Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  The pedagogue D. I. Tikhomirov thought that “the committee should not take up Tolstoy’s proposal, because ‘a 10-day experiment won’t convince anybody of the validity of its use, because if everyone is convinced that the theoretical basis of the usefulness of [Tolstoy’s] teaching is incorrect, the most brilliant results that come from the proposed experiment, by the method’s inventor, will show only that in his hands it can be very good.’ ”XXXII

  Tikhomirov was giving Tolstoy credit for what Tolstoy didn’t want factored into a pedagogical judgment—that is, his big personal presence. Was it Tolstoy’s fault that he hadn’t been able to explain himself in a way that convinced the committee members? Or maybe the committee understood better than he that he simply loved the work and was brilliant doing it, and that a brilliant teacher is not actually tied down to any method, that she or he sensibly uses any method to help a student learn? While Tolstoy believed his method rather than his personal charisma and tact should have been enough to win the argument, we’ll see that he would encourage his protégé to use any effective methods. Tolstoy’s real method (I would argue) was to be smart, sensitive, and excited about the immediate discoveries he made in his classroom. Preparing for and overseeing the pedagogical experiment would take up the bulk of Tolstoy’s attention in January and February of 1874.

  * * *

  The Tolstoy children were home-schooled for the most part, at least until early adolescence. What Sofia and Tolstoy didn’t have time or ability to teach them, tutors and governesses did. Sofia explained in My Life that their nice old French governess at this time was a bit of a thief; they caught her stealing and had to fire her.XXXIII Sometime that fall Tolstoy wrote to N. M. Nagornov, his niece’s husband, asking if he could go to a particular office in Moscow (near where the State L. N. Tolstoy Museum is now) and ask for a French or Swiss governess or governesses, “not so old as Mademoiselle Raoux,” he said. She needed “to look after Tanya and give lessons to the little ones.”XXXIV

  The Tolstoys’ seemingly perpetual search for governesses lets us see, when the novel opens, something of the Tolstoy family situation in the Oblonsky family.XXXV “All was confusion in the Tolstoy household” would still fit, if just for the number of children and for the household problems. A few problems obviously not in Anna Karenina are Tolstoy’s involvement with the Azbuka, the teaching-methods dispute, his trying to write Anna Karenina, and, in a few weeks, the death of baby Petya.

  For My Life, Sofia probably had to steel herself to relate the chapter “The Puppy and the Death of Petja”:

  At the end of October 1873, or possibly the beginning of November, someone brought to Lev Nikolaevich a tiny but well-bred borzoi puppy as a gift [perhaps Sofia knew but couldn’t bring herself to name and blame the “someone”?]. […] The children had great fun with this little doggie, and my chubby little Petja was especially fond of it. […] One time this dog began to wheeze and cough, almost like a bark, and little Petja, after visiting him, came and declared that “amka bobo” [Cathy Porter’s footnote says this is baby talk for “the doggie’s sick”]. I told the nanny to stay away from the dog, and after a two-days’ illness, the puppy passed on.XXXVI

  Three days later Petya was sick; they gave him medicine for croup; he died two days after that, on November 9.

  Though I was in the same room [writes Sofia], I could not bear to see my boy’s passing. It was Lev Nikolaevich who was sitting at Petja’s bedside at the moment of his death. We had sent for the doctor during the night, and by the time he arrived in the morning, the boy was already dead. The doctor said Petja had caught the croup from the puppy, and that infections from animals, chickens and such like, were a common occurrence. I was completely overwhelmed by an unanticipated feeling of loss over my child for the first time in my whole life. I could feel a very painful rupture, practically a physical experience of suffering. […]

  Sofia quoted from Tolstoy’s letter to Tatyana’s husband:

  “Even Petja, just a noisy kid and still devoid of any kind of charm from a father’s point of view… yet, apart from the sorrow associated particularly with his passing, he has left a feeling of great emptiness in our home which I had not anticipated.”XXXVII

  That sounds not very feeling. We know that Tolstoy said he didn’t care much about the children until they could talk, and late in Anna Karenina we see Levin’s confused disgust with his and Kitty’s baby. Children had to be able to talk to have “any kind of charm” for Tolstoy.

  And yet, let’s look at his entire letter to Sasha Kuzminskiy, which the editors of the Jubilee edition guess as having been written between November 18 and 25:

  We rarely exchange letters with you, dear friend, and every time only about misery. Your letter came without me [being here], and Sonya read it through. I was in Moscow. And in your little note, which Sonya wrote to me with the horses that met me, she wrote me about your misery [the Jubilee edition note explains Tatyana had suffered a miscarriage or “unsuccessful delivery”]. I can’t tell you how that hurts me. However many times I’ve noticed this strange law of luck: good and bad, not in a single game, but in the most important matters of life. It seems we with you—and we’re so close by wives and friendship—are stuck in this vein of bad luck. We’ll be strong. Again we’re awaiting the happy vein, which for me stands only in nothing changing. Even Petja, just a noisy kid not yet having any kind of charm from a father’s point of view…XXXVIII yet, apart from the sorrow associated particularly with his passing, he has left a feeling of great emptiness in our home which I had not anticipated.XXXIX

  Tolstoy went on and poured out more feelings:

  How many times have we remembered how he was! I hope that now your letter will come with other news, if not good then not bad about Tanya. Please write if you haven’t already. As far as we are from each other, I feel that you are truly also on the same roads, in family joys and miseries, nobody takes such part as we with each other.XL

  Reading the whole letter makes quite a different impression. His remembrance of Petya is moving. Tolstoy does not seem cold as much as like someone trying to moderate the presentation of his feelings. He was a father, he was reminding himself and Sasha; it’s different. It’s not as bad as what a mother feels. He was not cold in feeling but tempered about his grief when he compared his feelings to Sofia’s.

  At this moment in My Life, much of which was composed decades after the fact, Sofia mounts her own defense of this period of the mid-1870s, when their relationship became unhappy. She had plenty to complain about and a lot of their mutual agony was his fault. But she took revenge here—the way people do at divorce hearings—by denying him feelings that he actually had.

  But back to Sofia’s heartsick recounting. She had “a vivid memory of the funeral: there was a heavy frost. Lev Nikolaevich and I placed the coffin on our sleigh and took it to the church ourselves. During the service I looked at that little face, which had been quite untouched by the brief illness, and I tried my best to keep my spirits up. […]”

  But the most terrible moment was when we placed the little coffin on the snow beside the freshly dug grave, and in this heavy frost I saw his little body clothed in a light white shroud—that same little body that I had fed with my breasts and just recently weaned, which I protected from the slightest draft of air, coddled and kept warm, and now grown stiff partly from death and partly from the frost.XLI

  On the day of the funeral, Tolstoy wrote his brother: “[…] after your departure, that is, last night, Petya died, and today he’s been buried. His throat suffocated him, what’s called croup.”XLII

  According to the Mayo Clinic: “Croup refers to an infection of the upper airway, generally in children, which obstructs breathing and causes a characteristic barking cough. The cough and other symptoms of croup are the result of inflammation around the vocal cords (larynx), windpipe (trachea), and bronchial tubes (bronchi). When a cough forces air through this narrowed passage, the swollen vocal cords produce a noise similar to a
seal barking. Likewise, taking a breath often produces a high-pitched whistling sound (stridor). Croup usually isn’t serious and most cases can be treated at home.”XLIII

  Tolstoy knew what he was talking about to Sergei in calling it croup:

  This (comes) to us again very heavily, especially Sonya.—Yesterday I received a letter from the printer that the twelfth edition is coming out. And the D’yakovs came today. He has gone now to Moscow and leaves Masha and Sofie with us. I’d be much better if I went to Moscow now. Sonya will stay alone. If you can, come now, that is the day after tomorrow, the 12th. You’ll eat with us or we’ll eat on the train? Answer, how and what?XLIV

  At first I misread and thus mistranslated “Sonya will stay alone” as “Sonya can’t be left alone,” because that’s what I thought he should and would say. But the note by Gusev is unmistakable (“Tolstoy left YP November 12 and returned on the 16th,” which Gusev learned from a letter from Sofia to TatyanaXLV). Tolstoy left!

  Maybe Tolstoy did know Oblonsky rather deeply within himself? Stiva would or could leave Dolly alone shortly after a child’s death, and so also, apparently, could Tolstoy leave Sofia.XLVI

  In My Life, however, Sofia didn’t blame him: “Lev Nikolaevich went to Moscow to sell an edition of his complete works.” (She was mistaken in that he wasn’t “selling” it, it was being released.)

  It was very hard for me to live without Lev Nikolaevich, but there was so much to do, especially teaching the children, that willy-nilly I was obliged to plunge once more into my family duties. Once again the lessons proceeded according to an established timetable. Once again every evening I would transcribe Lev Nikolaevich’s work.XLVII

  Her baby was dead; she was pregnant; the other children needed her. Her husband went back to his routine—earning money, resuming Anna Karenina—and she went back to hers, work for which we readers owe her thanks.

  This next passage from Sofia’s memoir humbles me (and anybody who thinks they really know Tolstoy and his work), just as I believe Sofia meant for it to do:

  The transcribing of War and Peace—and, indeed, all Lev Nikolaevich’s works—was a source of great aesthetic pleasure for me. I fearlessly looked forward to my evening labours, and joyfully anticipated just what I would derive from the delight of becoming further acquainted with his work as it unfolded. I was enthralled by this life of thought, these twists and turns, surprises and all the various unfathomable aspects of his creative genius.

  I would ask myself: why did Lev Nikolaevich substitute a new word or phrase for one which appeared to be perfectly suitable already? It often happened that the galley proofs finally sent to Moscow for printing would be returned and corrected yet again. Sometimes he would telegraph an instruction to change some word or other—even just a single word.

  Why were whole beautiful scenes or episodes deleted? Sometimes, in transcribing, I felt so terribly sad at deleting splendid passages he had crossed out. Sometimes he restored what he had crossed out, and that made me happy. It happens that you get so involved with all your heart and soul in what you’re transcribing and you become so familiar with all the characters that you yourself begin to feel you can improve it: shorten an overly long passage, for example, or rearrange punctuation marks for better clarity. And then you come to Lev Nikolaevich with the work you’ve copied all ready, and you show him the question marks you’ve made in the margin, and ask him whether it might not be better to substitute this word for that, or delete frequent repetitions of the same word, or something else besides.

  Lev Nikolaevich would explain to me why it had to be a certain way, or sometimes he would listen to me as though he were actually glad of my observation. But when he wasn’t in a good mood, he could get angry and say that’s just a trifle, or that’s not important, it’s the overall thought that’s important, etc.XLVIII

  She was almost always on the job, right there, the sympathetic, forbearing midwife to artistic creation.

  * * *

  The day after his return home from Moscow, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov. His first paragraph was loving and grateful, which would make it obvious again if we didn’t already believe it that he adored Strakhov. Tolstoy then told Strakhov about Petya’s death… and the progress that he was making with Anna Karenina:

  I didn’t answer you for a while, at first because of negligence, and then for some time our whole life was destroyed. Our little child died—Petya. This was the first death after 11 years. The meaning of this death is impossible for a childless person to understand.XLIX

  (True, how impossible it is to comprehend a child’s death! And yet it seems tactless to tell a dear friend, “You, having different circumstances, couldn’t possibly understand mine.”)

  My work up to this was going well, even very well. I can say that seven sheets are ready for printing, and the rest are all kneaded in dough, so that the finish is only a question of time. I’ve already begun thinking about the process of printing, and all my hope is on you. And if you agree to take on the corrections I will publish it in Petersburg and will publish the first volume, not waiting for the second.L

  So what had he been coming up with for Anna Karenina? That “ready for printing” should be taken with a grain of salt, considering Tolstoy’s track record with “finishing” writing, and as for “the rest are all kneaded in dough,” he might have meant only that he had dozens of pages in the dough-bucket of his mind, the yeast of the dough being some of those notes we read in Chapter 2 (e.g., “She has it out with her husband. She reproaches him for previous indifference. ‘It’s too late.’ ”). We know the “light” novel he planned has no chance of coming to light because his life, becoming more and more unhappy, was going to flow, transmuted, into the novel, including, for a sentence or two, his recent heartache over the baby.

  It seems hard to comprehend now, with our sense of the final Anna Karenina, how he could still be so mistaken about its length and estimated time of completion:

  It could be ready in December, and maybe not ready. Please, answer, as always, simply and straight, would you take on this work and on what terms.LI

  He was impatient: the baker wanted to bake the dough. He did not mind now the thought of committing to publication before the novel’s completion. (Most of the rest of the letter is about physics, specifically gravity, about which he was puzzled. He asked Strakhov, his go-to person for science, if he understood him and agreed with him.)

  Tolstoy’s manner of mentioning Petya’s death to Strakhov was dramatically different from how he discussed it with Fet, who had his own children:

  We have a misery: Little Petya got sick with the croup and in two days died, on the 9th. This is the first death after 11 years in our family, and for my wife it’s very heavy. It’s possible to console oneself that if one of us eight had to be chosen, this death is the lightest of all and for all; but the heart, especially a mother’s—this is the most amazing revelation of God on earth—doesn’t judge, and my wife is very miserable.

  For some days I was in Moscow on business, making use of the presence of the D’yakovs with us in order not to leave Sonya alone, and now we’re in a little way becoming used to the emptiness that Petya left behind.

  […] I have one of the best, joyful occupations—these math and Greek lessons with the children that we’ve begun.

  Pass on our sincere greetings and hello to Marya Petrovna.LII

  In another letter to Strakhov, on December 12–13, he discussed science and philosophized until the last few lines. He knew Strakhov wanted to hear news of his creative work, so at the end he condescended to address that: “My work with the novel a few days ago was going well in progress. But then I was all unhealthy and out of sorts.”LIII

  A few days later, he wrote Strakhov again:

  I waited the whole year, sufferingly awaited the arrangement of the soul for writing—it came—I am using it in order to finish my favorite thing. Now what can I do to satisfy the pleasure of Prince Meshcherskiy, and to bring about a good ca
use? 1) Either to cut off work in order to write une bluette [a trifle], I even for a minute thought of doing this. But this would be a crime concerning my present duty.—2) To publish a chapter from this novel; but I constantly redo them and even so am unhappy with them, and again this passage. 3) From this portfolio give something—I cannot let go muck with my name. For such a purpose to do such a thing would be disgusting. […]LIV

  He would like to be distracted, it seems, by working on that “bluette,” a piece Gusev calls the “beginning of a tale.” It opens with the phrase (“… and I lost consciousness”). Wouldn’t it make sense that this fragment would have something to do with Anna Karenina?

  It would, but it doesn’t. It’s the opening of a dreamlike science-fiction tale of about five hundred words, perhaps a Swiftian satire intended for children.LV

  Sofia wrote her sister Tatyana on December 19 and mentioned that Tolstoy was “writing a lot” on Anna Karenina.LVI On December 28, Gusev notes that Tolstoy recorded his last diary entry until April 17, 1878. It seems that Tolstoy didn’t really need a diary once his thoughts and feelings were permeating Anna Karenina.

  5 Anna Karenina’s False Start: January 1–August 14, 1874

  The figure from a lifeless imagined thing had become living, and such that it could never be changed. That figure lived, and was clearly and unmistakably defined.

  —Anna KareninaI

  At the beginning of January, writes Gusev, “T. tells his children in French the contents of a Jules Verne novel.”II Sofia’s memoir explains: “Lev Nikolaevich would tell stories in the evenings from the illustrated editions. Later on these stories served for our reading after evening tea, and we eagerly awaited this time. One time Lev Nikolaevich went to Moscow and tried to buy something else by Jules Verne, but couldn’t find any illustrated edition, so he bought Le Tour du monde without illustrations. Then he began doing very primitive ink drawings to go with this work, which, I would say, delighted the children even more. I kept these drawings, and they are preserved in the Historical Museum in Moscow along with his manuscripts.”III