Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Tolstoy then confessed that he was embarrassed to say he himself had taken to the newspapers, but because of the famine he had just had to! He explained that the Samara governor only found the news and publicity inconvenient for the government’s sake: “The letter achieved its goal if it caused a bit of noise.”VIII

  * * *

  On September 5 the painter Ivan Kramskoy, who had never met Tolstoy, arrived at Yasnaya Polyana to try to persuade the famous novelist to sit for a portrait for the collector Pavel Tretyakov’s gallery in Moscow. Previous attempts by others to persuade Tolstoy to sit for a painting had failed.

  Gusev narrates Kramskoy’s point of view:

  Finding out from a servant that the count was absent, off somewhere, Kramskoy walked along looking for him. Seeing in a barn a worker sawing wood, Kramskoy turned to him with a question:

  “Would you know, my dear fellow, where Lev Nikolaevich is?”

  “Why do you need him? I’m he.”

  “I’m the artist Kramskoy; I came to ask permission to do your portrait for the Tretyakov Gallery.”

  “No need for that, but I’m glad to see you. I know you. Come along with me.”IX

  Good story! Probably too good.

  Tolstoy seems to have enjoyed being taken for just another workman, and maybe Kramskoy sensed that and indulged the great man. Everyone noticed how earnestly Tolstoy worked, and Tolstoy’s brother Sergei teased him that he was constantly picking up the idiosyncratic mannerisms of his peasant farmhands. Tolstoy wanted to seem like an honest working man, to be approachable. Like Levin, Tolstoy ecstatically mowed with the workers. We know that he could enjoy labor for labor’s sake, for its physical exercise, for bringing him to a state of unselfconsciousness. Kramskoy right away was attracted and amused. That same day, Kramskoy reported to Tretyakov:

  We talked for more than two hours. I returned to the question of the portrait four times, and all to no avail. None of my pleas or arguments had any effect on him. Finally I began to make all kinds of concessions, and went to the utmost extremes. One of my last arguments was: “My respect for the reasons which keep your grace from sitting to me prevents me from insisting any longer; I shall, of course, have to relinquish all hope of ever doing your portrait, and yet—your portrait should and will hang in the gallery.” “How so?” “Why, very simply. To be sure, I shall not be the one to do it, and none of my contemporaries either, but in thirty, forty, or fifty years it will be painted, and then it will be a cause for regret that it was not done by a contemporary.” He thought it over, but still refused, though with hesitation. To clinch our talk, I again began to make concessions and presented the following terms, to which he agreed: first, the portrait was to be painted, but if for any reason it did not please him, it was to be destroyed; then, the time when it was to be sent to your gallery would depend on him, although the portrait was to be your property. This last condition was so generous that he was even taken aback and had to accept it. Then it appeared from our subsequent conversation that he would like to have a portrait for his children, but did not know how to arrange it; he asked about making a copy and whose consent was required if it was to be made later, that is—the copy, which he felt should also be sent to you. To forestall the possibility of his beating a retreat, I made haste to explain that an exact copy was out of the question and could not be executed even by the same artist, and that the only solution was to do two portraits from life; it would depend on him which he would keep for himself and which would be sent to you. At that we parted, having decided to begin sittings tomorrow, that is, Thursday.X

  Kramskoy must have been clever and patient; he was for certain a good salesperson. In Sofia’s memoir’s account of the portraits, she recalled there was just something about Kramskoy or because he came in person that made it so he “quite endeared himself to Lev Nikolaevich.”XI

  Ten days later, Kramskoy reported to Tretyakov:

  Now that I have started work on the portrait and have come to know the count better, I see that he feels obliged not to impose his choice upon me. That is clear from everything that has passed between us. For instance, after his third sitting, he and his wife expressed satisfaction with the portrait; the next time I came with another canvas and started another, larger portrait,XII allowing the first to dry. When that portrait was underway, the countess said to me, “It could not be better!” The count agreed and added that his conscience would not permit him to keep the better one for himself. I said nothing and bade my time, confining myself to the remark that both portraits should be so good as to make preference difficult. Then I resumed my work on the first. The count doubted that it would come up to the second. But I went on working, and yesterday the results were so satisfactory that it was adjudged by all to be better than the second.XIII

  How about this account from Sofia’s memoir?

  I recall going into the small drawing room and watching these two “artists” at work—one of them on a portrait of Tolstoy, the other on his novel Anna Karenina. Their faces were serious and concentrated on their respective tasks. Both artists were genuine, larger than life, and I felt such respect for them in my heart.

  This would be a good scene for a movie. Tolstoy is sitting for a portrait and writing the novel. We can see the speed (the pace anyway) of his writing, the movements of his pen, his eyes, his shifting in his chair, his feet. (Does he have one leg tucked under him?) And how fine it is to also catch the famous painter at work!

  However, it’s Sofia’s imagination that created this scene.XIV Tolstoy, by every other account, including evidence from Sofia’s own letters of the time and from her own memoir a page later, was not working on the novel. He wanted to but just couldn’t. She remembered: “It happened that same autumn […] I do recall being upset that Lev Nikolaevich was not continuing work on his novel Anna Karenina, which I liked so much and got more and more interested in as I continued my transcribing of it.”XV

  Sofia’s next memory about her husband and Kramskoy might have a basis in reality:

  One time I happened to find them engaged in a conversation about art. They were in a heated argument but, unfortunately, I do not recollect what they said.XVI

  It’s the absence of re-created dialogue and particular details that persuades me of its plausibility.

  Sofia remembered the portraits taking two or three weeks, but as of September 23–24, when Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov, the sittings were still going on. Are we to assume the sittings were every day from September 6 (the day after Kramskoy’s visit that secured Tolstoy’s cooperation) through the 23rd or 24th? Kramskoy says that he went back and forth, letting one painting dry while he worked on the other.

  Sofia, who would be under the gaze of one of Kramskoy’s portraits hanging on a wall at Yasnaya Polyana for the next forty-five years, was not, after all, enamored with the results:

  He partially spoilt them because, after painting the head and hands from life, the whole torso was done in absentia. That was because Lev Nikolaevich was off hunting with [Dmitrij Dmitrievich] Obolenskij and refused to sit for the artist. As if hunting were somehow more important than a portrait which would last hundreds of years.

  Even now I can see Kramskoj stuffing Lev Nikolaevich’s grey shirt with some kind of white cotton rags and sitting this headless scarecrow on a chair, girded with a belt. If you examine the portrait carefully, it is quite apparent how unnatural the bulging chest appears, along with the gatherings in the shirt, and how small the head is in comparison to the body.XVII

  Offering us uninhibited reflections, Sofia has managed to get in digs at both her husband and Kramskoy: Tolstoy wouldn’t sit still and Kramskoy couldn’t paint straight!XVIII

  Some of us (I, for example) have stood before both portraits, which hang on walls one hundred miles apart, and not for a moment realized that they were different. Sofia claimed if we could “examine the portrait carefully,” we would notice what she noticed. Let’s look again then at the Yasnaya Polyana portrait: the chair back ap
pears behind his right shoulder and his right elbow could be leaning on the chair’s arm. Yes, he seems more reluctant to be sitting; he’s thinking about… if his actions speak louder than Sofia’s recollections, not Anna Karenina but hunting. In the favored image for reproduction, the one hanging in Moscow, Tolstoy seems to be engaging with the viewer. He is not speaking but is surely ruminating about something. I cannot decide which of the two is the one Sofia believed was done from a stuffed scarecrow body.

  Even though Tolstoy had not yet conceived of Anna Karenina’s portrait-painter Mikhailov, this episode of sitting for Kramskoy can put us in mind of Mikhailov’s sessions and his portrait of Anna. Everyone who sees Mikhailov’s portrait of Anna is struck by it, by how revealed she is, by how they know her now better than they knew her before. The artist has revealed what they all could see but hadn’t really noticed. What is art? One example is Mikhailov’s portrait of Anna, a revelation of what we didn’t know but could have known.

  In the novel, Tolstoy likes to show us the limitations of Vronsky’s self-awareness; though he is not stupid, he is dense:

  From the fifth sitting the portrait impressed everyone, especially Vronsky, not only by its resemblance, but by its characteristic beauty. It was strange how Mihailov could have discovered just her characteristic beauty. “One needs to know and love her as I have loved her to discover the very sweetest expression of her soul,” Vronsky thought, though it was only from this portrait that he had himself learned this sweetest expression of her soul. But the expression was so true that he, and others too, fancied they had long known it.XIX

  In that letter of September 23–24 to Strakhov, Tolstoy implied that he had resumed Anna Karenina:

  I’ve made good progress in my work, but I’ll hardly finish it before winter—December or thereabouts. As a painter needs light for the finishing touches, so I need inner light, of which I always feel the lack in autumn.

  But how much “progress” had Tolstoy made by now? He accepted that his “inner light” had insufficient wattage “for the finishing touches,” but he was far far far away from finishing. He said absolutely nothing about his actually sitting down and writing—and he protested that it wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t finished. He knew that Strakhov (who had asked in his last letter, “Please, as soon as possible, your novel! And if still not soon, say at what stage it is”XX) would be disappointed if the novel-writing hadn’t begun again:

  Besides, everything has been arranged so as to distract me: acquaintances, hunting, a court session in October with me as a juryman and then the painter Kramskoy who is painting my portrait for Tretyakov. Tretyakov tried to send him to me a long time ago, but I didn’t want him, but now this Kramskoy has come himself and talked me round, particularly by saying “your portrait will be painted anyway, but it will be a bad one.” Even this wouldn’t have persuaded me, but my wife persuaded him to do another portrait for her, instead of a copy. And now he’s painting it, and very well according to my wife and friends. […]

  And then, changing the subject again, Tolstoy related a topic from his sittings with Kramskoy that truly excited his interest:

  He was telling me today about the murder of Suvorina. [R. F. Christian’s note on this: “Suvorina, the first wife of the publisher and journalist A. S. Suvorin, was shot in a hotel by a certain Komarov, a friend of the family, who then committed suicide.”] What a significant event!

  Werther shot himself and so did Komarov and the schoolboy who found his Latin lesson difficult. The one is important and noble, the other sordid and pathetic. Write and tell me if you find out any details of the murder.XXI

  Tolstoy was explicit that he considered that a suicide could be “important and noble,” notably Werther’s romantic suicide. He was fascinated by the idea of such a suicide. He wanted to know more.XXII

  His correspondence of September 23 to Fet is a “What’s wrong? Why haven’t you written?” letter, friendly and intimate. “Obviously we, truly, I and the wife, are not only your friends but we love you. If everything’s well and good, write how’re your chicks, things, plans. […] We’re as of old; strongly planted another eleven years (it’s eleven years now that we’re married).” He was writing this letter on the anniversary of his marriage. He said that he was resuming the novel, “that is, I’m soon finishing the novel I started.”XXIII He mentioned Kramskoy’s two portraits, and added: “If you don’t come to me on the road to Moscow, I’ll be angry and come to you.”XXIV

  As of this date the happy family that was like all other happy ones was still Tolstoy’s own.

  * * *

  On October 3, he went hunting at Obolenskii’s again. On October 4, Sofia noted in her diary that Kramskoy “is doing two portraits of L., and this tends to prevent him working. But to make up for it there are long discussions and arguments about art every day.”XXV Was Kramskoy possibly still around, four weeks after starting? She used the present tense in her entry. She also noted on this date that “Throughout the summer, which we spent in the province of Samara, L. did no writing, but he is now polishing, revising and continuing with the novel.” She didn’t say that she had seen his hand moving over the manuscript; and if she were now recopying his manuscript she would proudly have mentioned it.

  Sofia briefly accounts for October 1873 in My Life. She didn’t like Lev’s return to hunting or that, as she remembers recordingXXVI in her diary of October 11, “he had caught three hares. The children, upon seeing their father’s serious attitude toward hunting and not realising that for him it represented a vital respite after his intellectual labours, were all infected with the hunting bug, which I was terribly sad to see. One time on a walk in October they ferreted out a hare and became wildly ecstatic.”XXVII

  So she accepted his hunting as something that he needed, but she didn’t like that her children had a new excited interest in it. She did not explain whether it was because she felt pity for the animals, or that she considered hunting a pastime whose indulgence had to be earned.

  Tolstoy, in any case, was crazy for it.

  I started reading one of Tolstoy’s letters from this period (a letter over which Gusev spends a while arguing why he thinks it was written in October) and, when I was thinking it was written to Strakhov, I was surprised by how gleeful and playful it was. What’s gotten into Tolstoy?

  What had gotten into him was that he was writing not to Strakhov but to his brother Sergei, that’s what. How different we are around our siblings compared to how we are with the rest of humanity. In the novel Tolstoy will show us Levin’s particular anxiety when he is around his brother and half-brother. Tolstoy’s tone when writing to his brother Sergei is different from the tones he used to Fet or Strakhov; it’s intimate and looser:

  How’s everything with you, lively, healthy, well? Mashenka [their sister] not long ago sent a telegram! […] Hunting you, I think, I’m not kidding. There’s such a drought there’s not been a hunting day. I caught three hares at the same time. Don’t you need some money? Generally the thought torments me that we’re not agreeing in when to pay you interest.

  If you could think it over and write, that would be good. I would have come to you if it weren’t such a valuable time. But maybe you’re coming over and then we’ll talk.XXVIII

  The next time they talked, Tolstoy was in no ways cheerful.

  When Tolstoy was actually writing Anna Karenina, he did not at the same time conduct other business or do other projects. So if Sofia was accurate about his having started revising in early October, this distracted letter about his distractions shows that he must have almost immediately stopped revising. On October 16, Gusev, citing Sofia’s letter to Tatyana, says that at Yasnaya Polyana “for a week,” there were “teachers from the people’s schools (about twenty people) for discussion of the topic on applying with the peasant children the method of teaching grammar, laid out by Tolstoy.”XXIX In My Life Sofia remembered that Tolstoy “summoned twelve rural teachers” to Yasnaya Polyana: “He brought kids from nei
ghbouring villages to the annexe—kids who had never gone to school—and conducted some experiments on them.”XXX

  Much more significant in Sofia’s October 16 letter to Tatyana was the news that Tolstoy had “completely abandoned” the novel.XXXI

  Did Sofia make herself patiently listen to him whenever he announced, “That’s it! I’m done! I quit!”? Sofia was so much a part of Tolstoy’s life and has provided us with so much information that I wonder about her reactions when she doesn’t tell us what she was feeling. How many days or weeks did it have to be before she nudged him, “Lev, please get back to the novel!”

  This was the first of Tolstoy’s declared abandonments of Anna Karenina.

  * * *

  On October 23, the president of the Moscow Literacy Committee, answering Tolstoy’s bold early June public letter about pedagogy, invited Tolstoy to present to the committee members an account of teaching reading by his method. This polite invitation led to work that would distract him from resuming the novel. To make a case for himself in public after having made the case in writing was going to take up a lot of Tolstoy’s time. Kramskoy’s coming to paint him had made him feel awkward and distracted, but at least at times it was interesting to him and even flattering, and he could have kept himself writing had he been in the mood. This beckoning to him to defend his pedagogy, however, would relieve him from attempting to fix his attention on the novel.