Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Or, to try another analogy, he was like an architect designing what he thought was a summer cottage and it became, instead, a cathedral. Because it was being built on his own land, on his own dime, the transformation of its size did not inhibit him.

  It’s hard to think of Tolstoy as naïve, but there was something naïve about his time estimates in regard to creative works. He wrote Strakhov:

  If I finish it, I’ll publish it as a separate book, but I very much want you to read it. Will you undertake to read the proofs, with a view to its being published in Petersburg?XV

  More than four years later, in January of 1878, the book edition of Anna Karenina, its proofreading shepherded and completed by Strakhov, would hit the bookshops.

  But Tolstoy was not someone who sent hasty letters. He was self-conscious enough, self-aware enough, that he did not send this March 25 letter to Strakhov until a couple of months later.

  At the end of March, twelve days after he had begun Anna Karenina, he took another try at outing himself about the new novel. Having exclaimed his praise of Pushkin’s fiction, Tolstoy told his friend Pavel Golokhvastov: “My new study of it made a powerful impression on me. I’m working, but not at all on what I intended.”XVI

  But he didn’t send this letter right away, either. For the first eight weeks that spring, the only people who knew what he was now working on were Sofia and her sister Tatyana. Perhaps he didn’t want to set up expectations again, to be asked about the new project’s progress. But it was going well, and good news can wait.

  * * *

  There is a rival “origin” story of the novel, invented by SofiaXVII:

  Yesterday afternoon he told me he had had the idea of writing about a married woman of noble birth who ruined herself. He said his purpose was to make this woman pitiful, not guilty, and he told me that no sooner had he imagined this character clearly than the men and other characters he had thought up all found their places in the story. “It’s suddenly become clear to me,” he said. He decided yesterday that the educated peasant he had thought up would be a bailiff.XVIII

  Sofia will prove a valuable but fitful diary-keeper and memoirist. Recounting her life in her diaries and a memoir, however, she was often content to approximate. She obliviously paraphrased or misquoted even herself; she more than occasionally related inconsistent or contradictory details; she also had bouts of willful or accidental forgetfulness.

  She wrote that note above, she claimed, on February 24, 1870, but this entry was not on the pages of her usual diary. Her husband’s idea does sound uncannily like Anna Karenina, notwithstanding the bailiff. But we know from Tolstoy’s drafts over the first year of actual composition that there was no such realization of the characters orbiting around the star Anna.

  He saw his original “Anna” as guilty as sin. He did not come to the story with sympathy or even pity for her, a cheating wife. Tolstoy would never have thought for a moment about how “pitiful” and “not guilty” Sofia would have been if she had run off with another man. As it was, Tolstoy could lose his wits if Sofia just smilingly poured tea for a male guest or sat at the piano next to an attentive male and ran her hands over the keys. Tolstoy, whose hair-trigger jealousy was well matched by Sofia’s, is unlikely to have told her that he wanted to make the Anna character “pitiful, not guilty.”XIX In conversation Tolstoy never expressed enlightened views about women. His art, the revelation of his deepest, best self, showed his enlightenment, and has made us realize the keenest feelings and thoughts of a brilliant, sympathetic woman, Anna; otherwise, his everyday remarks about women were those of a conventional aristocratic Russian male of the 19th century.

  Tolstoy’s first impulse in telling the story to a pregnant Sofia in 1870 would most probably have been to remind her what happened to women who ran off from their husbands. The real Anna Karenina was going to develop from his artistic and morally greater response. When he began the plans and drafts he condemned the Anna character and then, many pages into the drafts, began to comprehend her and, with misgivings, love her.

  Tolstoy believed art happened only when the artist saw the humanity of the people about whom he was telling a story. As he wrote his fiction, Tolstoy tried to demand of himself that he deal with what he had actually created rather than with the confinements of his own initial judgments and conceptions. His art challenged his own and everyone else’s conventionality.

  * * *

  Before we meet Anna in Part 1, before Tolstoy invented that impressive introduction to the novel’s protagonist, he had written hundreds of pages of drafts.

  We owe to Sofia our being able to read those scattered plans, drafts, and false starts of the novel. She saved everything she could of what he wrote. However frustrating or defensive her commentary could be, she was also the greatest of Tolstoy’s assistants and always expressed more sense than he about the current and future value of his work.

  While most of the drafts of Anna Karenina are not dated, one that is is from March 27, 1873, nine days after he began. Nikolai Gusev, Tolstoy’s biographer and latter-day secretary, questions the authenticity of that precise date, as it is based on an unknown hand’s notation.XX But let’s look at this “Variant No. 6” anyway, which at about 1,800 words could have been composed in one day or even one sitting. It has an epigraph, “Vengeance is Mine” (the capitalization of “Mine” indicates that it is God’s vengeance); the same epigraph would expand by a few words in the final version.

  By this date, Tolstoy had already invented Anna’s brother Stepan Arkad’ich Alabin (not yet dubbed Oblonsky or nicknamed Stiva), and had already conceived of Stepan’s morning wake-up as the opening of the novel.

  The tone, amused and amusing about Stepan’s distress over his wife’s threatening to leave him because of his affair with their children’s governess, would remain through the final draft of the first chapters; the events in this March 27 draft would later span four chapters. (The originally conceived opening, true to Tolstoy’s first plan [see above] begins with the Anna and Vronsky characters, already an item, openly flirting at a high-society party.)

  Stepan, though forty-one here, is nearly the thirty-four-year-old Stiva we know in the novel.

  How old should the characters be? Tolstoy took a stab; at forty-one, however, Stepan would be of almost another generation from his sister Anna, who eventually begins the novel at the age of twenty-eight but was perhaps twenty-three in the first drafts. With that difference of age, Stepan would not have been a child orphan, as Anna is.XXI We will never find out even through a draft’s stray detail how their parents died. We learn in the real novel that Anna was raised as an adolescent by her aunts, just as Tolstoy was raised by his aunts from the time he was eight.

  One dilemma that Stepan faces in the draft and the novel is that he needs money, but while he is in danger of being separated from his wife, Dolly, he cannot put up for sale a wood that belongs to her.

  Unlike the Stiva of the novel, this early-draft Stepan is not “honest with himself.” We need not feel attracted to him, nor trust his judgment. In the novel, we know he has cheated on his wife, and Tolstoy shows us that Stiva feels bad for having done so. We and all the household servants are more sympathetic to him than to Dolly; we also know that that’s not fair, but Tolstoy has already got us noticing the differences between what we are supposed to feel and what we actually feel.

  Here, in the draft, we don’t have to believe Stepan when he reflects, upon receiving a letter from Anna that morning, “This is a woman… A faithful wife, a society woman and always merry and broadminded. None of this Moscow purism.”XXII Anna, at this point in the first drafts, is still childless and wants to visit her brother and Moscow because her husband will be off on an inspection somewhere in Russia and she worries she’ll be bored. Bored!

  The novel’s Anna, who worships her son, is never bored until after she has left her son for her lover. In the real novel, Tolstoy wants us to like and to feel the likability of Stiva Oblonsky. Here in this
draft we are meant to see right through his thoughtlessness. He receives a letter from his lover, who expects him to see her that afternoon for lunch. Tolstoy would delete from the novel any new communication from Stiva’s lover; she would not be a current but an ex-governess. In this draft, a touching dialogue between Stepan and his eight-year-old daughter Tanya is started but not yet perfected. As Tolstoy wrote this draft, his own daughter Tanya was eight years old. In the draft Tolstoy got locked in on “eight years,” as Stepan, encountering his wife, recalls her “eight years ago at Moscow balls, with her strong figure and wide high chest, thin waist and small charming head on a delicate neck.”XXIII So the “eight years” couldn’t be right, with their daughter being eight (he and Dolly would not have had sex before marriage), but Stepan continues with that number when he puts his foot in his mouth, as he will similarly put his foot in his mouth in the novel: “Really, can’t eight years of life atone for minutes of passion?”XXIV

  In the draft Dolly is too much of a pushover. We don’t believe that she’ll resist Stiva for long; there’s no doubt she’ll cave in and forgive him. In the novel, we feel her quandary and Stiva tries to have faith but doesn’t really believe she will “come round.”XXV “Variant No. 6” ends with Stiva leaving the chaos of the house, jumping into a carriage and cheerily calling out the directions to the driver.XXVI

  The novel we all know is so seemingly perfected that its earlier drafts can seem wrong just for being different. And yet, of course, the drafts are exciting and full of life. But Tolstoy was dissatisfied with them.

  He held onto the drafts and used a few early scenes more or less complete and more or less unchanged. Some of his plans (as we are seeing) bore fruit while others intriguingly or necessarily withered away. Many of the greatest scenes, however, seem to have to come to him on the spot, out of the blue.

  We are indebted to the Soviet scholars V. A. Zhdanov and Z. E. Zaidenshnur for quilting together a “fifth draft” from Sofia’s rescues of the drafts. Zhdanov and Zaidenshnur call it “The First Completed Redaction of Anna Karenina.”XXVII The base of it is a draft that Tolstoy submitted to a printer in early 1874. Zhdanov and Zaidenshnur apply a lot of guesswork; they quote patches that don’t transition well or can’t be sewn together; they include doublings of scenes and other scenes that simply peter out. The most important of discoveries that we can make in “The First Completed Redaction of Anna Karenina” is that the novel is more about Karenin than Anna. Tolstoy’s early Anna (her name is Tatyana or Nana in some drafts) is unpleasant and vapid, coarse and unfeeling. She is much more like Anna’s high-society friends in the novel than like the real Anna.

  Meanwhile, Tolstoy warmly imagines Karenin; he will cut out all the warmth and sympathy in the real novel, but the character remains mostly the same.

  In the “Redaction” (we’ll now call it by this name), Tolstoy did not warmly imagine Anna; he did not create for her a spectacular entrance. In fact, Stiva asks the character-to-be-named Vronsky: “But you know Anna?”

  “I know her; a long time ago at a ball at the minister’s I was introduced to her, but it was as if, you know, I didn’t say two words, and now I wouldn’t even dare to bow. Then I saw her, she was acting in a French play at the Belozerskis’. She acts excellently.”XXVIII

  When in the drafts Vronsky meets her, they already know each other; this means that after Anna developed in Tolstoy’s head into her glorious self, he figured out that his readers and Vronsky needed to meet her at the same moment.

  In the “Redaction” she still arrives by rail. Anna, along with the reader, hears that a man has had an “immediate death” by suicide at the train station. “Immediate?” immediately asks Anna, which response Tolstoy understood was too loaded.XXIX This Anna-in-the-rough is simple-minded, but, interestingly, something of a comedian:

  Every joke that Aunt Anna told had success, and the children nearly died with laughter.XXX

  Tolstoy gives no examples of her jokes. The real Anna is marvelous, but she’s no Lady Glencora Palliser, Trollope’s witty heroine, and a character Tolstoy was, and would continue to be, familiar with in Trollope’s ongoing six-volume Palliser series (1864–1879), which Tolstoy read in English.

  When Anna confesses to her sister-in-law Dolly that she “coquetted” with Gagin (the Vronsky character) and that she feels ashamed before Kitty, Dolly forgives her because she doesn’t like Gagin for Kitty.XXXI This is similar to the real novel, but there is no seriousness or ominousness in it. Tolstoy doesn’t yet see or feel the novel’s seriousness, at least in regard to Anna. This early Anna is not capable or worthy of such consideration. Tolstoy had to find in the writing the real Anna, the attractive and irreducible Anna. He had to make her life valuable enough that it was terrible she lost it.

  “The guests after the opera gathered at the young princess Vrassky’s.”XXXII Tolstoy started his very first day’s draft here, apparently, before he began recasting and searching for other starts. Although inspired by Pushkin, it’s not inspiring work, as Tolstoy illustrates for the most part high-society nastiness.

  Unlike Trollope or Gogol, unlike Jane Austen or his most admired Charles Dickens, Tolstoy’s sarcastic or mocking presentation of aggressively nasty people is never funny. Anna’s high-society hypocritical friends are contemptible; we don’t identify with them and we don’t laugh with them, or even at them. In the novel they’re the only characters Tolstoy doesn’t have us sympathize with or understand. Comic foils have no life on Tolstoy’s stage.

  The primary difficulty Anna’s character confronts us with in the “Redaction” is that she is just another high-society hypocrite.

  Does it matter that the original Anna is not beautiful?

  […] she was unbeautifulXXXIII with a narrow forehead, short, an almost turned-up nose and a bit fat. So fat that just a little more and she would have been ugly. If not for the great black eyelashes decorating her gray eyes, black huge[?XXXIV] hair, beautiful brow, and a not-straight stance—she had a graceful movement like her brother and short arms and legs—she would have been bad. But despite the unbeautiful face, there was something in her kind smile that made her likable.

  […] No one could argue with a young person who called her unbeautiful when she walked into the room with her much too much squinting of her not-big narrow eyes (so that only her thick black eyelashes were visible). Narrow, very narrow forehead, small eyes, big lips and nose of an unbeautiful form.XXXV

  It seems to me that in this unflattering description, Tolstoy was imagining or remembering the neighbor woman Anna Pirogova. She had had a disturbing sexual allure, but Tolstoy didn’t see the pathos of her life, just as he didn’t see it of the original fictional Anna. He remembered Anna Pirogova as the unattractive neighbor and in the novel pushed a character similar to hers into society.

  No one could argue that a tragic novel focused on this character would be worthwhile:

  It was apparent that this course of conversation, which for most of the society people was the goal and the not-without-difficulty business, was for her a joke, not costing her the smallest effort, so little that she apparently never even thought about what to say, but spoke about whatever came into her head, and it always came out intelligently and sweetly, in all situations, lightly and seriously.XXXVI

  The final Anna will be actually intelligent and sweet, and she will inherit the dark eyelashes and her laugh.XXXVII This one is thoughtless and superficial. She childishly chews on her pearl necklace. Tolstoy doesn’t care about her, and we wouldn’t have, either.

  In one of the earliest drafts Tolstoy has Karenin confront Anna right away about her affair; in the earliest drafts they do not usually have a child (he pops up once or twice, not as a character but as a fact). Eventually Tolstoy gives them an actual child, but instead of motherhood humanizing and complicating Anna, as it does in the real novel, it makes her more contemptible; Karenin is clearly the primary and more important parent. He is the one with the sympathy and interest in their son, not she
.

  So what happened? How did the real Anna emerge from Tolstoy’s unsympathetic conception?

  We know from his earliest plans, which he conceived and described with the sparest of details, that her suicide will cause her brother, in the last chapter (before the epilogue) to sob! It’s the brother’s grief, not the lover’s, that Tolstoy means to depict (in a draft: “Stepan Arkad’ich sobs”XXXVIII). It’s the sobbing Tolstoy himself was doing at Anna Pirogova’s inquest.

  Her suicide, however, as first described in a draft by Tolstoy (and summarized by Gusev) is remarkably flippant. It comes right after her husband and lover run into each other at the house; she tells the shaken-up Karenin: “Well, you won’t be suffering for long.”

  She goes to her room, writes a note: “Be happy. I’m crazy,” and flees home. “In a day they find under the rails [in the beginning it was: ‘in the Neva’] her body.” Balashov [Vronsky] goes off to Tashkent, that is, joins the troops in the campaign on the Khiva. This shows the real-time of the novel—the Khivan campaign came about in 1873.XXXIX

  Her suicide is so little, so unrealized, so unfelt… but once Tolstoy finds the real Anna, her fate will become real. When her death became too terrible for him to understand, the novel sprang to life.

  One unknown day in late 1873 or early 1874, Tolstoy began writing, and Anna was suddenly beautiful, elegant, intelligent, and superconscious. Her transformation immediately complicated the novel for him. She, with her fateful descent to suicide, is the character through whom Tolstoy dramatized and experienced his deepest terrors.