Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  “He is gone,” said the priest, and would have moved away; but suddenly there was a faint stir in the mustaches of the dead man that seemed glued together, and quite distinctly in the hush they heard from the bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds:

  “Not quite… soon.”

  And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the mustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying out the corpse.XXX

  Was Sofia remembering the scene from Anna Karenina and mixing it up with her own memories?

  At first I imagined she must have told the princess’s story to Tolstoy and he had said, “Wonderful! I’ll use that.”

  But maybe, just as Sofia misremembered the first words of his first draft of Anna Karenina (which she only could have remembered from the final versionXXXI), she mixed this up, and drew the Anna Karenina scene into her recollection of Princess Elizaveta’s story.

  I wish I could find a polite way to challenge some of Sofia’s memories. After all, it’s only because of her account of this summer vacation that it has become real in my imagination. For example, when the Volga steamer docked at Kazan, still a couple of hundred miles north of Samara, Tolstoy went out in the morning with his two older sons, Sergei and Ilya, to show them where he had lived as an adolescent. We can imagine that the boys must have been so pleased to be out with their vigorous dad in this historic, exotic city. The steamship embarked again. Sofia, preoccupied with the baby, her daughters, and the servants, says she only later noticed that her husband and two older sons were not on board. And now how confused the boys must have been when they saw their father confronting the empty space at the pier. Did Tolstoy know the English expression “missing the boat”? Did he laugh? Did he groan? I expect that he did both. Meanwhile Sofia offered the captain money to go back, which he did (though he didn’t accept the money):

  As we made our approach, there was Lev Nikolaevich standing on the dock with his arms upraised, in a guilty pose. Serezha was standing on one side of him while Iljusha stood on the other, sobbing for all to hear.XXXII

  Just now typing up those two sentences by Sofia, it occurred to me that this misadventure had probably become a family story repeated many times by everyone concerned.

  When they got off the steamer for good at the town of Samara they stayed “at a splendid hotel,”XXXIII and Sofia was pleased to encounter Princess Elizaveta again.

  Sergei, almost ten years old, remembered the horse-drawn vehicles in which they drove ninety miles southeast from Samara to the farm:

  Shortly before our journey an old friend of my father, Sergei Urussov, in order to make the journey easier for my mother, presented her with his large dormouse that seated six people. It was the classical vehicle of these times, in which our ancestors travelled before the railroad existed. It was pulled by six horses—two in front and four in a row behind; a boy, the so-called Vorreiter, rode on one of the front horses. A kind of trunk was fixed on the roof of the carriage; behind was a two-seated bench, and the coachman’s seat was large enough to hold three people. In the carriage sat all our women with the youngest children, the others drove in wicket carts with straw carriage-bodies. Halfway we stopped for the night in a large hut where we suffered greatly from bedbugs.…

  Sofia also remembered this portion of the trip and that it was a native Mordovian family’s hut. The woman whose hut it was didn’t speak Russian. There were bedbugs, Sofia confirms, and some members of the Tolstoy contingent slept elsewhere on the grounds. “I went out of the hut into the spacious farm-yard,” she recalled, “looking for Lev Nikolaevich. He had prepared some accommodation for the two of us in a small out-barn. But somehow it didn’t turn out all that well: it was stuffy, and there were mice running around. I went over to the hut to visit the children and feed Petja, and when I came out, I saw Lev Nikolaevich dragging a large bale of hay out of the out-barn and preparing to spend the night in the open air. So the two of us went to sleep in the hay in the middle of the farm-yard. But there was no freshening of the air during the night. A tepid stillness hung over everything, and the wind kicked up the dust.”XXXIV

  Sofia’s descriptions here are vivid, though she had not noted them in a diary, which she rarely opened during these years of Anna Karenina. In the memoir she evoked herself and Lev and the way they were:

  I remember our mood at the time being happy, even amorous. Nothing could disturb our sense of quiet joy. All the children I had borne were alive, healthy, and right here with us. Our love had in no way been affected by anything. We were young, strong, and energetic, and, most importantly, friends and kindred spirits in every respect.XXXV

  When she wrote her memoir, she was contrasting these memories with the heartaches and grief that she didn’t know in 1873 were on the horizon, and probably she also had in mind the disaffection and out-of-sync relations that she and Lev had had for much of the last thirty years of his life.

  She remembers that night—the place, the air, being surrounded by family and feeling happy. She remembers “at the time” they were “even amorous.” How much would Tolstoy have blushed had he read this passage? Everything Tolstoy ever wrote about sex disintegrated him into a heap of shame. Sofia was more candid. Can we hope for them that on this long journey to the farm on the steppes that they had an “amorous” night for themselves “in the hay in the middle of the farm-yard”?

  Let’s remind ourselves that she was the one fondly remembering this night. Everything was good! The family was whole, complete. None of her children had died yet—but in the next three years one and then another and another were going to. For now she and Lev were on an adventure. Where the family was, there life was, buggy and mousy though it was.

  Gusev thinks that the Tolstoys arrived at the farm on June 8,XXXVI while Sofia’s biographer Alexandra Popoff calculates that the trip took eight days, which would make it June 10 at the earliest.

  Son Sergei later described the farm’s layout:

  Our property was divided into twelve fields of which only two were sown; the first, on hard soil, with Turkish wheat, the second with Russian wheat. Sometimes corn would be sown in the third year. The other nine or ten fields were left for pastures and meadows. The first two years after ploughing, the fields were overgrown with coarse, wild grass, but the next years they gave very good hay. The hay was gathered into stacks spread all over the steppe. There was no wood in that neighborhood, and bricks of dried manure were used for fuel. Pyramids of these bricks were stacked around the villages and huts.XXXVII

  In the chapter “Homestead on the Tuchkov Land” from her memoir, Sofia remembers, “our little house there turned out better than I had anticipated.” Even so, according to their impressionable first child, Sergei, “There was not enough room in it for all of us; so Fedor Fedorovich [the tutor], my two brothers and I spent the summer in an empty shed, and my father and Stepan Bers in a Bashkir caravan, a sort of felt tent, which my father had bought.”XXXVIII

  Their big barn, Sofia noted, would remain empty of crops because of the drought. She described how the Bashkirs made koumiss. Koumiss did everyone who drank it some good, but she herself wouldn’t drink it. The children sometimes had lessons with her, but mostly they romped. A piano had been brought from Yasnaya Polyana. No one mentions whether they hauled it back home in August or not, and no one that summer describes any music flowing from it. Sergei remembered Sofia having a harder time than the others: “My mother was at that time nursing Peter [Petja] and she bore with difficulty the discomforts of life on the farm. The house was drafty, the roof leaked, the bricks stank and burnt badly, the incredible number of flies made eating and sleeping a misery, the post came rarely, and had to be fetched by messenger from Samara. There were no neighbors, except Bashkirs and peasants, and the doctor lived far away.”XXXIX

  Sofia remembered: “Behind the homestead rose a sharp-peaked mountain known as the Shishka.”XL She collected “marine fossils”XLI and studied English on her own with a big volume of
Shakespeare; apropos of no particularly recalled incident, she wrote that she identified with Desdemona. She recalled realizing (she was not quoting a diary): “How many there are of us—young wives with jealous husbands, just as innocent as Desdemona, who spend years trying to figure out what our men are angry at us for!”XLII

  If there was a jealous scene that summer, it was not noted by anyone. She writes that she remembered “even though Lev Nikolaevich left this work [Anna Karenina] alone for a time, he never ceased thinking about it and being fascinated by it.”XLIII She provides no details of nor evidence for his continuous mental activity about the novel. Could she really know that he “never ceased thinking about it”? Of course what he had already written was knocking around or hibernating somewhere within him; but it was not on his mind. He definitely didn’t mention Anna Karenina in his letters that summer while he was in Samara. Sofia was, I’m guessing, just theorizing from the distance of decades, and I think most of us would have made such a guess ourselves. After all, how could he not have been thinking of Anna Karenina? (Two years later, again in Samara, he would brag to his friends that he hadn’t let himself think about writing all summer long.)

  Two weeks after their arrival on the farm they sent a messenger to Samara with letters. Sofia wrote her sister Tatyana. Meanwhile, in Tolstoy’s first letter of the summer, he asked Strakhov about helping him with “correcting” War and Peace, the galleys of which were tormenting his thoughts like a rash: “We are enjoying life in the Samara steppes, thank goodness, despite the heat, the drought and the children’s illnesses, which are not serious, but are a worry to us. The primitive state of nature here and of the people with whom we are in close contact have a good effect on my wife and children.”XLIV

  Tolstoy had been scrawling over the galleys of War and Peace that he was sending to Strakhov:

  I’m afraid that the calligraphic side of things is bad and will be impossible for the printers—I couldn’t do any better, what with the Samara flies and the heat.XLV

  His editorial work on War and Peace aggravated him: “I very rarely like it when I reread it, and for the most part it excites disgust and shame.”XLVI We learn that it was in this state of mind that he translated the novel’s French conversations into Russian “drily and sometimes even incorrectly,” says Gusev.XLVII Tolstoy also extracted information from the text and placed it into footnotes; he gathered some of the essay-like passages into a section of their own and reduced some material. “All these changes were made in a great hurry so as not to hold up the volumes for the printer,” writes Gusev, “and, besides which, were done with him not fully convinced and sometimes even reluctantly.”XLVIII

  It is characteristic of him that his disconnection from War and Peace led him to make hasty editorial changes; he was willing to give up solid ground that he had fought for at the time of writing and revising and first publishing the complete novel.

  He wrote to Strakhov: “The obliteration of the French sometimes seems a pity, but on the whole, it seems to me better without the French. The judgments of war, history, and philosophy seem to me, removed from the novel, to improve it and don’t deprive it of interest on their own.”XLIX

  Gusev writes: “Tolstoy asked Strakhov to look through his corrections and delete those of them that Strakhov judged as ‘bad,’ and, besides this, to fix what Strakhov found ‘conspicuously and noticeably bad.’ ”L

  Strakhov answered Tolstoy exactly correctly: “It seems to me that you poorly value War and Peace.”LI Tolstoy probably should have paid Strakhov to edit it, and then, with due deliberation, accepted or declined each particular change.

  Tolstoy’s next bit of surviving correspondence from that summer of 1873 is a postscript to Sofia’s July 8 letter to her sister Tatyana. He noted: “Sonya has gone off to feed [the baby], I am finishing off the writing.”LII He was glad to know that Tatyana would be coming to Yasnaya Polyana. He told her that the life there in Samara was better for everyone, that they relied on themselves. The “facilities” weren’t like the ones Tatyana had in the Caucasus, but they were better than he had expected.

  As of July 8, there had been no mention of Lev’s or Sofia’s distress about the drought-provoked “famine.” In long retrospect, Sergei, their son, though sympathetic to the native Bashkirs for the loss of their nomadic way of life, pointed out the drawbacks of the Bashkirs’ farming practices, which worsened the effects of the drought:

  All their efforts were concentrated on sowing as much wheat as possible. They sowed little corn, and no oats or hemp, no vegetables or potatoes. Therefore if there was a bad crop of wheat, which depended on whether it rained in May, they not only suffered great losses but even hunger. It was an irregular form of agriculture.LIII

  This was the third straight poor harvest. The local governor hadn’t done anything to help (so Tolstoy would tell Strakhov on September 4) but instead had demanded all the back taxes from the impoverished farmers.

  I keep having to remind myself that Tolstoy was on vacation, unwinding, and yet, just as he would do whenever new disasters struck the people, he threw himself into relieving their suffering:

  When A. S. Prugavin eight years later, in 1881, was in the Buzuluskiy region, in which was Tolstoy’s estate, he heard from those peasants there many stories about the “hearty care” that Tolstoy showed, living among them at the time of the famine in 1873, how he “personally went around to the most needy peasant-yards, with care in their interests and needs, how he helped the poor, supplied them with bread and money, and gave them means for buying horses and so on.”

  But of course this wasn’t enough for Tolstoy.LIV

  That is, Tolstoy exerted his energy and surveyed farm families to determine what they actually had on hand. Then he wrote to a Moscow newspaper about the regional disaster and explained to the readers that it wasn’t, as they were told, that the peasants were drunk, but that there had been these terrible harvests. He contributed his own money and solicited readers’ and governmental contributions. Tolstoy was so regularly giving and generous that I had forgotten this instance. He would again and again do such fund-raising and rallying for people whose lives had been devastated.

  And while he was doing this, what was he thinking? Could he have been thinking of Anna Karenina, as Sofia believed? I don’t think so.

  Did he dramatize in his fiction such philanthropy as he himself provided?

  No.

  Levin doesn’t ever rescue any famine-stricken peasants; if Levin had gone on vacation and encountered people in need, we can guess he tenderheartedly would have helped them, but Levin doesn’t go to the steppes. Tolstoy did help the poor but wrote about other things for his characters. How great and good was Tolstoy? He saw suffering and did his utmost to relieve it. But if we want to feel superior to him we can remind ourselves, for example, that Tolstoy wasn’t always a super husband or father, that he was born into wealth, which he squandered, that he wanted to live right and often failed…

  And all of these failings are ones that he pointed out to us about himself!

  There are no letters or notes by the Tolstoys between July 8 and the completion of his famine-relief article on July 28. This may be understandable, as they were busy:

  Crops at the Tolstoys’ farm were meager, but elsewhere, around distant villages, fields were bare and there was not enough water for the cattle. […] Their farmstead became a center for the locals […]. The Tolstoys refused no one: several hundred laborers “set up their tents in the field, grazed the oxen, and harvested wheat.” Some families camped in the yard, sleeping near the barns, in or underneath their carts.LV

  In his article datelined “farm on the river Tananyka,”LVI Tolstoy explained in his usual clear way the situation year by year from 1871, and how the poorer peasants began to go into debt after having a bad harvest. The next summer things got worse, and the poor peasants had to sell their cows and horses, and then the next rung of peasants went into debt. Now in 1873 even the “rich” peasants didn’t h
ave any crops and ninety percent of the population was hungry. The people depended on the crops and farm work. There was nothing growing; there was almost no bread. He had gone out into the countryside seventy versts (about forty-five miles) in three directions, and all the fields were bare:

  In the villages, in the farmyards where I went, everywhere it’s one and the same: not absolute famine but a situation close to it, all signs of a coming famine. There are no peasants anywhere, they’re all leaving to look for work, homes of skinny women with skinny and sick children and old people. There’s still bread, but just barely; dogs, cats, calves, chickens are hungry, and beggars, nonstop, come up to the windows and they’re given crusts or are refused.LVII

  Then he described a prosperous peasant family, by whose example he refuted those who said the dire situation was the shiftless peasants’ fault. He detailed his surveys of one of every ten families (not one village in three, as Stepan remembered): how many inhabitants, children, workers, cows, chickens, how much land, what was growing.

  Reading to the end of Tolstoy’s article, I began to understand for the first time why novel-writing could have seemed to him a kind of self-indulgence. As he went out among poor people in a devastated place, his doubts could naturally creep in that a long story about a married woman who runs off with an army captain could only be an entertainment for the upper classes, and that such a novel does nothing for relieving the suffering that the majority of the world experiences.

  Does consciousness of the world’s suffering mean that we ought, from humility, from decency, to give up deriving pleasure from the arts? Tolstoy would wonder about this question for the rest of his life. Twenty years later he wrote a fellow novelist: “I was about to begin further work on a certain piece of fiction, but believe me, it hurts my conscience to write about people who never existed and who never did anything of the kind. Something is wrong. Is it that the form of fiction has outlived itself, or that stories are outworn or that I am outworn? Do you experience anything like this?”LVIII