Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Despite Stiva’s waywardness as a husband, he is an effective government bureaucrat. We learn about his past; we’ll eventually know more of his past probably than of any other character. As he eats breakfast he hears the clamor of his five children, and he betrays his favoritism for his eldest daughter over his eldest son; he queries his daughter Tanya about her mother’s mood. He helps a woman with a bureaucratic request and, before leaving for the office, goes to see his wife, who is packing. Tolstoy, who will invariably be sympathetic to Dolly, shows us how miserable she is. She knows but Stiva doesn’t that she and the children probably will not leave. Stiva tries to work his charm on her, but, out of guilt, he can’t see his way to her forgiveness and even makes an uncharacteristic mistake of tactlessness about the affair, and Dolly becomes furious. She tells him to do the arranging for his sister’s stay. We don’t blame her at all… but we feel for Stiva.

  At Stiva’s office, a surprise visitor, Levin, arrives, all dressed up but with his nose out of joint. Levin is an old friend from university days who has come to Moscow to make a marriage proposal to Dolly’s sister Kitty.

  We learn of Levin’s previous retreat from Moscow, when he had failed to propose to Kitty. After Levin agrees to meet Stiva later for a meal, Levin goes off to visit his academic, older half-brother, Sergei. From there Levin goes to see if he can find Kitty skating at the pond at the zoo, where Stiva will be meeting him. She is there, and he is overwhelmed with love for her; he skates with her and blurts out too clearly his hopes. She clams up. Confused, he goes off to eat with Stiva. Stiva bucks him up about Kitty, and Levin is soaring before Stiva brings him crashing to the earth with the news that Levin now has a rival: the likable, rich army captain Alexei Vronsky. When Levin goes to see Kitty that evening, her mother is leery of him, because she has hopes that Vronsky will propose to Kitty. When Levin proposes, Kitty apologetically tells him, “It can’t be.” Before Levin can flee in shame, Vronsky shows up. He has none of Levin’s self-consciousness or modesty; he is not reflective, but he is bewildered by Kitty’s father’s contempt for him. The Levin-Vronsky rivalry is a sore spot between Kitty’s parents. Kitty’s mother is pleased, nevertheless, that Levin seems to be out of the picture now for good.

  We learn of Vronsky’s background. He is not a dishonest or bad man. He is confident but not quite arrogant; he has a conservative bent; he has an easy social manner. We follow Vronsky as he goes to the train station to meet his mother, about whom he doesn’t allow himself to acknowledge his lack of respect for. And all of a sudden, stepping down from the train carriage in which his mother has ridden from Petersburg is a graceful, strikingly beautiful woman.

  Anna Karenina strikes us and Vronsky the way a goddess would. After introductions all around (she has chatted with Madame Vronsky on the ride down), Anna starts to leave with Stiva, but there’s been a terrible, ominous accident. A station worker has been crushed and killed by a train. Vronsky shows off his generosity before Anna and Stiva by leaving money for the worker’s widow and family. Stiva takes Anna home, where Anna sits with Dolly and the children, winning all of them over. She then listens to Dolly’s account of the situation with Stiva, and Anna sympathizes with her. Anna’s sympathy opens up the possibility of reconciliation, and Stiva gets his chance to make up. Kitty, who is staying with Dolly, is infatuated by poised Anna’s beauty and personal attention to her. Vronsky drops by the Oblonsky house one evening, but only Anna divines that it was to see her that he has happened to come over. At the ball that week, where Kitty expects Vronsky’s proposal, Anna captivates him; Kitty realizes Vronsky isn’t interested in her anymore and she is devastated.

  * * *

  While his readers were devouring the first issue, Tolstoy was, according to Sofia’s letter to her sister, hurriedly readying the next installment for the February issue.X (Each installment was roughly half a “Part.”)

  From the beginning to the middle of February, Tolstoy wrote Katkov four undated letters about the Anna Karenina chapters that he would be submitting; he repeatedly apologized for their lateness and made promises about the submission of further chapters.

  The last of the four letters to Katkov concerns Tolstoy’s argument about the necessity of preserving the scene depicting Anna and Vronsky’s postcoital anguish after their first time making love:

  I am sending you some proofs, dear Mikhail Nikiforovich. I’m very sorry that there are so few, especially as the next 5 or so printer’s sheets are certainly ready, and I’ll send them to you in a few days.

  The second part is one of 6. I need this division because of the interval of time that has passed and the internal division of the book.

  I can’t touch anything in the latest chapter. Vivid realism, as you say, is the only tool, since I can’t use either pathos or argument. And this is one of the passages on which the whole novel stands. If it is false, everything is false.XI I tried to do the correcting so as to avoid setting up new type; I don’t know if I’ve succeeded, but all the corrections are necessary.XII

  Tolstoy argued what almost any author argues when challenged by an editor about an episode, section, or scene: I have to have to it! Katkov relented. We’ll look at this scene in its publication time, late February.

  * * *

  In St. Petersburg, Strakhov wrote Tolstoy about the reception there of the first installment of the novel: notwithstanding a comment that Strakhov heard from one dense reader, it was being admired. Strakhov, pleased to be the bearer and predictor of all the enthusiasm, concluded: “So it is. Goodbye and I entreat you one thing—don’t make a stop, let the novel appear uninterruptedly in each issue. Then my prediction will come true—an unheard of and immeasurable success!”XIII

  Tolstoy immediately vexed Strakhov, perhaps on purpose. Answering his friend, he thanked him for the news, and confessed that he had not expected success and had prepared himself for a fall. In addition to all his school business, the New Azbuka, and a grammar and a math book, “just very recently,” he wrote, “I conceived the idea of a new poetic work which gives me great pleasure and excitement, and which will probably be written if God gives me life and strength and for which I need my reputation.”XIV

  He had another six hundred pages or so of Anna Karenina to revise and write, but he claimed that he was thinking past that; and he must have guessed that this announcement would not be not pleasing to Strakhov. (Gusev says we don’t know what “poetic work” Tolstoy had in mind.XV) Tolstoy continued then to perversely (and characteristically) critique his new novel; if we didn’t know which work he was criticizing, we wouldn’t guess it was Anna Karenina:

  I don’t believe it will be a great success. I know how much you want it to be a great success and you think it is. But I completely agree with the people who don’t understand what there is to say about it. It’s all—I don’t say simple (simplicity, if it is there, is a tremendous virtue which it is difficult to attain), but low-grade. The idea is such a private one. It can’t be, and it oughtn’t to be a great success, particularly the first chapters which are decidedly weak. Besides, it’s poorly finished. I can see that, and it hurts me. […]XVI

  Tolstoy added that as far as he knew the Russian Herald wouldn’t publish more than three issues containing the novel this year, and, despite Strakhov’s hopes that Tolstoy would keep the momentum going, “there will be a break.” I don’t like to think of Tolstoy being disingenuous, but in regard to Katkov’s journal, Tolstoy often seemed disingenuous. As would any editor, Katkov wanted the hit novel to keep rolling out on a regular schedule.

  Tolstoy was conducting frantic literary and pedagogical activity while under a dark cloud of family unhappiness. He continued to Strakhov:

  I’ve been living in a strange and awful state of excitement this winter. In the first place I’ve had a cold all the time—toothache and a feverish condition—and I’ve been staying at home. Then there has been practical work—managing 70 schools which have been opened in our district and which are going wonderfully.
Then the pedagogical work I spoke about. Then the older children whom I have to teach myself, since I haven’t found a tutor yet. Then the printing of the novel, the proofs of the novel and of the Primer, which are urgent, and now at the same time a family sorrow and a new plan. The family sorrow is the terrible brain disease of our 9-month baby in arms. For over 3 weeks now he has been going through all the stages of this hopeless disease. My wife is feeding him herself and is in despair one minute that he will die, and the next that he will live and be an idiot. And it’s strange: I feel the need and the joy of work as never before. […]XVII

  In the midst of grieving, Tolstoy sometimes found relief in writing. But depression had its heavy hands on him and would soon bring him to a standstill.

  Tolstoy fondly concluded to Strakhov, “Goodbye: why do you write nothing about yourself? I remember, you were staying with us this time three years ago. How we enjoyed ourselves.”XVIII

  Tolstoy had a lot on his mind and too many things to do when, in the middle of February (Tolstoy often didn’t date his letters), he wrote to the Baroness Y. I. Mengden, who had written to Sofia to ask Tolstoy for his permission to publish translations of his works: “I’m answering for my wife, esteemed Lizabeta Ivanovna, because we have a very dangerously sick little baby, and she’s not able to think about anything else in her condition. I’m answering two points that very much interest me: a people’s journal and the translation of my works into English.”XIX He critiqued what he had seen of “journals for the people.” They needed what he himself demanded of writing: clarityXX:

  […] Intelligibility, comprehensibility, is not only a necessary condition if people are to read willingly, but is, I am firmly convinced, a check which prevents what is foolish, inappropriate, or untalented from appearing in a journal. If I were the editor of a popular journal, I would say to my colleagues: write what you will, preach communism, the Flagellant faith, Protestantism, what you will, only in such a way that every word should be intelligible to the carter who takes the copies round from the press; and I am certain that the journal would contain nothing that is not honest, wholesome and good. I am not joking, and I don’t wish to talk in paradoxes, but I know this well from experience. It is impossible to write anything bad in completely simple and intelligible language. Everything immoral will seem so ugly that it will be discarded at once: everything sectarian, whether Protestant or Flagellant, will appear so false if expressed without unintelligible phrases; everything would-be educational, popular-scientific, but not serious and for the most part false, which popular journals are always full of, also expressed without such phrases but in intelligible language, will seem so stupid and impoverished that it will also be thrown out. If a popular journal seriously wishes to be a popular journal, it only has to try to be intelligible and it is not difficult to achieve this. On the one hand it has only got to filter all the articles through the censorship of yardmen, cabmen, and kitchen cooks. If the readers don’t stop over a single word which they don’t understand, the article is fine. But if after reading an article none of them can tell what they have read about, the article is useless. […]XXI

  Tolstoy wanted there to be a people’s journal, he assured Mengden, but it was not an easy task to publish good writing for the people because, he believed, there was so little of it. In the 1880s he would produce, edit, and publish such material himself in inexpensive booklets.XXII

  Tolstoy gave Mengden his formal permission, written in French, to translate his work (Mengden had told Sofia that in England translations were done only with the permission of the author): “I authorize the baroness to translate everything into English. I authorize the translation from Russian.”XXIII Anna Karenina was not published in English until 1886, a year after it first appeared in French. Countess Mengden had no hand in its English translation.

  Meanwhile, Fet wrote Tolstoy about Anna Karenina that “The hero Levin is the person Lev Nikolaevich (not the poet)…”XXIV It’s no surprise that a close friend immediately recognized the original of Levin, but how many other readers in 1875 would have recognized facets of young Tolstoy in the character of self-conscious, honest, deep-thinking, serious, intense Levin?

  Some short time before February 20, Tolstoy wrote his brother: “We’re very bad. Nikolin’ka, that is, the one at the breast, for three weeks already has been sick with a brain illness, and there’s no hope for recovery. At the beginning there was vomiting, then began the convulsions—his eyes became fixed, and hiccoughs—and now everything continues such; he only steadily and slowly weakens. Sonya is very oppressed; she feeds and walks him and awaits his death. It’s oppressive, especially for her. And besides this I’ve not left here for 3 or 4 weeks and I sit constantly in flannels and am tormented with pain from my remaining teeth.”

  Tolstoy was grieving, yet the agony of his bad teeth distracted him. Tolstoy would revive this double torment two years later when he was concluding the novel and imagining Vronsky’s grief.XXV

  “On the whole it’s really sad for us,” Tolstoy wrote his brother Sergei. “You’ve lost children from this same illness, so you know.”XXVI

  The Tolstoys’ ten-month-old baby, Nikolai, died on February 20. Sofia recalled that, “Two days later Lev Nikolaevich and I took him in a covered cart to be buried. Neither of us were completely healthy, there was a twenty-degree frost and a fearful snowstorm blowing. When we put the open coffin down on the snow, the wind tore the headband from his [the baby’s] head, along with the muslin cloth covering him. Our fur coats were flapping in the howling, strange-sounding wind. We were no longer in any position to cry or even to think. We proceeded hastily with the burial, the one concern for both of us being not to catch cold. I was concerned for Lev Nikolaevich and he for me.”XXVII Sofia’s sheer grief is communicated here in Tolstoy’s ideal “completely simple and intelligible language.”

  Tolstoy wrote again to his fellow family man Fet and provided his own brief, humbled account:

  We have one sorrow after another. You and Marya Petrovna will certainly pity us, especially Sonya. Our youngest son, 10 months old, fell ill about three weeks ago with the terrible disease which is called water on the brain, and after 3 weeks’ terrible torture died the day before yesterday, and we buried him today. I feel it hard on account of my wife, but for her, nursing him herself, it was very difficult.XXVIII

  The deaths of their children always affected Sofia more than Tolstoy, naturally enough, as he suggested here. His pity and helplessness about the deaths, however, brought him eventually to a belief that the initial grief had been in vain, a belief in which Sofia, and some of us who find such a philosophy cold comfort, could not share.

  Tolstoy confessed to Fet:

  You praise Karenina, which pleases me very much, and other people praise her, so I hear; but assuredly there never was a writer so indifferent to his own success, si succes il y a [if success it is], as I am. […]

  Tolstoy was not in the mood to remember his own most lofty ambitions as an author. He actually had never been “indifferent to his own success,” for which “vanity” he would mock himself in Confession.

  Tolstoy told Fet of the same vague idea for a new project that he had shared with Strakhov: “On the one side, school business, on the other—a strange business—the subject of a new writing, overwhelming me in this very heavy time of the illness of the baby.”XXIX He praised “the embryo” of a beautiful new poem by Fet, which had an “absolutely clear poetic thought, but is absolutely unclear as far as the words go.”XXX

  Meanwhile, “I have received from Turgenev a translation of Two Hussars printed in Le Temps, and a letter in the 3rd person asking me to let him know that I received it, and that M. Viardot and Turgenev are translating some other stories, both of which things were completely unnecessary.”XXXI In the next few decades, many copies of his translated works would be sent to him at Yasnaya Polyana by the translators or publishers.

  Tolstoy ended the letter with an invitation to Fet and his wife to come visit the
m for a day, and with a word about Tolstoy’s favorite of all topics with Fet, horses: “The money will be sent the 1st of April. I very much thank Petr Afanas’evich [Fet’s brother] for the nice horse.—I’m afraid only that he won’t be a solid and trotter enough young stallion. I would much more like the old stallion.”XXXII

  By February 23–24, Tolstoy was writing Strakhov about business concerning Anna Karenina and the New Azbuka. He didn’t mention the death of baby Nikolai:

  I’ve just received the proofs for the 2nd issue, and there are many things I’m dissatisfied with. You have ruffled my author’s self-esteem about the novel, dear Nikolay Nikolayevich, and so if you have the time and the inclination, please let me know anything intelligent you hear or read by way of criticism of these chapters. There are many weak passages in them. I’ll mention them to you: Anna’s return home, and Anna at home [Pt. I, Ch. 22–23]. The conversation in the Shcherbatsky family after the doctor’s visit up to where the sisters have it out. The Petersburg salon, and others. If there are criticisms of these passages, please let me know. […]XXXIII

  What if Strakhov had answered a couple of weeks later like so: “Oh, yes, Lev Nikolaevich, a slew of wise critics and readers have been saying that all those parts are terrible”? What was Tolstoy fishing for? What does it mean when an artist or performer at the top of his game reveals his anxiety about the project he’s working on? Since 1875 there has been only one reader of the novel’s many million readers who ever criticized those passages as “weak”: Tolstoy himself.

  Meanwhile, the despondent, grieving Sofia was proud when she heard of the excited response to the appearance of the first serialized chapters of Anna Karenina:

  On this subject [Anna Karenina’s success] I wrote my sister soon after Nikolushka’s death: “Levochka’s novel is out, and they say it’s enjoying fantastic success, but I have this strange feeling welling up inside me, here we are in the midst of such {personal} grief, yet are being celebrated everywhere.”XXXIV