Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  She would forever speak fondly, admiringly, and sensibly of the novel. She was more level-headed than her husband about its supreme place in the world. Her daughter Alexandra narrates:

  Tolstoy was working intensely, revising completed parts for publication and adding chapters; Sophia was copying daily. Daughter Tanya, then eleven, would recall Sophia settling down at her desk in the evenings. Although behind her was a long day, it was clear “from the expression of concentration on her face, that for her the most important time… was just beginning.” Occasionally, Tolstoy approached her as she was copying and looked over her shoulder. “Then my mother would take his big hand and kiss it with love and veneration, while he tenderly stroked her dark, shining hair then bent to kiss the top of her head.”

  Only a few months after Nikolai’s death, Sophia was pregnant again.XXXV

  * * *

  When the second 1875 issue of the Russian Herald arrived shortly after its publication date of February 28, did Sofia read it, or did she tap her finger on the journal’s cover and say with veneration, “I don’t need to read it there. I already know it through and through”?

  Here are the February 1875 chapters in summary:

  Levin, comprehending Vronsky’s superiority as a romantic rival, goes to see Nikolai, his tubercular, difficult, unhappy, and irritable brother. Then Levin goes home to his estate and tries to reconcile himself to this familiar place and all his responsibilities to it. He sits reading and daydreaming in his study while the family retainer, Agafya, talks about recent local events.

  Then we turn to Anna, who, ashamed of having enjoyed conquering Vronsky, leaves Moscow. She thinks that she is in the clear, that the flirtation is over, but Vronsky has followed her and rides the same train back, and during a brief station stop confronts her on the platform and tells her his feelings. At the train station in St. Petersburg, Vronsky awkwardly presents himself to Karenin, Anna’s husband. Anna is surprised by her disappointment in her renewed sight of Karenin and even of her new impressions of her beloved son, eight-year-old Seryozha.

  Tolstoy has us follow Vronsky to the apartment that he shares with his regimental mates; Vronsky rearranges his life to be wherever Anna socializes.

  Part 2 of the novel opens with Kitty seeing a doctor and being seen by him—an excruciating image to Tolstoy, a naked young woman (modeled on Sofia) before a man who doesn’t know her. Kitty’s father is embarrassed and angry because he has correctly sensed that Kitty’s illness is the result of her shame at having been rejected by Vronsky. Dolly goes to her parents’ house to commiserate with her little sister Kitty, which leads to Kitty expressing her disgust at Dolly for having accepted Stiva’s philandering as a fact of their marriage. After Kitty’s blow-up, the sisters make up.

  Tolstoy jumps us to Petersburg, where we learn about the highest levels of society and that Anna and Karenin are in the second-highest level. But they can and do also interact with the next level down, which includes Anna’s friend Betsy, who is Vronsky’s cousin. Betsy is a frivolous, sharp-witted, cheating wife. Tolstoy shows Anna descending into Betsy’s atmosphere. Betsy conspires with Vronsky and Anna to arrange opportunities for their social meetings. In Part 2, Chapter 6 (of the book publication), we see the framework and many details of Tolstoy’s original draft’s opening scene—a party at Betsy’s with the gossips wondering when Karenin is going to notice the obvious love between Anna and Vronsky. The deliriously smitten couple scarcely care or notice that they’re being observed. Anna tries to pretend to Vronsky that she is not in love, but he repeatedly proudly declares himself to her. They ignore Karenin’s entrance at the party, but he notices the attention that Vronsky and Anna attract from the other guests, and he resolves to speak to her about it. She remains at the party, and her husband goes home. Karenin is resolute about not being jealous. We learn Karenin’s background and about his career climb through governmental ministries. His lone friend was his brother, who has died. It’s clear that Anna is his only friend. He is a disconnected father. Awaiting Anna’s return from the party, he paces. When she arrives home, he broaches the topic of her overly intimate conversations with Vronsky, and she dismisses his remarks and they go to bed. She almost hates him. Though partially blind in regard to social life, Karenin realizes that he seems to have lost her.

  Tolstoy wraps up the second installment of the novel with Vronsky and Anna sleeping together for the first time. This event is the passage of “vivid realism” that Tolstoy so absolutely defended to his editor Katkov. It is the only passage in the novel about which we have to blush in embarrassment and admit that our favorite author has artistic and personal limitations. Confronted with sex, Tolstoy loses his wits. Tolstoy told Strakhov of a conversation that he had had with Yiury F. Samarin about the punctuation marks that precede the chapter:

  Samarin told me: “There, where you have two lines of periods, I guess that there ought to be two chapters, and it’s a pity there’s not.” I answered: “It’s a pity that all that’s missed is filth. If I wrote it 100 times I wouldn’t at that spot change anything.” I thought that this was only my opinion, and you won’t believe how pleased I was to find out that people like Danielevskiy understood purity. (Not to mention you.)XXXVI

  I will take from this that even at the time some readers knew that Tolstoy was way off track in his attitude about sex, that “purity” was an idea that short-circuited his creative imagination. Tolstoy was convinced that everyone shared or should share his shame about sexual intercourse, so instead of allowing Vronsky and Anna their long-anticipated bliss, he imagines what he thinks he would have felt:

  That which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm, not knowing how or why.

  “Anna! Anna!” he said with a choking voice, “Anna, for pity’s sake!…”

  But the louder he spoke, the lower she dropped her once proud and gay, now shame-stricken head, and she bowed down and sank from the sofa where she was sitting, down on the floor, at his feet; she would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.

  “My God! Forgive me!” she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to her bosom.

  She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left her but to humiliate herself and beg forgiveness; and as now there was no one in her life but him, to him she addressed her prayer for forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she could say nothing more.

  As he wrote this scene depicting the aftermath of Anna and Vronsky’s first act of passionate love, Tolstoy’s personal nightmare overwhelmed his imagination:

  He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.

  And with fury, as it were with passion, the murderer falls on the body, and drags it and hacks at it; so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses. She held his hand, and did not stir. “Yes, these kisses—that is what has been bought by this shame. Yes, and one hand, which will always be mine—the hand of my accomplice.” She lifted up that hand and kissed it. He sank on his knees and tried to see her face; but she hid it, and said nothing. At last, as though making an effort over herself, she got up and pushed him away. Her face was still as beautiful, but it was only the more pitiful for that.

  “All is over,” she said; “I have nothing but you. Remember that.”

  “I can never forget what is my whole life. For one instant of this happiness�
�”

  “Happiness!” she said with horror and loathing and her horror unconsciously infected him. “For pity’s sake, not a word, not a word more.”

  She rose quickly and moved away from him.

  “Not a word more,” she repeated, and with a look of chill despair, incomprehensible to him, she parted from him. She felt that at that moment she could not put into words the sense of shame, of rapture, and of horror at this stepping into a new life, and she did not want to speak of it, to vulgarize this feeling by inappropriate words. […]XXXVII

  A hundred years later, the American critic Marvin Mudrick observed of this scene:

  Strong stuff, this moment of truth (“ ‘What bliss?’ she said with disgust and horror”XXXVIII), which, coming to it in so celebrated a novel, we don’t dare question because we’re afraid to seem coarse and ignorant: certainly the authoritative voice wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true (and how do we check it, do we take a poll of murderers’ row or the girls at the office?). Only it isn’t God talking, it’s Tolstoy, who unreasonably needs to assert that this particular married woman […], voluntarily clasped for the first time in the arms of her lover, will of course find the sex act frightful and revolting (if she can’t manage to close her eyes and think of England), will experience it as the “spiritual” equivalent of rape and murder, will see “her bewitching dream of happiness” crumble instantly. Tolstoy is at odds here not only with common sense but with his own creature. Anna gives evidence by everything else she thinks and says and does that she is physically and passionately in love with Vronsky; she was before and will continue to be after; she never regrets her love for him except when she suspects he doesn’t return it; nothing in her nature or circumstances suggests that this time as well as innumerable times afterward she wouldn’t enjoy the act; and whatever her apprehensions it isn’t likely, the bewitching dream having come to pass, that she would react to Vronsky’s first completed pass as old Tolstoy hopes […]. Tolstoy the novelist has created a woman alive to pleasures which Tolstoy the bluenose implausibly denies her.XXXIX

  Perhaps the best we can say for Tolstoy here is that, however bad the depiction, however nonsensical and out of character (for Anna) the scene, Tolstoy, in arguing for it, was simply pushing back against an editor. Who was Katkov to object to anything the greatest author of his time had written? Who are we to be disappointed by Tolstoy’s compulsive prudery? (On the other hand, Katkov was arguing against a truly lousy, shameful scene. It was indeed, as Katkov said, “false.”) Tolstoy, as the bridled but not broken author, was going to publish what he wanted, because it was “necessary.” The novel was also behind schedule, overdue, its readers were clamoring for more… so perhaps Katkov felt that he had to relent.

  But the shame of the sexual act that Tolstoy depicts! How to explain it?

  It is, unhappily, all too explicable: Writing this baffling scene about Anna and Vronsky’s terrible first sexual experience, Tolstoy was remembering his and Sofia’s terrible wedding night in 1862. Sofia recalled:

  […] even there at the station, the torments began which every young wife must go through. Not to mention the terrible physical pains, and just think of the shame! How torturesome it was, and unbearably shameful! All of a sudden there awakened within me a new, crazy but involuntary feeling of passion which had been dormant in the young not-yet-developed maiden.

  It was good that it was dark in the carriage, good that we could not see each other’s faces. It was only close, very close that I could feel his breath, which was fitful, quick and passionate. His whole strong and powerful being overwhelmed my whole self, which was meek and loving, but suppressed by tormenting pains and unbearable shame.

  Again and again, the whole night the same trials, the same sufferings.XL

  It wasn’t just the shame of the act that bothered Sofia and Tolstoy, it was that the act “awakened… a new, crazy but involuntary feeling of passion.” The first act led to many more acts. Alexandra Popoff continues the story of the brutal wedding night in her biography of Sofia:

  Tolstoy made a crude entry in his diary: “She was in tears. In the carriage. She knows everything and it’s simple. At Biryulevo. Her timidity. Something morbid.” Sophia would never forgive him his impatience: three decades later, she described their first night as a rape: “Violence had been committed; this girl was not ready for marriage; female passion, recently awakened, was put back to sleep.”XLI

  When Sofia eventually got around to writing her description of that night, she was detached enough to analyze her horrified experience. Tolstoy, on the other hand, could not write about it even in a novel about other people without his shame pinkening the pages. She could describe its wretchedness. For Tolstoy sex was too personal to describe imaginatively, sympathetically, appreciatively. His personal shame about sex and seemingly of his own wedding night overpowered his artistry and leached here into the novel.

  * * *

  In early March, Tolstoy wrote Strakhov to thank him for his help with the New Azbuka money accounts, about which his brother-in-law Petya Bers was no use. Now he would like Strakhov’s assistance in getting “On Popular Education” published as a “mini-book.” Tolstoy followed up with Nagornov in an exasperated letter on March 8 about the corrections needed for the New Azbuka: typefaces of various sections and stories, including “The Three Bears,” and formatting the book.

  He wrote Nagornov again in mid-March and apologized for all the changes he was making in the children’s reader, and meanwhile, “Every day I’m receiving telegrams from Katkov—hurrying me with Karenina, which disgusts me, and all the time I’m awaiting news from Varya. Sonya and I kiss her.”XLII (Tolstoy’s niece Varya would have a baby on March 22.)

  Very late again with his Anna Karenina chapters, Tolstoy in March declared to Katkov: “I will never promise beforetime concerning my writing, most esteemed Mikhail Nikiforovich, which as it goes on, it seems so ready, but when I took it out to send it, it was unavoidable to correct it, and I held onto it. Now it’s all ready, and I wanted to send it already by post, even though it’s not recopied, but my nephew came from Moscow and tomorrow night he is taking the train back. He will bring you the manuscript at 9 in the morning on Monday, and this will give me time to recopy it and review it.”XLIII

  Is there an editor or teacher who hasn’t heard such an excuse?

  “Now it’s all ready,” and yet he would still like to get the proofs back for a day! He worried there might be some geographical errors concerning St. Petersburg (if there were, Katkov should fix them), and he apologized again and signed off.

  From Petersburg Strakhov responded to Tolstoy’s curiosity about readers’ reactions to the novel: “The excitement doesn’t lessen; at first I thought that the second installment was having less success, but now I think that it’s even more. […] About the weak places, which you point out, nobody speaks. […] The progressives—Stasov, Polonskiy are amazed that Anna feels dirty shame, and they suppose that it is because you are a defender of the old morality.”XLIV (Stasov and Polonskiy were on to something, but Tolstoy never answered them, except perhaps indirectly in The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy’s novel of the late 1880s, wherein the protagonist blames his murder of his wife on the jealousy agitated by the indulgence of marital sexual intercourse.)

  After finishing off the March pages, Tolstoy had to work on the April installment; on March 29 Sofia wrote her sister Tatyana that Tolstoy “is only writing Anna Karenina.”XLV

  * * *

  The end of Part 2 (Chapters 12–29 of the book version) came out on March 31.

  If it’s the evening of the last day of March 1875, and we have finished poring through this installment in the Russian Herald, what do we know now about Anna, Vronsky, Karenin, Levin, Kitty, Stiva, and Dolly?

  At the beginning of springtime, Levin, on his estate, is still smarting over Kitty’s rejection. He supervises and plans the farm work and is vexed by some of his workers. Stiva visits and they go hunting. Levin asks Stiva a
bout Kitty and learns that she is unmarried, very ill, and has gone abroad for treatment. Levin can’t help thinking that she deserves her suffering. To Levin’s annoyance, Stiva sells Dolly’s property to a land speculator.

  We turn again to Vronsky and his and his wanton mother’s backgrounds. Madame Vronsky disapproves of her son refusing career opportunities because of his fidelity to Anna. Vronsky doesn’t consider their relationship only an affair. There is a big horserace that he is going to compete in against other military officers. Vronsky prepares himself on that day, but wants to see Anna, and decides to do so, even though they haven’t arranged a pre-race meeting. First he visits the English groom in charge of his racehorse Frou-Frou. Vronsky takes a carriage to Anna’s house in the country and sees her for a few tender minutes while her son, Seryozha, is out with a nanny. Anna tells him that she’s pregnant, and Vronsky is glad—too glad from her perspective, because she thinks that he thinks that it means she will have to leave her husband. Vronsky departs for the race.

  At the racetrack Vronsky’s brother intercepts him in order to confront him about Anna, seconding Madame Vronsky’s disapproval, and Vronsky tells him off. The thrilling race proceeds and Tolstoy puts us in the saddle with Vronsky on his adored Frou-Frou:

  […] Once more he perceived in front of him the same back and short tail, and again the same swiftly moving white legs that got no further away.

  At the very moment when Vronsky thought that now was the time to overtake Mahotin, Frou-Frou herself, understanding his thoughts, without any incitement on his part, gained ground considerably, and began getting alongside of Mahotin on the most favorable side, close to the inner cord. Mahotin would not let her pass that side. Vronsky had hardly formed the thought that he could perhaps pass on the outer side, when Frou-Frou shifted her pace and began overtaking him on the other side. Frou-Frou’s shoulder, beginning by now to be dark with sweat, was even with Gladiator’s back. For a few lengths they moved evenly. But before the obstacle they were approaching, Vronsky began working at the reins, anxious to avoid having to take the outer circle, and swiftly passed Mahotin just upon the declivity. He caught a glimpse of his mud-stained face as he flashed by. He even fancied that he smiled. Vronsky passed Mahotin, but he was immediately aware of him close upon him, and he never ceased hearing the even-thudding hoofs and the rapid and still quite fresh breathing of Gladiator.