Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

The search for the meaning of life is the purpose for Levin and for Anna.

  Wouldn’t Strakhov, the shy bachelor, like to join Tolstoy in that search?

  Tolstoy concluded the letter with a delighted recognition of coincidental desires:

  How strange that you are seeking out the monks and want to go to the Optina Monastery. That’s just what I wanted, and still do.

  How can we see each other? I’m going to Samara with the family at the end of May and come back in August. If you could only come to see me!

  In any case, please write to me.LXIV

  He included the general delivery address for Samara and added: “I’ve sent something for the 4th issue [of Anna Karenina] and won’t touch it again till autumn.”LXV

  On the same day, Tolstoy went from flirting with his sister-in-law to confessing his intellectual and emotional love to his devoted friend Strakhov. And he was about to go to Moscow with his wife for two days, without the children. And she would give birth to a premature baby in six months.

  I don’t know what to make of it.

  Was Tolstoy simply supercharged with attraction for his loved ones that day?

  Strakhov, in the meantime, had written Tolstoy a two-part letter from Italy, dated April 22 and May 5. Once Strakhov sent it, it took perhaps two weeks to reach Tolstoy. The friends were negotiating just what their relationship was or ought to be. In the April-dated letter, Strakhov made a perplexed start:

  You give me a few questions and even reproach me for those thoughts (as if they’re mine) that you yourself think about one of them. No, Lev Nikoaevich, this is not my thought; I know how kind you are and I feel your love. But I write you only about you, just about you, because I sincerely go into your interests and thoughts. I start so with almost everything, even sometimes with simple people; with you I count myself in your debt, for joy. But what’s true is true; I hide myself from you, and I haven’t uncovered, speaking about myself. Why not? I say straight off—I would be ashamed to uncover to you that lowness, that fall of spirits that covers me. […]

  Maybe I’m living through that period and am redoing my youth, but now I don’t see a way out. For two years I have been looking for it and I haven’t found it. Everything interests me weakly, nothing catches fire that might light the soul. On this theme I might write without end, but this is shameful to me—and this subject is absolutely useless and would interest no one. At the end of your letter you express a very good desire: be strong, you write. Yes, this is just what I should desire. […]

  On May 5, Strakhov added:

  I still need to answer your questions. I wrote you that it’s necessary to communicate something to you. You ask me—what?—I don’t remember, positively don’t remember, about what business; so many impressions have passed through my head.LXVI

  They were wrestling over questions that were troubling Tolstoy more than Strakhov. Strakhov was in low spirits but wasn’t exactly having a crisis, as Tolstoy was. Tolstoy’s loving assurances and wishes to “penetrate” Strakhov’s reserve wouldn’t ever appear so plainly in his letters again.

  In Anna Karenina, however, the minor character Sviazhskiy, a friend of Levin’s, is a family man but isn’t, it seems, much of an intellectual, though he reads a lot. Sviazhskiy is modest, as was Strakhov, and both were widely and deeply educated, but the real-life Strakhov was also an important literary critic and science writer. He was a shy man but not a shy critic. For all that, the editors of the Jubilee edition direct us from Tolstoy’s May 5 letter to Strakhov and the chapter where Levin tries to “penetrate” Sviazhskiy:

  If it had not been a characteristic of Levin’s to put the most favorable interpretation on people, Sviazhsky’s character would have presented no doubt or difficulty to him: he would have said to himself, “a fool or a knave,” and everything would have seemed clear. But he could not say “a fool,” because Sviazhsky was unmistakably clever, and moreover, a highly cultivated man, who was exceptionally modest over his culture. There was not a subject he knew nothing of. But he did not display his knowledge except when he was compelled to do so. Still less could Levin say that he was a knave, as Sviazhsky was unmistakably an honest, good-hearted, sensible man, who worked good-humoredly, keenly, and perseveringly at his work; he was held in high honor by everyone about him, and certainly he had never consciously done, and was indeed incapable of doing, anything base.

  Levin tried to understand him, and could not understand him, and looked at him and his life as at a living enigma.

  Levin and he were very friendly, and so Levin used to venture to sound Sviazhsky, to try to get at the very foundation of his view of life; but it was always in vain. Every time Levin tried to penetrate beyond the outer chambers of Sviazhsky’s mind, which were hospitably open to all, he noticed that Sviazhsky was slightly disconcerted; faint signs of alarm were visible in his eyes, as though he were afraid Levin would understand him, and he would give him a kindly, good-humored repulse.LXVII

  Strakhov never mentioned seeing himself in Sviazhsky and no one among their acquaintances did, either. This should persuade us that Tolstoy thought better of Strakhov than he does of Sviazhsky.

  For the most part, Strakhov’s Italian letters describe Rome and his trips out from Rome, and as if only because he knew Tolstoy was reading between the lines, they include an occasional personal detail.

  * * *

  Tolstoy and Sofia’s visit to the doctor in Moscow brought the welcome professional opinion that her pregnancy would be safe.

  The other good news Tolstoy received was that the censorship committee didn’t interfere after all and had let the New Azbuka through, and it was published May 19 or 20.LXVIII In his continued effort to promote interest in the children’s reader, he wrote to Katkov, hoping to get a plug for it: “Such an Azbuka there never was, not only not in Russia but anywhere! And each little page of it cost me more work and has more meaning to me than all the writings for which I have been so undeservedly praised.”LXIX

  The politically disreputable Katkov, a sort of 19th-century Fox News bloviator, deserves some credit here. He told Tolstoy that he would pass the Azbuka on to the Reading Committee member who could do it the most good. Then, favor granted, he discreetly added: “We’re waiting from you a portion [of Anna Karenina] for the June issue. Is there the concluding part of the first half of the novel? I’m afraid I’m besieged by subscribers.”LXX

  Tolstoy doesn’t seem to have answered Katkov to tell him that his subscribers would have to just keep on waiting, but he did tell Nagornov to get Katkov, who was also a Reading Committee member, a copy of the New Azbuka as soon as possible.

  Tolstoy could busily and anxiously promote the New Azbuka but could not engage himself in writing Anna Karenina. He continued with follow-up letters to the committee and an education journal editor.

  We don’t know what Tolstoy bought or whom he saw when he was in Moscow around May 22–24, but when he returned home he wrote his brother to ask him to send money to their sister. Answering Sergei’s concern about Sofia’s poor health (which Tolstoy had mentioned in his last letter), he clarified: “Sonya’s health isn’t as bad as I thought, but it’s not good. The main thing is that she’s pregnant, and so it’s hard to judge.”LXXI He then reviewed accounts with him, and at the end of May there was one more letter, including a legal statement that Sergei had received 7,660 silver rubles from Lev. He caught up on news, and said it was good that Sergei hadn’t come to visit: “We have Madame Menglen [the old acquaintance and a translator] with her daughter, and it’s a terrible boredom. But how great it would be if you came to us for a visit in Samara.” Sergei did not ever visit his brother there.

  Eager to be free of business, of farming, of supervision over schools, Tolstoy became relentless in planning his summer getaway. He must have been convinced that the uprooting would benefit the whole family, particularly Sofia, though she remembered her personal disgruntlement with it:

  By springtime both my health and Lev Nikolaevich’s had
deteriorated so badly that we decided we must definitely go for koumiss treatments to the new plot of land we had bought from Baron Bistrom in the Buzuluk Uezd of Samara Gubernia, six versts from the village of Gavrilovka.

  Even though we spent some time there, I didn’t have the opportunity to drink any koumiss, on account of a new pregnancy which had begun—the tenth, including the two miscarriages. I was thirty years old then, but this endless child-bearing had quite drained me. Everything was difficult for me, and I had become indifferent to it all. I did not look forward to leaving Yasnaya Polyana for the challenging trip to Samara for koumiss.LXXII

  Did she tell him what she tells us, her readers in My Life, that she didn’t want to be pregnant any more or as often?

  In an unhappy episode in Part 6 of Anna Karenina (not published until February 1877), we read how Dolly disapproves of Anna’s having somehow rendered herself impregnable. Tolstoy, the author in the wings, almost audibly echoes Dolly’s disapproval. Dolly, uncomfortable in Vronsky’s and Anna’s luxurious home, confused by her own regrets and unhappiness in marriage, tells Anna in a tête-à-tête about her tête-à-tête with Vronsky:

  “He said that he was unhappy on your account and his own. Perhaps you will say that it’s egoism, but what a legitimate and noble egoism. He wants first of all to legitimize his daughter, and to be your husband, to have a legal right to you.”

  “What wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my position?” [Anna] put in gloomily.

  “The chief thing he desires… he desires that you should not suffer.”

  “That’s impossible. Well?”

  “Well, and the most legitimate desire—he wishes that your children should have a name.”

  “What children?” Anna said, not looking at Dolly, and half closing her eyes.

  “Annie and those to come…”

  “He need not trouble on that score; I shall have no more children.”

  “How can you tell that you won’t?”

  “I shall not, because I don’t wish it.” And, in spite of all her emotion, Anna smiled, as she caught the naive expression of curiosity, wonder, and horror on Dolly’s face.

  “The doctor told me after my illness…”

  How mysterious that ellipsis is! What exactly did the doctor tell Anna? What do the drafts tell us? Nothing.LXXIII Tolstoy, as free as a writer in Russia could be at this time, could not or would not let us overhear Anna. But when, several years later, he did discuss contraception in The Kreutzer Sonata, it was in the mode of grim disgust. Dolly and Anna’s conversation continues:

  “Impossible!” said Dolly, opening her eyes wide.

  For her this was one of those discoveries the consequences and deductions from which are so immense that all that one feels for the first instant is that it is impossible to take it all in, and that one will have to reflect a great, great deal upon it.

  This discovery, suddenly throwing light on all those families of one or two children, which had hitherto been so incomprehensible to her, aroused so many ideas, reflections, and contradictory emotions, that she had nothing to say, and simply gazed with wide-open eyes of wonder at Anna. This was the very thing she had been dreaming of, but now learning that it was possible, she was horrified. She felt that it was too simple a solution of too complicated a problem.

  “N’est-ce pas immoral?” was all she said, after a brief pause.

  “Why so? Think, I have a choice between two alternatives: either to be with child, that is an invalid, or to be the friend and companion of my husband—practically my husband,” Anna said in a tone intentionally superficial and frivolous.

  “Yes, yes,” said Darya Alexandrovna, hearing the very arguments she had used to herself, and not finding the same force in them as before.

  “For you, for other people,” said Anna, as though divining her thoughts, “there may be reason to hesitate; but for me.… You must consider, I am not his wife; he loves me as long as he loves me. And how am I to keep his love? Not like this!”

  She moved her white hands in a curve before her waist with extraordinary rapidity, as happens during moments of excitement; ideas and memories rushed into Darya Alexandrovna’s head. “I,” she thought, “did not keep my attraction for Stiva; he left me for others, and the first woman for whom he betrayed me did not keep him by being always pretty and lively. He deserted her and took another. And can Anna attract and keep Count Vronsky in that way? If that is what he looks for, he will find dresses and manners still more attractive and charming. And however white and beautiful her bare arms are, however beautiful her full figure and her eager face under her black curls, he will find something better still, just as my disgusting, pitiful, and charming husband does.”

  Dolly made no answer, she merely sighed. Anna noticed this sigh, indicating dissent, and she went on. In her armory she had other arguments so strong that no answer could be made to them.

  “Do you say that it’s not right? But you must consider,” she went on; “you forget my position. How can I desire children? I’m not speaking of the suffering, I’m not afraid of that. Think only, what are my children to be? Ill-fated children, who will have to bear a stranger’s name. For the very fact of their birth they will be forced to be ashamed of their mother, their father, their birth.”LXXIV

  I had always thought that the doctor must have sterilized Anna, but it is also possible that Anna had begun using some sort of birth control, which was uncommon but still a possibility at that time.

  If that’s so, how does Vronsky not notice? That very day Vronsky has told Dolly that he anticipates more children: “We have a child, we may have other children.”LXXV

  Could some portion of Tolstoy’s guilt about sex have come from knowing that he was disabling a woman with the pregnancy? That for all his sexual “need,” the consequences of it landed on the woman? (The plot of Tolstoy’s last long novel, Resurrection, turns on this fact. The woman, not the man, is punished for the “crime” that the man instigates.) Tolstoy had to keep facing the knowledge that pregnancy and childbirth were life-threatening for Sofia.

  But back to the most sympathetic mother in any of Tolstoy’s novels, Dolly, as she muses to herself, muses for the first time in what seems to her like years. For a couple of days she is free of her children and has room to think:

  “It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only because I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course, there’s no counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there’s another baby coming?…” And the thought struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman was that in sorrow she should bring forth children.

  “The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the child—that’s what’s so intolerable,” she thought, picturing to herself her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled the conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young woman had answered cheerfully:

  “I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.”

  “Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya Alexandrovna.

  “Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.”

  This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was indeed a grain of truth.

  “Yes, altogether,” thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life [when the novel was published in book form in 1878, Sofia and Tolstoy had been married fifteen years], “pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything, and most of all—hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I’m with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the ag
ony, the hideous agonies, that last moment… then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful pains.…”

  Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain from sore breasts [this had been one of Sofia’s afflictions during nursing, about which her husband had given her little sympathy] which she had suffered with almost every child. “Then the children’s illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up; evil propensities” (she thought of little Masha’s crime among the raspberries), “education, Latin—it’s all so incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the death of these children.” And there rose again before her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of croup [croup! I think of poor Sofia copying these words; she must have wept]; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples, and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.

  “And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless.…

  “Why, even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil!… One’s whole life ruined!” Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.LXXVI