Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Here was Tolstoy as a dad and entertainer. Here was Sofia understanding that these drawings were important, that is, more important to her (and to me) than what he was gleaning at the time from his readings of Schopenhauer and Henry George. Tolstoy had to read ahead in Around the World in Eighty Days and choose the scenes he anticipated the children would respond to and he could render best.

  Two of Tolstoy’s several illustrations for his children from Jules Verne’s La Tour du Monde (Around the World in Eighty Days)IV

  * * *

  Sofia, in her otherwise undated entry from her memories of 1874, noted:

  I wrote my sister […] “[…] My evenings are spent in a lot of transcribing. Levochka’s novel keeps progressing. Occasionally we play four-handed piano pieces, and have supper at one {in the morning}V (I sometimes heat up supper myself on the gas cooker), after which I’m exhausted to the limit and go to bed and read English novels until three {a.m.}.…”VI

  Sofia was proud of herself and pleased with their intimacy; she was helping him with his writing again.

  On January 9, Sofia wrote her sister that she was recopying the novel “a lot,” and it was “completely changing.”VII Unfortunately for family happiness, Tolstoy left for Moscow on January 15.VIII

  That day, before the public meeting to which he had been invited by the literacy committee, Tolstoy had a “conversation with Katkov’s typographer concerning the printing of Anna Karenina in a separate edition.”IX He meant to finish his little novel and put it behind him. Having taken care of that printing business, he made his way to the meeting.

  Tolstoy was famous enough that the session was standing-room only:

  It differed in an unusual way for a meeting of the committee by the crowd: 31 members of the committee and 65 outsider attenders (usually at meetings of the committee there were no more than 15–20); in the space of the hall there was not enough space—they stood in doorways and sat on the window-sills.X

  Tolstoy was asked to demonstrate his method, and he answered that it was all laid out in the Azbuka, and he could explain to the committee anything that was still unclear. He answered a questioner who pointed out that one of the best features of his method was that the children quickly learned to read, while the “advocate of the sound method, D. I. Tikhomirov, explained that the speed of learning was a secondary matter. Much more important was the development of the children, achieved by the conscious work of the sound method.”

  To this Tolstoy said that the teacher’s obligation was to satisfy the wishes of the people, and the people wished for their children to be taught reading and writing as quickly as possible. “But as for development,” said Tolstoy, “the parents are not asking [for that], for this they won’t pay a salary, consequently, the teacher does not have any right to develop the pupils… I don’t consider I have the right to produce development, because all development suggests its own known direction.”XI

  Based on Tolstoy’s experience with actual students, this was a weak argument. As a teacher, Tolstoy was so deeply involved that he did “develop” the students. He did change them. “Education is violent; because it is creative,” wrote ever-practical G. K. Chesterton.XII “It is creative because it is human. It is as reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house. In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with life and growth.”XIII

  Tolstoy didn’t believe teachers had the right to inculcate students, but he knew very well that any involved charismatic teacher is shaking up souls—Tolstoy did this himself and had described it in his Yasnaya Polyana articles of 1861–62. And of course speedy learning is better, all other things being equal. But Tolstoy couldn’t have taught a fast, catchy system if he weren’t so dynamic—so Tikhomirov’s criticism of his method was fair. From a distance, we can regret his wasting his time and energy on an academic shoe-tying dispute. Both Tolstoy’s and Tikhomirov’s methods worked, but Tolstoy’s pride was wounded and he got caught up in the arguments for one side.

  His method worked best if he was the one carrying it out, and we also know, from his own mouth (and pen), that in the moment of teaching he used anything that worked:

  To the question of how he conducts the teaching of reading, Tolstoy answered, “I first of all mark on the wall with charcoal or chalk giant letters, and with a stick point at the letter and name it, and the children repeat it. In such a way, I in one lesson get through the whole alphabet, and already by the next day all the children know it without an error.”XIV

  The biographer Ernest Simmons points out that these “assembled pedagogues were naturally confused, for in part Tolstoy obviously employed the very oral method that he professed to scorn.”XV All of us teachers have been at meetings where a colleague asserts the effectiveness of a particular teaching method, while neglecting to mention the primary difficulty that had to be overcome: exciting interest in actual students. The professional teachers at this meeting would have understood that it was not Tolstoy’s method as much as that Tolstoy had a knack with the students and that they raptly attended to him. Even a great teacher, however, doesn’t want that to be true—that her method might matter less than the medium.

  The questions went on, and Tolstoy was rambling. He was trying to prove something that he could only truly prove in his own classroom and that he could really only describe through narrative:

  Tolstoy in detail answered his opponents on why he counted the sound method unacceptable in a Russian school. “When eight- to twelve-year-old students come to school,” he said, “you begin the lessons with turning their attention on what’s contained in the room that surrounds them. You ask them about such subjects that they have long known, so in such a way even the most unintelligent student answers you. So you say you begin your lessons with conversations, but I count those absolutely harmful, as in order for the conversations not to be boring demands genius from the teacher; then you give the children the word ‘au,’ demand they name it and ask what is heard in the beginning of the word and what at the end. But this very word they do not understand… Then you go over a whole bunch of exercises and conversations, but all these conversations only confuse the child, push him off and create a disbelief in the parents toward teaching, because they see that the child studied but all the same doesn’t know anything. So here, finally, in three weeks the child comes home and to the parents’ question, What did you learn, what do you know?, the child answers, ‘The sound ‘oo.’ ”XVI

  Tolstoy showed in his education articles of 1862 that he was never restrained by a method; he always trusted the moment. He registered what was working and what wasn’t. He couldn’t persist with a lesson if it wasn’t feeling successful. Here, on the other hand, he was imagining what would happen if he persisted in stupidity, in futility; in a real classroom he would have rerouted the lesson plan.

  Speaking out publicly, Tolstoy, as always, was shy and felt uncomfortable; in the words of the Russian Herald reporter, he spoke “awkwardly, passionlessly, and with frequent hesitations.” […]XVII

  He was awkward, in part, because, like his character Levin, he was trying to concentrate while being watched and feeling self-conscious. He would not have spoken by rote.

  At the conclusion of the debate the president said a final conclusion might be taken only “after experience of the advantages of the one or the other method.”XVIII

  That is, it was a tie, and thus required a contest.XIX

  Tolstoy went ahead (he liked contests) even though he knew this dispute couldn’t be decided the way a horse race is; the reading method depended on the particular student and the particular teacher.

  He wrote Sofia that evening:

  I’m keeping my promise. I arrived well. All the important business about the printing […] and the meeting in the committee, all this finished favorably. Only one thing was not good: this is that I promised tomorrow and the day after to give model lessons, and this will take up all my evening, which I wo
uld have spent pleasantly. And, I’m afraid, there will not be benefits, that is no one will be convinced, there is too much stupidity and stubbornness. I didn’t get angry, and D’yakov and others said that I spoke well. And tomorrow I hope to escape so that on Thursday I don’t go to the meeting. My health is well. The D’yakovs are very sweet.—I kiss you, darling, and the children.

  I ask the three older ones to behave so you don’t complain about but praise them.XX

  The next day, the first day of the contest, he was sick. On the 17th he did a demonstration of the method at a factory. Gusev writes: “The gathering was a group of illiterate workers. Tolstoy started teaching them literacy by his method. He wrote with chalk on the board the letters of the Russian alphabet, named them and had the students repeat them in order to explain to the students the turning of the sounds into syllables.” Gusev quotes Tolstoy’s opponent Tikhomirov’s memoir:

  “Besides the difficulty and novelty, the whole atmosphere of the lesson was not favorable: the presence of strangers, the stuffiness in the confined room distracted and wearied the students. And sweat rolled from the students and the teacher. Tolstoy could not further continue the lesson. The first lesson remained unconvincing.”XXI

  The president of the committee decided that the question of which method was better was still open.

  Although Tolstoy’s lesson had been a bust, the committee wanted the contest to proceed anyway. On the 17th (or perhaps, Gusev says, the 18th) Tolstoy returned home to Yasnaya Polyana.

  I was expecting Tolstoy to begin to feel guilty about having wasted not only his own but everybody else’s time, but apparently not. He had Pyotr Morozov, one of the teachers at his school in the early 1860s, complete his method’s lessons over the next several weeks.

  This is an unpleasant episode, as unpleasant as any academic dispute, because finally it settled nothing and Tolstoy, a great principled pedagogical theorist and teacher, comes off poorly. Almost the only thing at stake was that he wanted to win the contest, and he allowed himself to badger his stand-in Morozov to stick to the declared methods (“firmly maintain my instructions”XXII), when to send the pupils to the board, when to dictate, and what to do when things weren’t working… “and write me how it’s going.”XXIII The letters are undated, but according to the Jubilee editors they fall between February and March 15. Morozov’s letters in reply no longer exist. “First off, write me as often as possible,” commanded Tolstoy. “I write every day… and receive one a week.”XXIV

  Tolstoy was uncomfortable appearing in public, and this was one of those tasks wherein his conscience was sending him plenty of messages to desist. A bad conscience is something he would depict in Oblonsky:

  Stepan Arkadyevitch, with the same somewhat solemn expression with which he used to take his presidential chair at his board, walked into Alexey Alexandrovitch’s room. Alexey Alexandrovitch was walking about his room with his hands behind his back, thinking of just what Stepan Arkadyevitch had been discussing with his wife.

  “I’m not interrupting you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, on the sight of his brother-in-law becoming suddenly aware of a sense of embarrassment unusual with him. To conceal this embarrassment he took out a cigarette case he had just bought that opened in a new way, and sniffing the leather, took a cigarette out of it.

  “No. Do you want anything?” Alexey Alexandrovitch asked without eagerness.

  “Yes, I wished… I wanted… yes, I wanted to talk to you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with surprise aware of an unaccustomed timidity.

  This feeling was so unexpected and so strange that he did not believe it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he was meaning to do was wrong.

  Stepan Arkadyevitch made an effort and struggled with the timidity that had come over him.

  “I hope you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere affection and respect for you,” he said, reddening.

  Alexey Alexandrovitch stood still and said nothing, but his face struck Stepan Arkadyevitch by its expression of an unresisting sacrifice.XXV

  Just so Tolstoy, his conscience being shrugged aside, kept pushing poor Morozov: “All this is possible, Petr Vasil’evich, and you’ll be quite a fellow if you do it all.”XXVI The misgivings and anxiety were the signals Tolstoy either should have given up the whole thing or done the work himself.

  The Jubilee editors say that Morozov, in the course of these two months, paid several visits to Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana,XXVII where Tolstoy had resumed writing Anna Karenina.

  In a late January letter, this one to Fet, we learn about a letter-reading habit Tolstoy had:

  I was overjoyed at your letter and began, as usual, to read it from the end: it seems to me you’re promising to come.XXVIII

  We don’t know if it’s also Anna’s habit, but she does this too when she receives her husband’s icy letter and starts reading at the end:

  A footman brought in a thick packet directed in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s hand.

  “The courier had orders to wait for an answer,” he said.

  “Very well,” she said, and as soon as he had left the room she tore open the letter with trembling fingers. A roll of unfolded notes done up in a wrapper fell out of it. She disengaged the letter and began reading it at the end. “Preparations shall be made for your arrival here… I attach particular significance to compliance…” she read. She ran on, then back, read it all through, and once more read the letter all through again from the beginning. When she had finished, she felt that she was cold all over, and that a fearful calamity, such as she had not expected, had burst upon her.XXIX

  Tolstoy and Anna were reading letters from the end because they were looking for an answer, a decision, the final word.

  In early February, Sofia wrote and told her sister, “Apart from the children’s lessons, I hardly let my pen out of my hand, spending the whole time transcribing Levochka’s novel (Anna Karenina), which he keeps endlessly revising, as always…”XXX As for those lessons, recalled Sofia, her children “were also making good progress in French, but they didn’t like being compelled to speak foreign languages. English was closer to them than any other, since all the nannies they had were English, and little Masha didn’t even know any other language and could barely understand Russian.” In the area of foreign-language learning, we can see the Tolstoy family as the Oblonsky family, at whose pretentiousness or wrongheadedness Levin looks askance:

  “… What have you come for, Tanya?” she [Darya Alexandrovna, “Dolly”] said in French to the little girl who had come in.

  “Where’s my spade, mamma?”

  “I speak French, and you must, too.”

  The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look for the spade. And this made a disagreeable impression on Levin.

  Everything in Darya Alexandrovna’s house and children struck him now as by no means so charming as a little while before. “And what does she talk French with the children for?” he thought; “how unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it so: Learning French and unlearning sincerity,” he thought to himself, unaware that Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed it necessary to teach her children French in that way.XXXI

  I wonder if Sofia, on first recopying this passage, looked askance at Tolstoy and reminded him that they had both agreed on the matter of the benefits of English language acquisition for their children.

  In either January or February, Tolstoy turned down Nikolai Nekrasov’s offer to publish Anna Karenina in Notes from the Fatherland: “I don’t think I can start publishing in journals, and so I’m very sorry that I cannot fulfill your wish.”XXXII Why, by March 1, would he change his mind? He would agree then, if he was going to publish it in a periodical, to publish it in Katkov’s Russian Herald.

  In mid-February, in the midst of writing the novel and direc
ting the literacy contest from afar, Tolstoy wrote Strakhov. He was annoyed by Strakhov’s less critical, more accepting attitude of, among other things, the genre of criticism:

  […] criticism which you are so fond of is a terrible thing. Its only importance and justification is to guide public opinion, but this is the joke—when criticism talks rubbish it guides public opinion, but if it is the result of genuine and serious (ernst) thought it has no effect, and may just as well have never been written.XXXIII

  Despite his renunciation of criticism, Tolstoy would go on to write criticism that was “the result of genuine and serious thought.” For example, in the 1880s he would write introductions of writers’ selected works for a publishing company that he and Vladimir Chertkov started in order to print inexpensive editions of classics and wholesome works for the newly literate populations in Russia. When Tolstoy spoke or wrote about literature, his listeners and readers learned not just his lightning-strike opinions but how sharply and engagedly he read. Reading Tolstoy’s critical essays on Chekhov, Ruskin, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Maupassant, it can seem as if he as a reader has a bigger and better lens than ours: it’s got panorama-vision with heat sensors and radar. We can aspire to reading with his power and perception (just as we can hopelessly aspire to write with his power and perception), but probably the most important benefit of such criticism as Tolstoy’s is that we are provoked to go read the work that he discusses.