Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

The steppes of the Samara region in summer!

  From Yasnaya Polyana it took about a week in June of 1873 for the sixteen members of the household to arrive at the farm Tolstoy had bought in the Samara countryside.II

  Those treeless arid steppes!

  “Were I to begin describing, I should fill a hundred pages with this country and my own occupations,” Tolstoy had told Fet two summers before.III And if he had ever done so, we would all of us imagine them as vividly as everything else he described.

  Tolstoy had journeyed to Samara for the first time in 1862 for a fermented-milk health cure—koumiss therapy. Koumiss, variously spelled by its translators, is a slightly alcoholic potion of mare’s milk, made by the formerly nomadic native people of the region, the Bashkirs. For all of Tolstoy’s physical energy, for all of his loudly and consistently expressed mistrust of medicine, he seems to have had a streak of hypochondria. He hated listening to doctors but followed their advice in the end. In 1862 he had felt worn out from his efforts running the school for peasant children and advocating for pedagogical reform in his magazine, Yasnaya Polyana. He understandably worried he could have tuberculosis, which two of his brothers had recently died of. His late father also had gone to the steppes for the koumiss cure.IV After a month in that summer of 1862, Tolstoy felt himself coughing less and regaining weight. Although he had hired a clerk, he told Alexandrine Tolstaya in a letter back then, “I do not dictate or write much. Laziness quite overpowers one when taking koumiss.”V

  The biographer Aylmer Maude says that in 1862, during the thirty-three-year-old Tolstoy’s health-restoration visit, the envious landowner “noticed how extremely cheap and how fertile was the land in those parts. He therefore wished to purchase an estate there, and visited the district in the autumn of 1864, probably with that end in view.”VI

  Tolstoy returned to Samara in 1871. He had had such a nightmarish experience traveling on his own in 1869 (this came to be referred to as the “Arzamas Horror,” during which Tolstoy hallucinated a voice telling him to kill himself—more on this later) that Stepan, Sofia’s fourteen-year-old brother, was enlisted as his traveling companion.VII

  There is much to like in Stepan Bers’s memoir of his brother-in-law, from whom he only grew disaffected when Tolstoy renounced the family’s privileged life in the early 1880s. Bers was generous about and fond of Tolstoy. The biographer Maude writes: “Tolstoy furnishes an example of the well-known fact that men of artistic temperament are often untidy. Though he acknowledges the advantages of neatness in general, he often remarked that it is a quality most frequently found in shallow natures. He himself simply could not, and therefore did not try to, keep his things in order. When he undressed he let his clothes or boots drop where he stood; and if he happened to be moving from place to place, his garments remained strewn about the room, and sometimes on the floor.” Maude quotes Stepan:

  I noticed that to pack his things for a journey cost him great effort, and when I accompanied him I used very willingly to do it for him, and thereby pleased him very much. I remember that once, for some reason, I did not at all wish to pack for him. He noticed this, and with characteristic delicacy did not ask me to, but put his things into his portmanteau himself; and I can assert positively that no one else, were they to try, could have got them into such fearful disorder as they were in, in that portmanteau.VIII

  Tolstoy’s trip in the summer of 1871 took him away from Sofia, the children, and Yasnaya Polyana for eight weeks. From Samara he, his “man-servant” Alexei, and Stepan (often referred to by his nickname Styopa) rode horses along the Karalyk River to the village of Karalyk, where he had stayed in 1862.

  At first Tolstoy was blue and could not shake his mood. He wrote Sofia: “I would say that I’m completely healthy if not for the sleeplessness and the very depressed state of my soul. Really, Styopa is of use to me and I feel that with him the Arzamas horror won’t happen.”IX

  A few days later, he wrote to tell her: “I can’t give you any pleasant news. My health is still not good. Since I came here, I’ve begun to get a feeling of depression like a fever at 6:00 o’clock every evening, a physical depression, the sensation of which I can’t convey better than by saying that soul and body part company. […] I don’t understand my condition: either I’ve caught a cold in the tent during the first cold night or else the koumiss is bad for me, but I’ve been worse in the three days I’ve been here. The main thing is weakness, depression, and wanting to play the woman and weep, and it’s embarrassing, whether with the Bashkirs or with Styopa.” Tolstoy went on, however, to describe the satisfactions of lacking comforts:

  We’re living in a tent and drinking koumiss, Styopa as well, everybody treats him; the discomforts of life would strike terror in your Kremlin heart: no beds, no crockery, no white bread, no spoons. As for you, you would find it easier to endure the misfortune of underdone turkey or undersalted Easter cake. But these discomforts aren’t at all unpleasant, and it would be good fun if only I were well. As it is, I make Styopa depressed, and I can see that he’s bored. The hunting is quite decent. I went out once and killed two ducks. […]

  The most painful thing for me is that because of my poor health, I only feel 1/10 of what exists. There are no intellectual pleasures, especially poetic ones. I look at everything as though I were dead—the very thing for which I used to dislike many people. And now I myself can only see what exists; I understand and grasp it; but I can’t see through it, as I used to, with love. And if I’m sometimes in a poetic mood, it’s only a very sour and tearful one—I just want to cry.X

  But to everyone’s relief, he came around. Embarrassedly, he wrote Sofia:

  I’m glad to write to you, my dear, with good news about myself, i.e., that two days after my last letter to you where I complained about depression and ill health, I began to feel fine, and ashamed that I had alarmed you. I can’t, from habit, either write or say to you what I don’t think. […]XI

  That last admission is quite a boast. He described for her his and Stepan’s routines:

  There is much that is new and interesting; the Bashkirs who reek of Herodotus, and Russian peasants, and villages which are especially charming for the simplicity and kindness of the people. I bought a horse for 60 rubles and Styopa and I go riding. Styopa is fine. Sometimes he’s in high spirits and keeps abusing Petersburg with an important air, sometimes he hangs around me and I’m sorry for him because he’s bored, and sorry he’s not at Yasnaya. […] I shoot ducks and we have them to eat. We’ve just been riding after bustards and only scared them away as usual, then we came on a wolf’s litter and a Bashkir caught a cub there. I’m reading Greek, but very little. I don’t feel like it. Nobody has ever described koumiss better than the peasant who said to me the other day that we are out at grass—like horses. I don’t feel like anything which might harm me: vigorous exercise or smoking (Styopa is trying to cure me of the habit of smoking, and now gives me 12 cigarettes a day, reducing the number all the time)—or tea or sitting up late.

  I get up at 6, drink koumiss at 7, go to the village where the koumiss drinkers live, have a talk to them, walk back, drink tea with Styopa, then read a bit, walk about the steppe in my shirtsleeves, go on drinking koumiss, eat a piece of roast mutton, and either go hunting or riding, and in the evening go to bed almost as soon as it’s dark.XII

  Aylmer Maude notes that “Tolstoy was extremely fond of the Bashkirs, associated much with them, and strictly followed their diet: avoiding all vegetable foods and restricting himself to meat and animal products. Dinner every day consisted chiefly of mutton eaten with the fingers out of wooden bowls.”XIII

  Tolstoy occasionally recounted his dreams to Sofia:

  Sleep here, more than anything, brings me closer to you. The first night I dreamed of you, then of Seryozha. I showed the portrait of the children to the Bashkir men and women […] In the dream I saw that Seryozha was being naughty and I got mad at him; in reality it was probably the opposite.XIV

  Awake, he conti
nually looked out for Stepan’s comfort in a comfort-limited place, doling out to him candies and marmalade that Tolstoy had bought in the town of Samara.XV

  He and the boy camped all summer; they slept in a sweltering tent and Tolstoy took doses of koumiss. In the village, Tolstoy had found a priest with whom he could study ancient Greek, which pursuit Sofia was sure had been and would continue damaging his health. (She said she persuaded his friends to write him and tell him to desist.) Though I’m skeptical about Greek study–induced illness, she had come to the conclusion that his intellectual exertions tended to weaken his physical health.

  In late June of 1871, Tolstoy, about to ride eastward with Stepan across the steppes to Buzuluk for a seasonal fair, refined for Sofia his description of the daily routine: “I wake very early, often 5:30 (Stepa sleeps until 10:00). I drink tea with milk, 3 cups, I walk around the little kibitka, I look at the herds returning from the mountain, which is very beautiful, about a thousand horses.”XVI

  The Buzuluk fair became a summer highlight for the Tolstoy family. In 1871, however, Tolstoy was so tired from not sleeping well in the tent that on the road at an inn, he wrote Sofia, “I slept so that I didn’t sense the bedbugs which (when I woke up and saw them) had fallen all over me.”XVII

  Stepan remembered this adventure and reminds us that Tolstoy, for all his sociability, had a reserve of dignityXVIII:

  The fair attracted a strange motley of different nationalities and races, Russian moujiks [peasants], Ural Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Khirgese. As usual, and thanks to his natural affability, Leo Nicholaevitch was soon on the best terms with them all. Some of the frequenters of the fair were generally drunk, but, for all that, the Count would chat and laugh with them. Once a drunken moujik, inspired by a superfluous excess of affection, wished to embrace him, but a stern look from the Count was sufficient to make him draw back, as he muttered a kind of apology, “No, pardon me, I pray you.”XIX

  When Tolstoy wrote to Sofia that summer of 1871 to ask her permission to invest in land near Patrovka, “he went ahead anyway, even before he had received her reply,” writes the biographer Rosamund Bartlett. “As it happened, she was not at all enthusiastic: ‘If it’s profitable, that’s your business, and I don’t have an opinion on the matter. But it would have to be extreme necessity that would want to force a person to live in the steppe without a single tree for hundreds of miles [Sofia exaggerated the treelessness], as one would never go there willingly, particularly with five children.’ ”XX Bartlett reminds us: “A primitive Bashkir village in the middle of nowhere was not every Russian’s idea of the ideal health resort.”XXI

  Confusingly to Sofia (she may have wondered, If you love me so much, why did you choose to leave?), Tolstoy wrote her during the 1871 trip more than a dozen tender letters, with notes to the children as well. To Ilya, who was only five, he wrote:

  Ask Seryozha, he’ll read to you what I’m writing. Today a Bashkir was riding and saw three wolves. He wasn’t at all scared and jumped right down from the horse at the wolves. They began biting him. He shot two but caught one and brought him to us. And tonight, maybe the mother of this wolf will come. And then we’ll shoot her. I kiss you.XXII

  Sweet dreams, Ilya! (By the way, Tolstoy gave up hunting about a dozen years later.)

  Once the Tolstoys had worked out a correspondence system, which involved his sending a hired man to Samara, letters took about eight or nine days to arrive. When Tolstoy requested Sofia’s approval of his scheme to buy thousands of acres of farmland, he excitedly pitched to her all of its advantages (“Ten times more income than ours, ten times less bustle and work”XXIII), with Sofia shaking her head and resigning herself to her husband doing what he wanted to do, no matter her doubts about the farm’s profitability. “Don’t be mad, sweetie,” she wrote him, “if I oppose you in something, but do in any case what you want.”XXIV

  Having already done what he wanted, he tried to reassure her in his response: “Living without trees for 100 versts would be terrible in Tula; but here it’s another thing: the air and grass and dryness and heat makes it so you grow to love the steppe.”XXV

  His daughter Alexandra Tolstaya remarks in her biography: “Whether it was because Tolstoy loved the steppes, the Bashkirs and the koumiss, or because he had a passion for acquiring new property, or a desire to build up some capital for the benefit of his growing family, his trip to the province ended with his making a most advantageous purchase of 2,500 desyatins [6,750 acres] of land […] for 20,000 rubles.”XXVI

  Tolstoy and Stepan returned to Yasnaya Polyana in early August 1871. Tolstoy made a short trip to the steppe the following summer to make arrangements about building and plowing.XXVII

  * * *

  Until July of 2018, I had to take Tolstoy’s descriptions of the Samara region in pieces, from different years of Tolstoy’s life, as well as make use of descriptions by other travelers and family members, because how else does a writer describe a place where he has never been?

  Feeling abashed before the dogged biographer Richard Holmes, who desired to leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of the poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I finally traveled to the easternmost bend of the Volga and made it to the city of Samara. Then Aleksandr, a driver-photographer, drove me the final ninety miles from that city to the “treeless” countryside on the steppe, where Tolstoy bought thousands of acres of farmland. Thanks to a local historian, Valentina Petrovna Salazkina, who met me at the Patrovka village library, which was originally established in 1893 from a gift of books and money from Tolstoy himself, I was shown the brand-new, in-the-making monument to Tolstoy and his son Ilya (who was instrumental in relieving the region during the famine of 1891). Salazkina then guided me and the driver to the site where Tolstoy and his family spent the summer of 1873 (a marker is laid at the spot), and then on foot, across the dry lively steppe, to the marker at the site of the second house.

  I understand now why Tolstoy so adored the region. The sky, the air, the dots of yellows and purples amid the dry grasses, the rugged pockets of scrappy brush and low trees immediately caught my fancy. I could imagine Tolstoy sighing with delight at the rolling vistas and seemingly endless space.

  So to continue back to June of 1873, when the whole Tolstoy family set out for Samara to their farm and its ramshackle farmhouse: They left Yasnaya Polyana on June 2 and seem to have stayed one night in Moscow. The boys’ tutor, Fedor Fedorovich, went ahead of the rest to Samara with a carriage “and most of our things.” Sofia wrote: “As I recall, the rail trip from Moscow to Nizhnij Novgorod was most unpleasant.” They were all in one “compartment,” and they couldn’t leave that compartment either: “[I was stuck with] little children and filth.” They took a steamer down the Volga eastward to Kazan, which journey she liked, “in spite of my fussing over the children.”

  Sergei, the eldest child, remembered: “The great spaces of water, the dark forest slopes, the yellow sand beaches, the spray that splashed up from the ship’s wheels, the fish and the smell of fish, the trading at the ports, the different types of vessels, barges, cargo boats, and rafts—all these were new and vivid impressions.”XXVIII

  On board Sofia made the acquaintance of Princess Elizaveta Aleksandrovna Golitsyn (the princess title in Russia was not on a par with that title in England), whom she liked very much. The princess was accompanying her sick lover and their two children.

  Anna Karenina might accustom us to taking for granted the shunning of high society women in out-of-wedlock relationships, yet the Tolstoys were quite used to and accepting of them—Sofia’s maternal grandmother had been the product of a second family; Tolstoy’s brother Sergei had several children with his common-law wife before he married her (and during which time was even briefly engaged to Sofia’s sister Tatyana!), and Tolstoy’s sister, Maria, had a longtime partnership with her illegitimate daughter’s father. The Tolstoys, like most aristocrats, were familiar with unsanctioned relationships. (Why then, Tolstoy may have begun to wonder, wa
s Anna Karenina going to have to suffer so much for hers?)

  Sofia relates that Princess Elizaveta married young, and her husband left her after two weeks. All he had wanted was to sleep with her and he had been willing to marry her to do so. Elizaveta, abandoned by him, eventually got her own lover, became pregnant, and left home. She was now forty. As a plot, it’s more intriguing than what Tolstoy had come up with for Anna and Vronsky.

  Sofia surprisingly doesn’t connect the next scene that she narrates to the death scene of Levin’s brother Nikolai in Anna Karenina:

  [Elizaveta] later told me, when I visited her in Moscow, just how Kiselev [her lover] died. He had already grown completely cold and motionless, the priest had recited the prayer for the dying, and Princess Elizaveta Aleksandrovna covered his eyes with her hands. The priest approached, took one look at him and said, “It’s over!” Suddenly from somewhere out of the depths, as though from the grave itself, came a voice: “Not quite!”

  Both gave a shudder and, as the princess said, the effect was terrifying.XXIX

  In Anna Karenina, “the effect” of Levin’s brother Nikolai’s last peep is not “terrifying” but grimly comic:

  Towards night the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to read the prayer for the dying.

  While the priest was reading it, the dying man did not show any sign of life; his eyes were closed. Levin, Kitty, and Marya Nikolaevna [Nikolai’s companion] stood at the bedside. The priest had not quite finished reading the prayer when the dying man stretched, sighed, and opened his eyes. The priest, on finishing the prayer, put the cross to the cold forehead, then slowly returned it to the stand, and after standing for two minutes more in silence, he touched the huge, bloodless hand that was turning cold.