Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  When the characters in Anna Karenina read, on the other hand, they are almost always distracted; they don’t take in more than they want to; they’re reading to pass the time or in order not to think. This shows that Tolstoy doesn’t take fully engaged or perceptive reading for granted. Tolstoy’s most admiring depiction of reading would occur in 1885 in a moral tale that he adapted from the French, “Where Love Is, There God Is Also”:

  When Avdyeich read these words, there was joy in his heart. He took off his glasses, put them on the book, leaned his arms on the table, and fell to musing.XXXIV

  Shoemaker Avdyeich’s reading experience of the Gospels is not the result of criticism and could not have been inspired by criticism. So in that sense, Tolstoy might ask, what is the use of writing or reading criticism? Avdyeich’s thoughts and actions are the “criticism.”

  In any case, to Strakhov, Tolstoy went on and changed the subject, unusually to his own writing habits:

  You guessed that I’m very busy and am working hard. I’m very glad that I didn’t start publishing a long time ago when I wrote to you. I can’t draw a circle except by joining it up and then straightening out the initial irregularities. And now I’m joining up the circle and straightening it out, and straightening it out… It’s never happened before that I’ve written so much without reading anything to anybody and not even talking about it, and I terribly want to read it out. What I would give to have you here!XXXV

  Tolstoy creates the marvelous image of an artist drawing a circle by hand. By repeated applications, he tries to smooth out the rough curves through handwork. The second revelation is that Tolstoy needed to read aloud his own writing and hear it himself. Maybe he couldn’t imagine a reader unless there was a reader in the room with him. With somebody listening, he himself could listen to it and appraise it:

  But I know that that’s mean and I’m only deluding myself. I’m tired of working—revising, putting on the finishing touches—and I’d like someone to praise it and I don’t want to work on it any more if possible.

  We can believe he was “tired of working”; Tolstoy was not a literary workman. He was not Anthony Trollope knocking out one novel after another. Though we know that Tolstoy read many of Trollope’s forty-seven novels, one of which, The Way We Live Now, would be appearing in translation in some of the same issues of the Russian Herald as Anna Karenina, we don’t know if he ever read Trollope’s posthumously published An Autobiography (1883) or what he made of workman-like artists. Trollope writes:

  I always had a pen in my hand. Whether crossing the seas, or fighting with American officials, or tramping about the streets of Beverley, I could do a little, and generally more than a little. I had long since convinced myself that in such work as mine the great secret consisted in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labour similar to those which an artisan or a mechanic is forced to obey. A shoemaker when he has finished one pair of shoes does not sit down and contemplate his work in idle satisfaction. “There is my pair of shoes finished at last! What a pair of shoes it is!” The shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages half his time. It is the same with a professional writer of books. An author may of course want time to study a new subject. He will at any rate assure himself that there is some such good reason why he should pause. He does pause, and will be idle for a month or two while he tells himself how beautiful is that last pair of shoes which he has finished! Having thought much of all this, and having made up my mind that I could be really happy only when I was at work, I had now quite accustomed myself to begin a second pair as soon as the first was out of my hands.XXXVI

  Tolstoy, in contrast, can make us feel that his god’s gift of talent was a burden. It’s amusing that he wanted “someone to praise” this draft; later, he regularly told Strakhov that he did not want any praise of the work from him. Strakhov, he sometimes suggested, was too predictably encouraging:

  I don’t know if it will be all right. I rarely see things in such a light that I like everything about them. But so much has already been written and polished up and the circle has been almost joined, and I’m so tired of revising, that I want to go to Moscow after the 20th and deliver it to Katkov’s printing press. [Christian’s note: “Tolstoy went to Moscow on 2 March to deliver the first part of Anna Karenina to the printer’s.”] I’ve changed my mind about troubling you. I’m very grateful to you but I must correct the proofs myself.XXXVII

  Tolstoy had rushed along with the novel, but then he suddenly became uncertain about its value and decided that he wanted to publish it in parts. Strakhov immediately and enthusiastically answered Tolstoy’s letter: “What wonderful news, inestimable Lev Nikolaevich! The event that is occurring in Yasnaya Polyana is so important and so precious for me that I am afraid of something all the time, as used to happen, when you are afraid and do not believe that a woman loves you. But you write that everything is ready: for God’s sake, do protect the mss and pass it on to the press.”XXXVIII

  Again and again Strakhov shows us the proper or sensible response to Tolstoy’s composition of this novel: “protect the mss” with your life. Tolstoy was giving birth to something “so important and so precious”! (An artist who speaks of his own work as precious is probably contemptible; but if we’re artists’ friends, anxious for the appearance of their work, we can be fully justified in our assessment of its preciousness.)

  As a change of pace, on February 27, Tolstoy wrote in a notebook at Yasnaya Polyana what Gusev calls “the opening of a religious-philosophical work.”XXXIX I would call it, instead, the beginning of his multiyear revision and development of Confession, the philosophical rumination about his suicidal impulses in the mid-1870s:

  There is a language of philosophy and I will not speak it. I will speak a simple language. The interest of philosophy common to all society and the judgment of all.

  Philosophical language is invented for counter-objections. I’m not afraid of objections. I’m looking for them. I don’t belong to any camp. And I ask the readers not to belong to one.—This is the first condition of philosophy. I need to object to materialism in the preface. It’s said that besides earthly life there is nothing. I need to object because if that’s so, there’s nothing for me to write about. Having lived nearly 50 years, I’m convinced that earthly life gives nothing, and the smart person who looks at earthly life seriously, the difficulties, fears, reproaches, fights—for what?—out of craziness, right away will shoot himself, and Hartmann and Schopenhauer are right. But Schopenhauer gave the feeling that there is something, as he did not shoot himself. So this something is the task of my book. Why do we live?—Religion.—XL

  Was this the real book that Tolstoy first imagined Levin working on, instead of the one that Levin eventually got stuck on about the economics of contemporary Russian farming?

  No.

  Why?

  Because Levin is ten to twelve years younger than Tolstoy in 1874, not a writer, and not yet a father.

  On the other hand, Levin, by the end of Anna Karenina, is tempted to shoot himself; he doesn’t figure out the answer of why he shouldn’t, but by managing to avoid it, he gets past the “feeling” that he ought to. As did Tolstoy. Perhaps the value of Anna Karenina was that it was the “something” task that kept Tolstoy from shooting himself. It was not, to his thinking, the reason to stay alive, but his dramatization of Anna’s despair may have prevented his own self-destruction.

  The day before going to Moscow to submit the first part of Anna Karenina to the printer for publication as a separate edition, he wrote to the editor of the Russian Herald, Mikhail Katkov:

  As for the proposition for publishing in the Russian Herald, if I decide to publish in a magazine, generally speaking, the desire will always be to give it to the Russian Herald. My conditions are 500 rubles a sheet.XLI

  He was wavering about the novel even as he was submitting it. Should he publish it as a book, part by part, as he had War and Peace, or serialize it in a journal instead? Was he anxi
ous as he rode on the train that something would happen to the manuscript? Was he satisfied? Did he look it over some more? I imagine him confident and proud, knowing he had indeed worked hard at it and that the material itself was about as good as anyone could produce. The first part of the manuscript that wasn’t yet but would be his great work was in his hands or tucked into his bag. Was he thinking of the story and of how he would be reading it aloud to those specially selected listeners, or was he contemplating the literacy-teaching contest?

  It was that first night in Moscow, on March 2, when, according to Gusev he read “aloud some chapters of the novel.”XLII He wrote about this experience a few days later, back in Yasnaya Polyana, in a letter to Strakhov:

  […] I read a few chapters out for the first time to Tyutchev’s daughter and Samarin. I chose them both as being very cold, intelligent, and shrewd people, and it seemed to me that it made little impression on them…XLIII

  Tolstoy sometimes brought his art out into the air in order to get a new sense of it, to assess it, to be surprised by it, to replan it. But how keenly did he read those friends’ responses? “I chose them both as being very cold, intelligent and shrewd people”!

  Imagine that you, you cold, intelligent, shrewd person, have been chosen by the author to listen to the beginning of Anna Karenina. You don’t know that it’s going to be Anna Karenina. You are distracted perhaps by Tolstoy’s excitement or manner. He’s even told you, perhaps, that he has chosen you because you’re “very cold, intelligent, and shrewd,” which seems simultaneously complimentary and insulting. You are a test audience. He is not an actor. He is not, likely, reading it with obvious self-admiration. You have to guess what it is he wants to hear from you; you are not his equal. You cannot be totally frank. But if you are completely bowled over, gasping with awe, will he think you’re a sycophant?

  This is in contrast to Strakhov, who could react as enthusiastically as he felt; he could fall off his chair in amazement and insist that the great chapters he had just heard read to him were sublime—and he would have been right. Strakhov had enough confidence in his literary opinions to be able to state that Tolstoy’s writing was extraordinary. But here the poet Tyutchev’s daughter and SamarinXLIV were a special panel, whose “coldness” would perhaps keep Tolstoy from getting distracted. He could read to them and feel as if he had exposed the novel without having to care deeply about their responses. Tolstoy’s account of the evening continues:

  … but so far from being disenchanted, I set about revising and touching it up with even greater enthusiasm. I think it will be good, but it won’t be liked and it won’t be successful because it’s very simple. Samarin has agreed to correct the proofs. I’m very glad about this, but I’ll do some correcting myself as well.XLV

  But what could Tolstoy have meant by its being “very simple”? It means that he still hadn’t discovered the real novel yet. For the moment, he thought that he was going to finish and ditch it before it could consume him.

  While in Moscow, he visited the school where the children were learning reading by his method, but he did not remark in writing about that experience.

  On March 5, as Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana by train, did the motion of the train remind him of Anna and her fate? Did he try to read, as he would depict Anna trying to? Did he drift off into a nap and wake up two or three hours later in Tula or at the Kozlova Zaseka station, the train stop nearest Yasnaya Polyana?

  Besides the letter to Strakhov on March 6 about his business in Moscow and the reading aloud of those Anna Karenina chapters, he wrote, in a different vein, to his relative Alexandrine:

  […] This year sorrow has afflicted us. We lost our youngest son, the 6th child. Now we have 5 and are expecting another around Easter. Of all the intimate losses we could have suffered, this was the easiest to bear—a little finger, but painful just the same, especially for my wife. Death never has a very painful effect on me (I felt this at the loss of a dearly loved brother). If you yourself don’t approach nearer to your own death with the loss of a being you love, if you don’t become disillusioned with life and don’t cease to love it and expect good of it, then these losses must be unbearable; but if you submit to this approach to your own end, then it’s not painful, but important, significant, and beautiful. That is the effect death has on me, yes, and on everyone, I think.XLVI

  This is what Tolstoy in a philosophical frame of mind said about death. Such philosophy was an aspirational pursuit for him. How should it feel? Like this. But this had not been how he acted or would act when the thought or reality of death hovered near. His fear of annihilation was soon going to disable him. His imagination would in fact “become disillusioned” and anticipating death would definitely not seem “beautiful” to him. Tolstoy was of two minds about death: (1) wise and philosophical and (2) petrified.

  A small example. When burying Petya, I was concerned for the first time about where I am to be laid. And, apart from a mother’s special, almost physical pain, it had the same effect on Sonya, despite her youth.

  We’re living in the same old way, so busy that there’s never enough time. The children and their upbringing take up more and more of our time, and it’s going well. I try not to, but I can’t help being proud of my children. Besides that, I’m writing and have started publishing a novel which I like, but which is unlikely to be liked by anyone else, because it’s too simple. […]

  Again with the “simple” and unlikable Anna Karenina! And how about his “Besides that” (“krome togo”XLVII)! Anna Karenina as a “besides that”! Besides that, writes Albert Einstein, I have come up with a theory of relativity… Besides that, writes Mozart, I have jotted down an opera, The Marriage of Figaro… etc.

  For his relative, he was bringing together death and the novel. He even mentioned the happy state of his happy family. All happy families are… on the verge of unhappiness. Does being conscious of family happiness break the spell? It’s not clear that he ever again expressed his interest, happiness, and pride in the family.

  Throughout March, Tolstoy continued his backseat driving of his substitute Morozov’s teaching. It could not have been easy to work as Tolstoy’s stand-in: “I just received your letter, and I still know little and it’s short. How did the little ones read? Were they able to recite? […] Write me in more detail about everything that I wrote you. Were you able to use everything that I advised you in the last letter and how did it work?”XLVIII

  The nagging persisted: “You ask me whether I accept that the exams were intense? I can’t answer that at all because I don’t know anything about the success of the pupils from the time of my leaving Moscow. You don’t write me anything or you write me what I don’t need to know; the smallest details are what interest me in the school’s progress. You don’t even answer the questions in my letters. How does the dictation go with the young ones? How are they reading?”XLIX He told Morozov to test the comparison group’s students.

  It could have been this contest that prompted Tolstoy’s bitter regrets in Confession about imposing his pedagogy on the world: “I naively imagined that I was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.”

  […] I acquired a new vice: abnormally developed pride and an insane assurance that it was my vocation to teach men, without knowing what.

  To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of those men (though there are thousands like them today), is sad and terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one experiences in a lunatic asylum.

  We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and wrote—teaching others. And without noticing that we knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life’s questions: What is good and what is evil? we did not know how to reply, we all talked at the same time, n
ot listening to one another, sometimes seconding and praising one another in order to be seconded and praised in turn, sometimes getting angry with one another—just as in a lunatic asylum.L

  In the first week of April, Tolstoy was still caught up in the teaching contest and traveled back and forth between Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow despite the fact that Sofia was due at any time and despite the anxiety-causing news that his brother Sergei’s wife had just miscarried.

  In a chapter about 1874 titled “Disease and Death,” Sofia remembered: “I always feared a premature birth, and was constantly thinking that I would certainly die therefrom. I became so nervous that I wrote my sister: ‘I’ve become so nervous, fearful and timid that the slightest thing can set me off and even drive me to despair.’ […] I was especially afraid for my eldest son, Serezha. I loved him very much and wrote about him: ‘As the eldest, and smartest, and kindest, he is dearer to me and gives me greater cause for concern than any of the others…’ ”LI

  This might remind us about Anna Karenina, and the premonition Anna has when pregnant with Vronsky’s baby. Anna, after all, has some connections to Sofia. Anna’s hysterical fears about her second pregnancy are Sofia’s actually much more reasonable fears about her seventh. Sofia’s devotion to Seryozha is Anna’s to her own Seryozha.

  While Kitty shares conspicuous traits and characteristics with the Sofia of ages eighteen and nineteen, there are also measures of Sofia in Anna, who is the same age as Sofia as the novel proceeds. And once the vital “real” Anna existed, maybe Sofia began to take after her. Life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde enjoyed pointing out. In the next three decades Sofia would threaten to kill herself a half-dozen times. Experiencing the death of several of her children perhaps made her feel less frightened of dying herself.