Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  He wrote to Alexandrine on that same semi-hopeful day, but not about the novel: it was about his despairing hunt for tutors and governesses: “I have a German-uncle and English-nanny, but the older children have outgrown them and we are looking for a master and governess.” He apologized repeatedly for annoying her with his requests for help, but he knew that she, the governess of a Romanov princess, had connections to others in her field in Switzerland and England. He was pulling out all the stops.

  “My desires here,” he wrote Alexandrine, “are that the person have good morals, as much as possible a high soulful mood, without being pedantic or a Pharisee. And best of all a husband and wife, childless or with a child from six to eleven years old. There are no other requirements. Nationality is of no matter: German, French, English, Russian—as long as it’s European and Christian. Salary—everything I can give, that is, from one to two thousand rubles for two. Education—all the same—the more the better—especially language, but if they don’t know any, besides proper language, I’m fine. I can—as I’ve done all along—teach them myself the mathematics and the classical languages. Age? It’s all the same, from 20 to 70.”

  He added: “If necessary, I would go to Switzerland or wherever necessary in order to see those who might come under my requirements. The needs for the children had suddenly changed—as if onto a new stage. This especially seems so for the girl [Tanya was nine]. They develop earlier.” In the 1870s Tolstoy continued to seem like a 21st century father, involved in all aspects of the children’s lives: “How much I think over and feel about them, with so much effort—for what? So that in the best case, they’re not very bad or stupid people.”LXXXVI

  Those are the sentiments of an involved but realistic parent.

  And at the same time he was vacillating over whether or not to write his novel.

  How a two-week getaway to Samara with his son Seryozha got planned, I don’t know. Perhaps it was a spur-of-the-moment idea. Muttering to Sofia about his yearning for Samara, did she suggest that he take a short trip there? Her brother could stay to help with the kids, but maybe he could take their oldest boy this time? Seryozha had just turned eleven. The first written mention of the trip is in Tolstoy’s letter of July 29, on the eve of his and Seryozha’s departure for Moscow and from there to Samara, when he wrote Golokhvastov just as humbly and desperately as he had written to Alexandrine about help finding a tutor and governess. Concluding his letter, he complained: “The other day Strakhov was at my place; he almost got me interested in my novel again, but I just dropped it. It is terribly disgusting and nasty.”LXXXVII

  This was two days after his hopeful remarks to Strakhov!

  What does Tolstoy’s repulsion from the novel that he himself had created mean?

  Tolstoy has taught me almost everything I think I know about psychology, and I wonder at this moment, in his repeated mentions of his disgust with the novel, how much of this reluctance had its roots in depression? He didn’t know or couldn’t imagine where his vitality for writing was going to come from.

  Sofia remembered this journey in her memoir as “Lev Nikolaevich’s Trip with Serezha to Samara—The Children at Home”: “It was frightening for me to let [Serezha] go off so far away, but I also considered it harmful to keep the boy his whole life just with me and his nannies.”LXXXVIII

  The Tolstoys’ Seryozha and Anna’s Seryozha are growing up over the time of the novel; and while Karenin and his Seryozha have a poor relationship (in the final draft, but not in the early drafts, when Karenin is a good dad and has a magic touch with children), Tolstoy saw this as a chance to develop a better relationship with his boy. Sofia remembered:

  At that time Lev Nikolaevich, too, had begun taking an interest in his children, and I even detected a degree of concern in him that he was missing out on opportunities, that he must hasten to hire a good teacher and begin getting the older boys studying ancient languages. […]LXXXIX

  On July 30, Tolstoy and Seryozha stayed with the Perfil’evs in Moscow. Tolstoy was finishing up accounts with the printer of that abandoned separate edition of Anna Karenina, for which thirty chapters of Part 1 had been set in type.XC As a reassuring husband and father, Tolstoy wrote Sofia right away: “We arrived fine. […] Polin’ka [Praskov’ya Fedorovna Perfil’eva] suggested Arkady [a servant] taking Sergei to the zoo garden, and I called and went myself with them.”XCI (That zoological garden is an important place for Levin in Part 1, Chapter 9; he goes there, in winter, to see Kitty, and he displays his skating prowess; however, when he gets to skate with her he communicates too much about his feelings and she freezes him out, preparing us, if not him, for her impending rejection of his proposal.)

  On with the parental report: “Seryozha slept little and was limp, but I lay him down to sleep, and he’s sleeping now. Very soon I’ll wake him to eat and to leave. […] Seryozha has woken. He’s sleepy, but hasn’t much of an appetite.”XCII Seryozha’s own note to his mother was written on Tolstoy’s letter. They traveled by train to Nizhni-Novgorod on July 31 and got on the Volga steamer August 1, when Seryozha added: “Dear Mama, we’re now on the steamer, and my handwriting is bad from that, because the steamer rolls so much. We went straight onto the Nizhni Gorod train; it was a very comfortable space for us, because in our compartment sat a German and a Jew. I slept on the floor, but I slept better than on a sofa. In the morning we went to Nizhni. There it was terribly crowded, because there was a fair. We went on the Alexander II steamer, which is very big and is two stories. We’re now between Nizhni and Kazan and we ought to be in Samara after tomorrow morning. In this steamer is a very big wheelhouse and cabins, not below but on the same level with the wheelhouse. […]”XCIII

  Tolstoy followed Seryozha’s informative note: “Well, here, he’s written everything. Traveling for us is going well and the company is simple and not unpleasant. The main thing is that the steamer runs all night and on Saturday morning we’ll be in Samara. This saves us time, but don’t expect us before the 15th. Maybe we’ll stay longer on the farm.—I had been very tired, but on the steamer I have already succeeded in resting. Seryozha’s very sweet, and this trip has brought us together. I’m always looking at him with affection. I said that it’s boring on a steamer, but now I take that back; I’m sitting on a balcony, I look around and am joyful and think about how next year we’ll all go together. Only if for you it would be beneficial. […] I won’t have any melancholy with Seryozha. The whole time it’s as if I’m with the family.”XCIV Apparently, Sofia had been remembering his low mood when he went for a koumiss cure in 1871 with her little brother Stepan.

  Even if depressed, he was careful to reassure her.

  He wrote her again from the farm: “I slept poorly in the night and so slept through into Samara, and the steamer was late, so that in Samara I was very rushed and didn’t manage to send you this letter.”XCV He had heard from the housekeeper that the bread was especially bad at their place.XCVI

  At the Samara farm, Tolstoy’s goal was “to look at what was growing and to settle accounts.” While there he finished preparing “On Public Education”XCVII for publication.

  How about that? He wouldn’t work in the summer… except on public service writing. Evangelizing knows no rest. Art, on the other hand, demanded something else from him, namely creation, not the sharp explication of what he already thought, and it required a cool mind.

  But when and how did he work on the essay? Did he share any of his thoughts about education with Seryozha? After all, he had assigned the boy teaching duties in 1872 when he was using the Azbuka to teach the peasant children.

  In any case, Seryozha was “delighted” to be on the steppe with his father, but he remembered decades later being chagrinned there when Tolstoy lost his temper:

  I was surprised to hear my father reprimand a local peasant very angrily for appropriating about 13 dessiatines to his plot. Altogether the affairs on the farm were not too prosperous. My father had appointed an ignorant peasant, Timofei, as ba
iliff and he proved totally inadequate. My Uncle Sergei used to say about it: “Leo can allow himself the luxury of taking on bad bailiffs; for instance, Timofei will cause him one thousand rubles damage; Leo will describe him in a book and receive two thousand rubles for the description—so he’ll be one thousand to the good.”XCVIII

  Father and son returned to Yasnaya Polyana by August 14, the date on which Tolstoy wrote his brother: “I especially want to see you and find out that everything is fine, because five days ago I saw [something] so terrible and lifelike in a dream that I can’t forget it. When we see each other, I’ll tell it to you.”XCIX This reminds me of the scene when Anna tells Vronsky her frightening dream, and she manages to terrify him more than she ever did by any other action:

  “[…] I have had a dream.”

  “A dream?” repeated Vronsky, and instantly he recalled the peasant of his dream.

  “Yes, a dream,” she said. “It’s a long while since I dreamed it. I dreamed that I ran into my bedroom, that I had to get something there, to find out something; you know how it is in dreams,” she said, her eyes wide with horror; “and in the bedroom, in the corner, stood something.”

  “Oh, what nonsense! How can you believe…”

  But she would not let him interrupt her. What she was saying was too important to her.

  “And the something turned round, and I saw it was a peasant with a disheveled beard, little, and dreadful looking. I wanted to run away, but he bent down over a sack, and was fumbling there with his hands…”

  She showed how he had moved his hands. There was terror in her face. And Vronsky, remembering his dream, felt the same terror filling his soul.

  “He was fumbling and kept talking quickly, quickly in French, you know: Il faut le battre, le fer, le brayer, le petrir.… And in my horror I tried to wake up, and woke up… but woke up in the dream. And I began asking myself what it meant. And Korney said to me: ‘In childbirth you’ll die, ma’am, you’ll die.…’ And I woke up.”

  “What nonsense, what nonsense!” said Vronsky; but he felt himself that there was no conviction in his voice.C

  Dreams resonate throughout Anna Karenina, but we will never know what terrible dream it was that Tolstoy intended to tell his brother.

  6 For Love or Money?: August 15–December 31, 1874

  By August 15 Tolstoy was conducting business and catching up with friends, but for the next two weeks there was no mention of trying to resume Anna Karenina.

  He told Sofia his “On Popular Education” article was ready for publication; he would be paid 150 rubles a “sheet” in the September or October issue.I “Tolstoy also thanked the editor of Notes of the Fatherland for his readiness to help him in his fight with the pedagogues,” writes Gusev, “and concluded his letter with the words: ‘I firmly believe that if the editorial office turns its serious attention on this question, that it will become absolutely aligned with my point of view.’ Nekrasov without delay answered his agreement to all of the conditions.”II

  As for Tolstoy’s statement that “the editorial office” would certainly agree with him, this was not his rhetorical trick for confirming solidarity with his views but his customary attitude. He always believed what he said and always agreed, if just for the moment, with his own arguments. It was typical for Tolstoy to argue like so: “If you really think about it, you’ll finally draw the very same conclusions that I have drawn.”

  Even if he should have been working on Anna Karenina instead, Tolstoy’s essay is one of the most stirring works on education ever published. He brings us to think about the fundamentals of education; he shows us why we ought to question any system or trend or fad.

  In the introduction, he explains that the transcription of his remarks as provided him by the committee was mistaken; he also makes excuses for why his method did not prove its superiority, among them that his method required ten- and eleven-year-olds, not younger or older students, as well as that the school was “stuffy,” and that, furthermore, Popotov, his opponent and the proponent of the sound-method, in fact used Tolstoy’s methods and Tolstoy’s Azbuka!

  Strakhov and Sofia were still disappointed that he was not writing the more important Anna Karenina, but all his many writing gears were meshing. His nonfictional exposition was at its usual height of brilliance. As a critic, Tolstoy’s vision showed him huge holes and fault lines in his opponents’ arguments, and he almost always had the confidence in himself to offer remedies:

  Should I teach according to the sound alphabet, translated from the German, or from the prayer book? In the solution of this question I was aided by a certain pedagogical tact, with which I am gifted, and especially by that close and impassioned relation in which I stood to the matter.

  … because compulsion in education, both by my conviction and by my character, are repulsive to me, I did not exercise any pressure, and, the moment I noticed that something was not readily received, I did not compel them, and looked for something else.…

  … Consequently, the question of what the criterion was as to what to teach and how to teach received an even greater meaning for me; only by solving it could I be convinced that what I taught was neither injurious nor useless. This question both then and now has appeared to me as a cornerstone of the whole pedagogy, and to the solution of this question I devoted the publication of the pedagogical periodical Yasnaya Polyana. In several articles (I do not renounce anything I then said) I tried to put the question in all its significance and to solve it as much as I could. At that time I found no sympathy in all the pedagogical literature, not even any contradiction, but the most complete indifference to the question which I put. There were some attacks on certain details and trifles, but the question itself evidently did not interest anyone. I was young then, and that indifference grieved me. I did not understand that with my question, “How do you know what to teach and how to teach?” I was like a man who, let us say, in a gathering of Turkish pashas discussing the question in what manner they may collect the greatest revenue from the people, should propose to them the following: “Gentlemen, in order to know how much revenue to collect from each, we must first analyze the question on what your right to exact that revenue is based.” Obviously all the pashas would continue their discussion of the measures of extortion, and would reply only with silence to his irrelevant question.

  This example, so effortless and vivid, reminds us that Tolstoy may be the greatest master of metaphor since Homer. The images are natural, immediate, none too worked over, the genius mind revealed at its moment of making connections. And it’s funny! The point is so serious, however, that Tolstoy doesn’t let up:

  But the question cannot be circumvented. Fifteen years ago no attention was paid to it, and the pedagogues of every school, convinced that everybody else was talking to the wind and that they were right, most calmly prescribed their laws, basing their principles on philosophies of a very doubtful character, which they used as a substratum for their wee little theories.

  And yet, this question is not quite so difficult if we only renounce completely all preconceived notions. I have tried to elucidate and solve this question, and, without repeating those proofs, which he who wishes may read in the article, I will enunciate the results to which I was led. “The only criterion of pedagogy is freedom, the only method—experience.” After fifteen years I have not changed my opinion one hair’s breadth…III

  As a student under the direction of tutors and professors, Tolstoy was a Samson who burst whatever bonds anyone put on him. In Kazan in the early 1840s, the brilliant adolescent Tolstoy could not be compelled to read what he was told to read, but he read passionately anything that attracted him. He would not follow the mandated course of studies. Having switched fields of study a few times, he dropped out of the university.

  By the time he began writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy had been teaching his own children for several years. Despite having hired tutors for them, he kept teaching. For the most part, his children fondly remembered
those lessons, but his eldest daughter, Tatyana, described one of his failures:

  The hardest lessons of all were the arithmetic ones with papa. Outside the schoolroom I was never particularly in awe of him and even played with him sometimes in a way my brothers would never have dared. But during our arithmetic lessons he was a stern, impatient master. I knew that the slightest hesitation on my part would make him start to get angry, raise his voice, and reduce me to a state of total idiocy.IV

  Hence most of us teachers send our children to school. We need separation; we need a different relationship, a “formal” one to give us and our children space and freedom. There might have to be some abstraction to teach others, and parents and children have a built-in lack of abstraction; we flow into each other.

  Tolstoy knew this about himself: he had to be excited and interested and curious about his subject to be able to teach it. He knew that this was true of others, including Anna, when we find her explaining to Levin, in Part 7, Chapter 11, to Levin’s complete sympathy, why her venture into girls’ education did not pan out:

  “I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev [a publisher], “that if she were to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English girl to the public question of the education of Russian children, she would be doing a great and useful work.”

  “Yes, but I can’t help it; I couldn’t do it. Count Alexey Kirillovitch [i.e., Vronsky] urged me very much” (as she uttered the words Count Alexey Kirillovitch she glanced with appealing timidity at Levin, and he unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring look); “he urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several times. The children were very nice, but I could not feel drawn to the work. You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it. I took to this child [the English girl Hannah]—I could not myself say why.”