Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  We all wrestle with that thorny problem of enjoying ourselves while the world seems to be collapsing, but in the meantime we go on reading Anna Karenina with excitement and tears. And, after all, Tolstoy, with his heavy conscience, went on writing it.

  Witnessing and imagining the peasants’ suffering, Tolstoy felt guilty for his pleasures and advantages. He wrote in the article:

  The situation of the people is terrible when looking at and considering the coming winter; but it’s as if the people don’t feel or understand this.

  As soon as one talks with a peasant and asks that he consider himself and consider the future, he says: “We don’t know how our headmen think,” but he seems absolutely calm, as usual; so for a person who condescendingly looks now at the people, distributed across the steppes, picking the stubble barely seen from the ground, elsewhere sprouted wheat, one might see a healthy, always merry working people, and one might hear songs and laughter here and there, to whom it would even seem strange that in the midst of this people is one of the worst poverties. But this poverty exists and its signs are far too clear.

  The peasants, despite that they sow and reap more than other Christians, live by the Testament’s words: “The birds of the heavens don’t sow or reap, and the heavenly father feeds them”; the peasant firmly believes that by his eternal heavy labor and the smallest requirements his heavenly father feeds him, and so he does not value himself and when such a terrible impoverished year comes, he only humbly bows his head and says, “We’ve angered God, apparently for our sins!”

  From this count, it’s clear that ninety percent of the families don’t have enough bread. “What are the peasants to do?” First, they will mix in the bread in cheap and non-nutritious bad-stuff: chaff, quinoa (as they told me, in some places they’re already doing that); in the second, the strong members of the peasant family are leaving this fall or winter for work, and from hunger the old and the women and exhausted and feeding mothers and children will suffer. They will die not straightaway from hunger but from disease, by reason of the food will be bad and not enough, and especially because the Samaran population of various generations is accustomed to good wheat bread.

  Last year even, in some places mothers had to nurse the wheat bread for the young children; this year there is already none and the children are getting sick and dying. What is there to do when it is already beginning, there is not enough pure black bread?

  It’s terrible to think about the poverty that awaits the biggest part of the population in Samara Gubernia if it’s not given help by the government or community. A subscription might be opened, in my opinion, for two things: 1) a subscription for contributions and 2) a subscription for grant money for provisions on credit, without interest for two years. The subscription of the second kind, that is, grant money without interest, I propose, in order to more quickly reach that sum that will provide for the suffering population of Samara Gubernia, and probably the zemstvo of Samara Gubernia could take on itself the labor of distributing bread bought with this money and debt collection in the first harvest year.LIX

  * * *

  Tolstoy wrote movingly to Alexandrine Tolstaya in St. Petersburg on July 30. The situation—now that he knew firsthand the peasants’ condition—was indeed dire. First he apologized for bothering her and then, in the excerpt below, he explained why he felt he had to:

  With all my characteristic inability to write articles, I’ve written a very cold, clumsy letter to the papers, and for fear of a polemic, I’ve presented the matter as less terrible than it really is, and I’ve written to some of my friends to get things moving, but I’m afraid that no headway will be made or that it will be slow, and I’m turning to you. If you wish to, and are able to interest the good and the mighty of this world, who are, fortunately, the same people, then headway will be made, and yours and my joy will be such insignificant grains of sand in that enormous good that will be done for thousands of people, that we won’t even give it a thought. I don’t like writing in a plaintive tone, but I’ve lived for 45 years in the world and I’ve never seen anything like it, and never thought it possible. When one pictures vividly to oneself what it will be like in winter, one’s hair stands on end. […] It’s particularly shocking and pathetic to someone who is able to understand the Russian’s forbearance and humility in suffering—his calmness, and submissiveness. There’s no good food—well, there’s no point in complaining. If he dies—it’s God’s will. They aren’t sheep, but good, strong oxen ploughing their furrow. If they fall—they’ll be dragged away, and others will pull the plough.LX […]

  He notes Alexandrine’s own charity work with “Your Magdalens,” that is, prostitutes, but he argued, “pity for them, as for all spiritual suffering, is more of the mind, of the heart, if you like; but one’s whole being feels pity for simple, good people, who are physically and morally healthy, when they suffer from deprivation; when one looks on their suffering, one is ashamed and grieved to be a human being. So there, I put this important matter, dear to our hearts, into your hands.”LXI

  Tolstoy’s article was published on August 17, prefaced by an editorial note about Tolstoy and the situation in Samara. It had “many number of responses,” says Gusev. “Tolstoy’s letter appeared as if not the first then in any case one of the first instances of statistical description of Russian village reform; it spoke in terms of numbers and so it produced such a strong effect.”LXII Gusev believes that Tolstoy was right in making the article a “cold, clumsy” argument: “Tolstoy’s call for help provided by contributors saved Samara’s peasants from destruction.”

  The letter about the Samara famine was Tolstoy’s first public display [in which he was] revealing a disastrous situation of the Russian peasantry in the post-reform period. It set the beginning of many others of Tolstoy, of even worse effects on the given question in the ’80s and ’90s.LXIII

  Sofia’s memoir’s story of the famine-relief is so very different from her husband’s that I need to account for it. She was anxious that they had no doctor nearby and that bread was scarce. She says that as a result of her observing the impending famine and worrying about the winter for the region’s poor that she “decided to write an article for the papers with an appeal for help.”LXIV

  I showed the article to Lev Nikolaevich.

  “Who’ll believe you without all sorts of statistics?” was his reaction.

  Whereupon he decided right off to go around the nearest villages, along with my brother Stepa and taking a survey of the families and mouths to feed hut by hut.LXV

  She has claimed that the article was her idea. Tolstoy never suggested this, and their surveying, as she understood it, is different from what Stepan and Tolstoy actually did.

  She didn’t in her memoir seem to take pride that she had prompted his effective work. She has left it to us to believe that her husband took over her idea.

  Her own brother Stepan did not mention her input or article and credited only Tolstoy. “It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the misery and sufferings the poorer peasants had to endure,” Stepan recalled. “With his wonted kindliness and energy, Leo Nicholaevitch came to their aid, and was the first to open a subscription fund for the starving population. I accompanied him to two of the neighboring villages, and helped him to make an inventory of all the grain and property actually in their possession.”LXVI

  I will ungenerously doubt that Sofia wrote any article. She may have said, “I will write an article,” and explained to her husband what she might say in it. And then he would have said (as she said he said), “Who’ll believe you without all sorts of statistics?” And then he and Stepan went and did the legwork (not, as she said, “hut by hut”), and then Tolstoy made the right decision about how to present it, “coldly.”

  Because he wrote the article, Russia learned about the famine, news that the governor himself didn’t want known, and a heap of money was donated, some of it actually directed to the particular families that Tolstoy had mentioned.
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  Tolstoy did much good for the sake of the hungry in rural Samara, but what else did he do that summer? What were his routines? The contrasting presentations of the famine from Sofia and Lev remind us that in the meantime family life was going on. Even if we’re responding to emergencies and donating food and money, we all still have our home life. Sergei and the other children remembered nothing unpleasant.

  Sofia recalled that despite having the book of Shakespeare for her English improvement, she didn’t read much; the children demanded a lot from her, she recalled, and they were often sick from the heat:

  I would send to Samara 130 versts distant and they would bring stale white bread loaves, which I would slice. I would dry rusks and store them away (preferably in a drawer) so they wouldn’t get mouldy. This is what we lived on, and sometimes we also ate Albert biscuits.LXVII

  Sofia’s editors provide a note about the biscuits, which were British and “very popular in Russia at the time.”LXVIII Were they a gift sent from governess Hannah’s family back in England? Just what sorts of products could upper-class Russians like the Tolstoys buy? I’m guessing they had more “Western” products available to them than would be available to Soviet citizens.

  But they were caught by the drought, too. They had no water in their wells. They “drank either boiled water or dirty water… Only those who drank koumiss didn’t get sick,” recalled non-drinking Sofia.LXIX

  She fondly, heartbrokenly remembered her baby son Petja as he was then, “big, chubby, and thirsty. I even wrote my sister about him: ‘My little bull keeps tugging at me. I’m growing thin, but I shan’t wean him until we return home from Samara.’ ”LXX

  Meanwhile…

  Lev Nikolaevich would drink quantities of koumiss and then walk or ride far into the steppes, walking completely naked, as he said, in the sun. He didn’t write anything, he read practically nothing, and lived a purely animal life, building up his strength and health.LXXI

  We have to travel now in our imaginations to the steppe, a hundred and forty-seven years ago. We venture outside in the woozy early afternoon and we notice off in the grassy distance, perhaps with the pinecone-shaped Shishka hill behind him, a figure, a burly fellow striding along. Is he wearing an animal skin?… That naked man there is the author of War and Peace!

  As far as I have found, Tolstoy did not express horror or shame at male nakedness. (But female nakedness? Kitty in Anna Karenina is humiliated by having to undress for medical examinations, and Tolstoy almost stutters with astonishment at the unashamed society women whose dresses reveal something of their bosoms.) Still, this naked detail surprised me. Sofia’s “as he said” is important. She was emphasizing, I didn’t see this. He told me so. If Lev wants to stride about the steppe like Adam, let him!

  She did not begrudge him the recovery of his vitality. Her statement that he didn’t write and hardly read is untrue, though. He conducted the survey of the peasants and he wrote the article, and at least for the first week or two he had read or tried to read and correct the War and Peace volumes.

  Tolstoy wanted the family to stay through the harvest, but that year “the harvest was absolutely pitiful.” There was a big gathering with people they had hired “in the large village of Zemlijanka,” “hundreds of people with their children, cows, dogs and even chickens.”LXXII Sergei remembered that his father set up recreational races and events in early August, though not as he more grandly and famously did in 1875.LXXIII

  There are no more surviving letters by Tolstoy after the one on July 22 to Alexandrine until he got back to Yasnaya Polyana. They left the farm in Samara on August 14. “The steamer voyage wasn’t as much fun as before,” Sofia remembered, “since we spent a long time on the river, there was fog, and Tanja and I felt very much under the weather.” They arrived home on August 22, her birthday.LXXIV We don’t know anything more from the family about the excitement or resignation of returning or about the return journey. On August 23, Sofia weaned baby Petja. A month later she was pregnant again.

  4 Distractions and Family Woes: August 22–December 31, 1873

  The return to Yasnaya Polyana brought Tolstoy back to attempting to resume Anna Karenina. There is no evidence that as he took walks or rode around the estate he tried to conjure up situations for the novel. He seems to have worked and created with his right hand dipping the pen into the inkwell and skritching it across the paper. So we can imagine him now, in late August of 1873, thinking or hoping that being at his desk would get the novel rolling again. He felt physically restored.

  From his personal correspondence, we see that he wanted to want to write. He wrote two letters on August 24—one to Strakhov and one to Fet. He told Strakhov he didn’t know how to thank him for the summer’s “boring work on War and Peace.”

  You write that you’re awaiting from me something in a more severe style—like my attempts in the Azbuka; but I, to my shame, ought to confess that recorrecting and finishing off now that novel, about which I wrote you, is in the lightest least severe style.I

  He still had not described the plot of Anna Karenina to Strakhov and had no suspicions that his novel’s “lightest least severe style” was going to darken and concentrate itself into a most severe style.

  I want to play around with this novel and now I can’t finish it and I’m afraid that it’s coming out poorly, that is, you won’t like it. I will await your judgment when I finish; but unless you or I are going to be in Petersburg, I won’t be able to read it to you. Our whole big happy family has come back, returned from Samara, having acquired physical and spiritual health. I say nothing of myself: I’m healthy as a bull, and, like a dammed mill, I’ve built up water. If only God gives enough strength to use in this business. Where are you preparing your trip for? Over to our side? That would be so joyful for me. I don’t dare daydream about it.II

  He was ready to burst with this novel. His summertime had indeed been his restoration.

  And there was that “big happy family” of his.

  To Fet, Tolstoy wrote a note apologizing that it was not a letter. His third sentence (of four) reads:

  Despite the drought, losses, discomfort, we’re all, even the wife, happy with the trip and even more happy with the old frame of life and accepting the respective labors.III

  The perfect summer vacation.

  He had family happiness there and back home, and Anna Karenina was, as far as he knew, simply a lark that wouldn’t cost him or his readers much involvement.

  But, even into September, he still had to think about the revised War and Peace for the collected works. Back in June, we might remember, he had asked for Strakhov’s help with it. Strakhov’s letter in response to that one has not survived, but “pointed out some judgments (probably in the epilogue), which he thought excessive.” Though Tolstoy had given his friend full power to eliminate what seemed “excessive, contradictory, unclear,” Tolstoy backpedaled in early September with, as Gusev says, “a characteristic qualification”: “I give you this full-power and I thank you for the taken-up labor, but, I confess, I’m sorry. It seems to me (I’m probably wrong) that there’s not anything excessive there.”IV

  I imagine Strakhov receiving this letter and twisting his mouth at the thought of the earnest work he had put in at Tolstoy’s request. I imagine Tolstoy, professing his regret but deciding on second thought that, after all, War and Peace is a pretty good book, and that he shouldn’t monkey with it—even if Strakhov is right.

  Strakhov wrote him back that there was in any case an error in an astronomy reference. He justifiably scolded Tolstoy again for not valuing War and Peace highly enough. Tolstoy told him he remembered that passage and Strakhov should have taken it out, but that he would write the printer that very day to get it removed. Dutiful Gusev, following up on this point, writes: “However, either the letter wasn’t written or it didn’t reach the printer, and the 1873 edition’s paragraph 12 remained in its place and was reprinted in all the further editions.”V

  Tolstoy fi
nally realized, or maybe Sofia told him, or maybe Strakhov’s critical admiration convinced him, that he himself was not the best option for the War and Peace editing job. This early September letter from Tolstoy to Strakhov is full of personal feeling and gratitude. When I had read only Gusev’s quotations from this letter they didn’t give me a sense of the friendship. Reading the whole letter, there is more loving-friendship feeling in it than in any friendship Tolstoy describes in Anna Karenina. After thanking Strakhov again for all his work on War and Peace, Tolstoy declared: “I fully believe in you.”

  Right now I told my wife that one of the happinesses for which I thank fate is this, that N. N. Strakhov exists. And it’s not because you help me, but for making it pleasant to think and write, knowing that there is a person who wants to understand not what he wants to but everything that wants to be expressed by him who expresses it. You are so good to me to have written about your place in the library that I see you there and dream about it [… ]VI

  Strakhov, having made his living as a schoolteacher and then as a freelance writer, now had an adequately salaried job at a library in St. Petersburg. Tolstoy had a thing against journalists:

  I am very glad for you that you sit on that chair and are not needing to write in the newspapers. Today is a superb fall day, I went out the whole day alone on the hunt and several times remembered you […] and the whole time it’s been annoying to me to think that you’re a journalist.VII