Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  She’ll be a splendid wife if God should give her a husband. And I’m prepared to give a huge prize to anyone who could make a new woman out of her.

  Tolstoy had to be imagining that he would continue being the generous-hearted father he was now. He turned out, instead, in his fifties and beyond, to be rather possessive of his grown-up daughters, and, as it happened, Tanya wasn’t conventional and made herself something of “a new woman” on her own: she married late, to a widower, and only had one child.XXII

  The 4th—Lev [three years old]. Good-looking, clever, a good memory, graceful. Any clothes fit him as though made for him. Anything other people do he can do too, and very cleverly and well. I don’t understand him properly yet.

  The 5th—Masha. Two years old [actually only 20 months], the one who nearly cost Sonya her life. A weak, sickly child; milk-white body, curly fair hair, large, strange blue eyes—strange because of their deep, serious expression. Very clever, and unattractive to look at. She’s going to be an enigma. She’ll suffer, and search and find nothing; but she’ll go on searching for ever for what is most attainable.

  Masha’s birth and Sofia’s consequent nearly fatal puerperal fever would become part of Anna Karenina’s story. (I’ll discuss this unhappy connection in a later chapter.)

  Tolstoy has described his children’s characters, but they don’t seem limited or fixed. He squares them up in his vision and predicts something of their fates, and their fates are nearly their characters:

  The 6th—Pyotr [four months old]. A giant. An enormous, fascinating baby in a bonnet. He puts his elbows out and tries to crawl somewhere, and my wife gets agitated and excited and het up when she takes him in her arms, but I don’t understand it at all. I know he has great physical reserves, but I don’t know whether there is also anything for which they are needed. For this reason I don’t like children less than 2 or 3 years old—I don’t understand them. […]XXIII

  By this point we should wonder about Sofia’s point of view. Pyotr was the last, of course, for now. Tolstoy wanted lots and lots of children, didn’t want to stop having them, while Sofia was tired and wanted a pause. Contraception was available (Sofia knew more about it than—we discover late in the novel—Stiva’s wife, Dolly, knows), but Tolstoy scorned contraception, believing sex for sex’s sake (as a married man) was immoral. He needed to temper his shame about his lustfulness by believing that the act could result in procreation.

  After the birth of their second baby in 1864, Sofia was suffering from cracked nipples, and when she begged Tolstoy to hire a wet nurse, he threw fits. He was impatient about maintaining his complete dream of family life, and he felt nursing shouldn’t include anybody but the mother and baby. Readers may remember Levin’s disappointment in himself when Kitty has their baby and how its helplessness bothers him, but by 1872, Tolstoy was accustomed to his deficient understanding of infants.

  However we judge Tolstoy as a father or husband, Anna Karenina shows us that the dynamics of family life fascinated him. Through Tolstoy we, family-focused or not, are captivated by the Oblonskys. We become thoughtful about family dynamics; we recognize the unfairness and simultaneously accept that Stiva maintains the sympathy of friends and family despite his cheating heart.

  Sofia Tolstaya’s husband was more dependable than Dolly Oblonskaya’s, but Sofia’s happiness was more obviously tied to Tolstoy’s than Dolly’s to Stiva’s. Though Sofia had grown weary of copying out portions of Tolstoy’s Azbuka, as it wasn’t fiction for adults and didn’t engage her, in the fall of 1872 she was looking forward to helping him with his grand new historical novel about Peter the Great’s era.

  That fall, just a couple of days after Tolstoy’s proud letter to Alexandrine, Sofia wrote to her sister Tatyana: “Levochka has just begun a novel and is very happy and enjoying his labor to come.”XXIV

  If he was “very happy,” she was very happy.

  * * *

  In early November 1872, Tolstoy wrote to a close friend, the poet Afanasy Fet, with whom he often shared domestic news: “We’ve just now all gone skating as a family.” (The winter freeze had already occurred in Yasnaya Polyana, 120 miles south of Moscow.) Afanasy Fet (1820–1892), one of Tolstoy’s best friends in this period, was a famous poet whose work Tolstoy usually greatly admired. Fet and Tolstoy were at the time as if on the same Russian Olympic literature team. Fet was someone to whom Tolstoy never condescended. Fet never documented his friendship with Tolstoy, and neither did Tolstoy with him. They shared an interest in literature but probably an even larger one in horses. Fet was a family man, so they also regularly exchanged news about their children and wives. He mentioned to Fet, seemingly with high hopes, the impending publication of the Azbuka. But as for the Peter the Great novel, there was a stall: “I’m readying everything to write, but I can’t say that I have begun.”XXV

  Tolstoy devoured books and kept notebooks for his research on Peter. He found that one little detail could give him the essence of a moment or of a character.

  In Sofia’s “Various Notes for Future Reference,” which had a separate place in her diaries, she observed:

  He jots down in various little notebooks anything that might come in useful for an accurate description of the manners, customs, clothes, houses, and the general way of life in this period—particularly that of the peasants and those far from court and the Tsar. Elsewhere he jots down any ideas he may have about the characters, plot, poetic passages, and so on. It’s like a mosaic. He is so immersed in the details that he came back especially early from hunting yesterday, as he wanted to go through various documents to find out whether one writer was correct in saying that they wore high collars with the short kaftan in the days of Peter the Great. L. thinks these were worn only with the long coats, particularly amongst the lower orders. […]XXVI

  Amid everything that he had collected and digested about Peter the Great, he was nevertheless stymied.

  Sofia had been watching him like a hawk for any sign of movement with his writing. On November 19, she wrote her younger brother, Stepan:

  Levochka sits, surrounded by a heap of books, portraits, pictures, and frowning, reads, makes marks, makes notes. At night, when the children have lain down to sleep, he tells me his plans and what he wants to write; sometimes he’s disenchanted, goes into a terrible despair and thinks that nothing’s going to come out, and sometimes he’s so close to getting to work with great excitement; but one still can’t say that he wrote, only that he prepared himself [to do so].XXVII

  Her progress report to her sister Tatyana at the end of November was more hopeful: “Now Levochka is especially heartily working on the story of Peter the Great. He gathers material, reads, writes, labors terribly, and wants to write a novel from that epoch. We’re leading more than ever a solitary and laborious life.”XXVIII Sofia, having grown up in Moscow, on the Kremlin grounds, often rued their “solitary” life. Despite that the Tolstoy family’s letters and diaries make it seem as if they had a constant stream of visitors, Yasnaya Polyana was plain and simple country living; visitors necessarily came a long way; traveling there was a slow adventure until the mid-1860s, when a railroad station connected Moscow with Tula, the small city a dozen miles from Tolstoy’s estate.

  At the beginning of December 1872, Tolstoy took a train to Moscow for the baptism of his grandniece.XXIX He often declared he didn’t like trains. However, to catch Tolstoy out in contradictions or seeming contradictions is easy; he was usually the first to point them out. Despite Tolstoy’s dislike of trains, he continually used them and would eventually, at the age of eighty-two, run away from home by train and finally die beside the tracks in a stationmaster’s house. Trains are the locomotion that bring Anna into and out of the novel; they could bring Tolstoy up to or back from Moscow in a couple of hours. On this quick little trip, Tolstoy went to a Moscow bookstore and bought seven more books on Peter; he met with a literary friend, Pavel Golokhvastov, who gave him a list of his own Peter-related books; Tolstoy later picked
thirteen of them he wanted to borrow.

  Back home from Moscow a few days later, he wrote Alexandrine a newsy, cheerful note, concluding with the mention that “in the winter [we’re] at work from morning to night.”XXX

  That parting line suggests he was not blocked about the writing, but he was in fact stuck.

  In mid-December Tolstoy wrote to his most important friend of this decade, the critic Nikolai Strakhov, and admitted, “I have not been working. I have surrounded myself with books on Peter I and his time; I read, take notes, endeavor to write, and I can not. But what an age for an artist. Wherever one looks, everything is a problem, a riddle whose solution is possible only through poetry. The entire knot of Russian life rests here. It even seems to me that nothing will come of my preparations. I have already been taking aim too long, and I am too excited. I will not be distressed if nothing comes of this.”XXXI He seems to have begun preparing himself to abandon the project.

  The holidays, a festive time at Yasnaya Polyana ever since Lev and Sofia’s marriage, were shared with Tolstoy’s old friend Dmitrii Alekseevich D’yakov (a widower) D’yakov’s daughter, and a few relatives.

  Tolstoy had begged his lone surviving brother Sergei to come and bring his daughter and also wondered if Sergei could lend him fifteen hundred rubles. For the next few years, it would not be unusual for Tolstoy to rummage for money to buy land or horses. This is one area where Levin seems more responsible than Tolstoy; Levin is careful about money. Tolstoy, like Stiva Oblonsky, sometimes began trying to buy before he had the money; he had more wants than means. Tolstoy explained to Sergei that the Azbuka had been “a fiasco” and “won’t make money,” and it would be best if he could pay him back in a year, with interest.XXXII

  In the new year 1873’s first letter, Tolstoy wrote to thank Golokhvastov for the books about Peter, but complained that he hadn’t been able to shake off a gloomy feeling: “I’m this whole winter in so heavy, abnormal a state. I’m tormented, I’m agitated, I’m horrified by this submission, I despair, and I’m sure leaning toward that conviction that nothing besides torment is coming out of this.”XXXIII

  The biographer Nikolai Gusev highlights Tolstoy’s attempt to light the fire of imagination, pointing out that “on this very day” of his frustrated letter to Golokhvastov, “he writes a letter to his acquaintance V. K. Istomin, working in Novocherkassk, with the request to paint ‘a picture of that place’ above the Azov, where the military action under Peter had taken place. He wanted to know: ‘which bank of the Don […] is there—where was it high, where was it narrow? Were there hills, mounds? Were there bushes […] what kind of grass? Was there feather grass? Were there reeds? What kind of wildlife? And in the main currents of the Don […] what was the main character it had, what kind of bank?’ He asks [Istomin] to name for him the books that his questions were interested in and to indicate ‘whether there was anything… of Peter’s Azovian campaign?’ ”XXXIV

  He wanted those eyewitness descriptions of Peter’s campaign. He wanted to reengage himself the way he almost effortlessly became engaged by the people and customs in War and Peace. But where his imagination excitedly made connections in the mid-1860s to the first two decades of the 19th century, he was now lost and waiting. He had researched and researched, so why couldn’t he transport himself in his imagination to 1700?

  Gusev counts thirty-three starts of the Peter novel and divides them into six categories of focus.XXXV As summarized, they seem like trial balloons that couldn’t quite carry Tolstoy away. Peter was just too awful—his cruelty, his participation in torture, his killing of his own son. The whole epoch, remembered Stepan Bers, made Tolstoy feel “unsympathetic.” Peter’s life and character, which had been fascinating to Tolstoy, ended up disgusting him.

  Meanwhile, he was also aggravated by the Azbuka’s poor sales and reviews, and so sure was he (he would be proved right) that the Azbuka deserved success, it would divide his attention and he would spend a good portion of the next year and a half revising it and recasting it.

  Near the end of January, “Tolstoy journeyed to his brother’s at Pirogovo for the burial of his child.”XXXVI From that bare note in the first volume of Gusev’s Letopis’ (a chronicle of almost eight hundred pages accounting for Tolstoy’s day-to-day or week-to-week movements and activities from childhood to 1890), my imagination began asking for details. For starters, how did the bad news arrive? Did a servant of Sergei’s carry a letter and make his way those thirty miles to Yasnaya Polyana on horseback or in a sleigh? What was Tolstoy thinking as he took the long cold midwinter journey to Sergei’s? Did he become agitated about his own children’s vulnerability?

  As has often happened in the course of researching Tolstoy’s years writing Anna Karenina, I wanted the details about his life presented as vividly and significantly as only he himself could present them. I wonder if Tolstoy set off similarly to how Nikita and Vasili would one day set out in his novella Master and Man:

  […] the day was windy, dull, and cold, with more than twenty degrees Fahrenheit of frost. Half the sky was hidden by a lowering dark cloud. In the yard it was quiet, but in the street the wind was felt more keenly. The snow swept down from a neighbouring shed and whirled about in the corner near the bath-house.

  Hardly had Nikita [“Man”] driven out of the yard and turned the horse’s head to the house, before Vasili Andreevich [“Master”] emerged from the high porch in front of the house with a cigarette in his mouth [Tolstoy smoked cigarettes even into his sixties], and wearing a cloth-covered sheep-skin coat tightly girdled low at his waist, and stepped onto the hard-trodden snow which squeaked under the leather soles of his felt boots, and stopped. Taking a last whiff of his cigarette he threw it down, stepped on it, and letting the smoke escape through his moustache and looking askance at the horse that was coming up, began to tuck in his sheepskin collar on both sides of his ruddy face, clean-shaven except for the moustache, so that his breath should not moisten the collar.XXXVII

  While Master Vasili is venturing out into that wintry day on business, Tolstoy’s purpose in 1873 was to console his brother and his brother’s family.

  Tolstoy wrote a letter to Fet shortly after the funeral of Sergei’s child. In it he reflected on the importance of religion in dealing with death and discussed details he could not have written to his childless bachelor friend Strakhov or mentioned to his own reasonably anxious wife. That is, amid the awkwardness of the ceremony of death, what do you say, what do you do? There’s something practical to do and there’s the absurdity of religious ceremony, but the ceremony somehow helps:

  […] I recently visited my brother; a child of his had died and was being buried. There were priests, and a pink coffin, and everything there ought to be. My brother and I took the same view about religious rites as you do, and when we were together we couldn’t help expressing to one another a feeling almost of revulsion at this ritualism. But then I began to think: well, what could my brother have done to carry the decomposing body of his child out of the house in the end? How should it have been carried out? By a coachman in a sack? And where should it be put, how should it be buried? What, generally speaking, is a fitting way to end things? Is there anything better than a requiem incense, etc.? (I, at least, can’t think of anything.) And what about growing weak and dying? Should one wet oneself, s…XXXVIII, and nothing more? That’s no good.XXXIX

  Tolstoy was edging toward a conviction that he would describe later in Confession: those human social activities that make everyday life possible for the majority of people in the world have “something” to them and shouldn’t be held in contempt by nonbelievers. For now, he concluded:

  […] The remarkable thing about religion is that for so many centuries and for so many millions of people it has rendered a service, the very greatest service that any human thing can render on this occasion. With such a task, how can it be logical? It is an absurdity, but the one out of many millions of absurdities which is suitable for this occasion. There is somet
hing in it.

  It’s only to you that I allow myself to write such letters. […]XL

  With Fet, he sometimes extended himself and wrote his feelings directly onto the page. The postscript to this letter has been left out in R. F. Christian’s English translation:

  My letter is wild because I’m terribly out of spirits. My work is underway—terribly difficult. Preparations of studying are not finished, the plan is completely building up, but the strength, feeling, all that is less and less. A day of health and three not.XLI

  Peter’s world was not where Tolstoy wanted to go. He could feel his wife and friends looking expectantly at him. It’s as if his well-wishers wanted to travel with him to the launch of his new project, but instead all they were seeing was his continual repacking for it.

  Meanwhile, he was so testy that he responded to Alexandrine’s letter of praise of War and Peace by scoffing that to him that novel was “completely disgusting,” and while trying to decide how to prepare it for inclusion in an eight-volume edition of his collected works (the last four volumes contained that novel), he had experienced “the feeling of despair, shame.”XLII Tolstoy became even more irritable every time he thought about the Azbuka and its unhappy reception, and he warned Alexandrine off his pride and joy:

  Please don’t look at my Primer. You haven’t taught little children, you’re far removed from the people, and you will see nothing in it. I’ve put more work and love into it than into anything else I’ve done, and I know that this is the one important work of my life. It will be appreciated in years’ time or so by those children who study from it.XLIII

  He had a remedy for the chronic problem of education in Russia, and he resented the authorities for not letting him apply it.