife saying she could feel the movement of her child. For a long time his favourite game was to stuff something round underneath his jacket, stroke it with a tense hand and whisper with a smile: “It’s baby.” He would also stroke all the bumps where the furniture springs had broken and say “baby.” Recently, when I was writing stories for my Primer he invented one of his own: “A boy asked: ‘Does God go to the lavatory?’ God punished him and the boy had to spend all his life going to the lavatory.’ ”

  Tolstoy never wrote such a letter again; he never again surveyed his family in such a pleased, proud, and detailed way. At this time he expressed no regrets about their way of life, even if he betrayed the anxiety of any parent who foresees future calamities:

  If I die, the elder boy will turn out a splendid fellow, wherever he gets to, and will almost certainly be top at school, but Ilya will come to grief unless he has a strict supervisor and one he loves.

  Tolstoy illustrated his point about his boys in his usual brilliant, apparently simple, narrative mode:

  In summer we used to go bathingXX; Seryozha would ride himself, and I would put Ilya in the saddle behind me. I came out one morning and they were both waiting. Ilya was wearing a hat and carrying a towel, all neat and tidy and beaming, but Seryozha had come running up from somewhere, hatless and out of breath. “Find your hat,” I said, “or I won’t take you.” Seryozha ran hither and thither—but no hat. “It’s no good, I won’t take you without a hat. It will be a lesson for you, you’re always losing everything.” He was on the verge of tears. I set off with Ilya and waited to see if he showed any sympathy. None at all. He just beamed, and talked about the horse. My wife found Seryozha in tears. He’d looked for his hat and couldn’t find it. She guessed that her brother, who had gone off early in the morning to fish, had put on Seryozha’s hat. She wrote me a note to say that Seryozha was probably not to blame for losing his hat, and she was sending him on to me in a cap. (She had guessed rightly.) I heard rapid footsteps on the bridge leading to the bathing-place and Seryozha came running up (he’d lost the note on the way) and began to sob. Then Ilya did too, and so did I a little.

  Tolstoy loved his sons but may not have been as charmed by them as he was by his daughters. And in Anna Karenina, Stiva Oblonsky may have shared Tolstoy’s own affinity for daughters over sons:

  Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevitch recognized the voices of Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tanya, his eldest girl) were heard outside the door. They were carrying something, and dropped it.

  “I told you not to sit passengers on the roof,” said the little girl in English; “there, pick them up!”

  “Everything’s in confusion,” thought Stepan Arkadyevitch; “there are the children running about by themselves.” And going to the door, he called them. They threw down the box, that represented a train, and came in to their father.

  The little girl, her father’s favorite, ran up boldly, embraced him, and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the smell of scent that came from his whiskers. At last the little girl kissed his face, which was flushed from his stooping posture and beaming with tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her father held her back.

  “How is mamma?” he asked, passing his hand over his daughter’s smooth, soft little neck. “Good morning,” he said, smiling to the boy, who had come up to greet him. He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and always tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond with a smile to his father’s chilly smile.XXI

  Tolstoy’s magic with the character of Stiva is that the ever charming, ever conscious socializer, not to mention the ever calculating philanderer, never seems to be a stand-in for the author. And yet in Stiva’s loving behavior as a father we do see something of his author.

  Tolstoy continued to Alexandrine:

  Tanya is 8. Everyone says she is like Sonya [again, Tolstoy’s usual affectionate name for Sofia], and I believe it, even though it’s a good thing to believe, but I also believe it because it’s obvious. If she had been Adam’s eldest daughter and there had been no children younger than her, she would have been an unhappy girl. Her greatest pleasure is to play with little children. She obviously finds physical enjoyment in holding and touching a child’s body. Her avowed dream now is to have children. The other day we went to Tula to have her portrait done. She began to ask me to buy a penknife for Seryozha, then something else for another child and something else for a thir
d. She knows exactly what will give most pleasure to each one. I didn’t buy anything for her, and she never for a moment thought about herself. On our way home I said “Tanya, are you asleep?” “No.” “What are you thinking about?” “I’m thinking when we get home how I’ll ask mama whether little Lev has been good, and how I’ll give him a present, and somebody else a present, and how Seryozha will pretend he doesn’t like it, but will really like it very much.”

  It seems, especially in this narrative mode, that Tolstoy understands his children the way he understands his characters. He appreciates what they do and what they say, their physical manifestations, their movements and inclinations. The proud father’s frank evaluations, on the other hand, might take us aback:

  She’s not very clever. She doesn’t like to put her mind to work, but the mechanism in her head is sound.

  His next remark, about her probable conventionality, actually more reveals his own conventionality at the time: