Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  R. F. Christian says in a note that the other “activities” he needed space for were “religious writings. Tolstoy began an article on the meaning of religion in November 1875.” Tolstoy means, more specifically, the book that came to be called Confession, which he had started back in 1874 (see pages 111–112).

  After praising the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev’s work, which “stirred up the philosophical ferment in me very much,” Tolstoy expressed the hope of seeing Strakhov that year.XVIII

  He needed Strakhov and enjoyed philosophizing with him, but if we want to be in the company of the family-oriented Tolstoy it’s better that we read his letters to Fet. To Fet, on the same day, there was none of the assumption of superiority or would-be spiritual or unconsciously physical affinity, but there were, on the other hand, the horses: “Your horses are recovering on the grass of the steppes. I am grateful to you for both stallions.” Tolstoy then told Fet, as he hadn’t Strakhov, about Sofia: “The health of my wife is always varying: now better, now worse; but it seems not worse since we’ve come back.” And about the kids: “The children are well. And the new Swiss classics tutor, Monsieur Rey, who came to us before the trip to Samara has been very good ever since as a teacher and master.”

  But even to Fet he could not resist complaining about Anna Karenina: “For two months I haven’t stained my hands with ink or my heart with thoughts, and now I’m bearing the boring, vulgar Karenina with only the desire to as soon as possible clear off space for myself—leisure for other occupations, but not pedagogical ones, which I love but which I want to abandon. They take up too much of my time.”XIX He missed Samara already (“the flies, uncleanliness, peasants, Bashkirs”XX), where everything seemed interesting and important.

  Sofia almost immediately felt annoyed by Tolstoy’s avoiding the novel; she wrote her sister on August 26: “Levochka is set up to write and goes hunting.”XXI

  Writing is transformative, so perhaps Tolstoy was shaken up and despairing because of what he was discovering in the novel. Anna’s hopeless situation, despite her vitality and privileges, had to make him think about the meaning or meaninglessness of life. The contemplation by her and by Levin of the meaning of life and the allure of suicide creates the tension of the novel. Tolstoy’s desperate thoughts tormented him, but they also eventually drove the novel forward.

  At the end of August, Tolstoy reminded Nagornov again about promoting the Azbuka, complaining that nobody knew about it in St. Petersburg. In early September he scolded Nagornov for not taking care of business, asked him for details of all the accounts and reviews, and told him to hire someone to do all the busy work.

  In his relations with Strakhov, Tolstoy could be businesslike, direct, without the usual courtesies of friendly correspondence. In his letter of September 6–7, he jumped right in: “I’m answering two of your questions, dear Nikolay Nikolaevich, one minor thing and the other of the most importance.”XXII The important matter was seeing him; Tolstoy would be going nowhere in September except for a week to a session of the district court in the village of Sergievo: “Your criticism is so much needed by me! […] I muddle about in the novel during the morning, but it doesn’t take and I go hunting.”XXIII

  Whether the book was taking or not, Tolstoy continued to think about art, and what art requires of the artist. In a response to Golokhvastov, he reflected on a truth that he had discovered for himself at least as early as a dozen years before when he was teaching peasant children:

  There is nothing worse than communicating to each other one’s plans for artistic work. If you could tell in a conversation what you wanted to express in your drama, you would not write it. And so I probably couldn’t understand what you want to do.XXIV

  We should remind ourselves of this whenever we encounter Tolstoy’s offhand remarks about his novel: nothing he could say about it would change what he wrote. Nothing he said about it was actually the novel. And as he would indeed say when he had finished the novel, the only way to explain the novel would be to quote it in its entirety.

  He expressed to Golokhvastov the commonsensical observation he had already made about pedagogy: “Artistic production is the fruit of love. But love without deeds is death. Make the thing of love and we will love what you love.”XXV That is, as he wrote in 1862 in “Education and Culture”: “If you wish to educate the student by science, love your science and know it, and the students will love both you and the science, and you will educate them; but if you yourself do not love it, the science will have no educational influence, no matter how much you may compel them to learn it.”XXVI

  He wrote to his brother Sergei in mid-September and asked how Sergei’s son Grisha was faring and mentioned that after Sergei’s visit, everyone had been sick with whooping cough. It was especially bad for Sofia, he said, as she was pregnant: “I’m also a big part of the time unwell and don’t write anything. Yesterday I went out with the dogs and caught 4 hares.”XXVII

  In his next letter to Nagornov, he was pleased that Nagornov had convinced him that taking care of the Azbuka business was not too much for him. He mentioned the family’s ill health but also, in the postscript, that “The woodcocks have arrived.” More hunting!

  On September 17, Sofia wrote her sister that Tolstoy “is almost never working, he just hunts and says that ‘it’s not going.’ ”XXVIII It must have been in the same letter of that date that Sofia mentioned, “Yesterday Levochka went to the Sergievo jury duty, but he is so worried about us that he has sent today a certificate to a doctor and returned home himself.”XXIX

  Gusev writes: “The search for the meaning of life led Tolstoy into a joyous mood when he found satisfactory answers to the agitating questions, but sometimes it caused difficulty and tormenting depression, despair, and even a complete renunciation of life.”XXX Tolstoy was always trying to catch that clarity in his own life and thoughts that he constantly gives us, his readers, in Anna Karenina. His art does for us what he himself was seeking. In his own personal confusion and troubles, he searched for what, as an artist, he created for readers.

  At the end of September, Strakhov was at Yasnaya Polyana,XXXI and then or at the beginning of October, Strakhov went to Moscow to see Katkov, who was anxious about Tolstoy’s tardiness in delivering Anna Karenina. Strakhov wrote Tolstoy: “I convinced him that you want to finish the novel even this year and that I even expected to see the end in the next four issues of the Russian Herald. On this he began telling me about some sort of hearsay, that you don’t want to publish with him the second half of the novel. I convinced him that I had heard nothing like that from you.”XXXII

  Strakhov had gone to see Katkov about his own articles, but the editor, said Strakhov, “spoke only about you. He was agitated that he didn’t know how or when Anna Karenina would finish, and how he was to place it with the journal.”XXXIII Strakhov asked Tolstoy to reassure Katkov.

  * * *

  Gusev and Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya point us to Sofia’s diary of October 12:

  This isolated country life is becoming intolerable. Dismal apathy, indifference to everything, day after day, month after month, year after year—nothing ever changes. I wake up in the morning and just lie there wondering who will get me up, who is waiting for me. The cook is bound to come in, then the nurse […] Then in the evening more darning, with Auntie and Lyovochka playing endless horrible games of patience together. […]

  This year, God knows, I have struggled with these shameful feelings of boredom, and have tried, all on my own, to assert my better self, and to reassure myself that it is best for the children, emotionally and physically, to live in the country, and I have managed to subdue my own selfish feelings, but I then realise to my horror that this turns into a terrifying apathy and a dull animal indifference to everything, which is even harder to struggle against. Besides, I am not on my own, I am tied to Lyovochka and the bonds have grown even tighter with the passing of the years, and I feel it is mainly because of him that I am sinking into this depression. It’
s painful for me to see him when he is like this, despondent and dejected for days and weeks on end, neither working nor writing, without energy or joy, just as though he had become reconciled to this condition. It is a kind of emotional death, which I deplore in him. Surely it can’t go on much longer. It may be vulgar and wrong of me, but I feel oppressed by the terms of our life which he has laid down—by this terrible monotony and solitude which reduce us both to such apathy. […] how can I be expected to take sole responsibility [for the children], and how can I help them at all when Lyovochka is in such a dazed and hopeless state that I despair of rousing him? […] my hope is that God will light the spark of life in Lyovochka and he will once more be the person he used to be.XXXIV

  Sofia’s account of Tolstoy’s dark mood rubbing off on her is not dramatized in Anna Karenina—or anywhere in Confession. Had he written about depression in a memoir rather than in a philosophical treatise, Tolstoy would have felt obliged, I think, to mention how his depression affected his loved ones. In Confession he writes:

  And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved, good children, and a large estate which without much effort on my part improved and increased. I was respected by my relations and acquaintances more than at any previous time. I was praised by others and without much self-deception could consider that my name was famous. And far from being insane or mentally diseased, I enjoyed on the contrary a strength of mind and body such as I have seldom met with among men of my kind; physically I could keep up with the peasants at mowing, and mentally I could work for eight and ten hours at a stretch without experiencing any ill results from such exertion. And in this situation I came to this—that I could not live, and, fearing death, had to employ cunning with myself to avoid taking my own life.XXXV

  The depression described in Confession had already started in 1875 or earlier, but by the time Tolstoy was writing the epilogue of Anna Karenina, he (and Levin) had got beyond it.

  Gusev writes: “This was the time of Tolstoy’s life in which he in four years remembered in the following way: ‘… I began to find moments of despair, life’s end, as if I did not know how I was to live or what I was to do. At the beginning there were only moments in life that gave way to previous habits, but then more and more often, and then at the time that I was writing and finishing my book Anna Karenina, the despair reached where I couldn’t do anything, but only think, think about the terrible situation in which I found myself.’ ”XXXVI (That quotation is from a draft of Confession, where he mentions Anna Karenina, but only this once.XXXVII)

  Gusev then quotes from Anna Karenina about Levin’s despairing thoughts, but Tolstoy keeps us and himself distant enough from Levin that we are fascinated by the character’s situation rather than overwhelmed by it. In Confession, on the other hand, Tolstoy induces the feeling of depression that he underwent. Levin’s pre-marriage depression is plenty affecting, but it’s only great fiction; Tolstoy and we are sympathetic observers, but we feel (and know) Levin will pull out of this:

  It was only just at parting that Nikolay kissed him, and said, looking with sudden strangeness and seriousness at his brother:

  “Anyway, don’t remember evil against me, Kostya!” and his voice quivered. These were the only words that had been spoken sincerely between them. Levin knew that those words meant, “You see, and you know, that I’m in a bad way, and maybe we shall not see each other again.” Levin knew this, and the tears gushed from his eyes. He kissed his brother once more, but he could not speak, and knew not what to say.

  Three days after his brother’s departure, Levin too set off for his foreign tour. Happening to meet Shcherbatsky, Kitty’s cousin, in the railway train, Levin greatly astonished him by his depression.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Shtcherbatsky asked him.

  “Oh, nothing; there’s not much happiness in life.”

  “Not much? You come with me to Paris instead of to Mulhausen. You shall see how to be happy.”

  “No, I’ve done with it all. It’s time I was dead.”

  “Well, that’s a good one!” said Shtcherbatsky, laughing; “why, I’m only just getting ready to begin.”

  “Yes, I thought the same not long ago, but now I know I shall soon be dead.”

  Levin said what he had genuinely been thinking of late. He saw nothing but death or the advance toward death in everything. But his cherished scheme only engrossed him the more. Life had to be gotten through somehow till death did come. Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.XXXVIII

  Tolstoy would write or revise this chapter between this fall and its publication in the January 1876 issue.

  Gusev then quotes significant lines from the Epilogue (still almost two years away), when Levin is happily married, fulfilled, having achieved the family life he dreamed of:

  And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.XXXIX

  Gusev comments, “It’s doubtless that these last lines were autobiographical,”XL and quotes from Chapter 4 of Confession, in which Tolstoy confesses:

  It had come to this, that I, a healthy, fortunate man, felt I could no longer live: some irresistible power impelled me to rid myself one way or other of life. I cannot say I wished to kill myself. The power which drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish. It was a force similar to the former striving to live, only in a contrary direction. All my strength drew me away from life. The thought of self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to improve my life had come formerly. And it was so seductive that I had to be cunning with myself lest I should carry it out too hastily. I did not wish to hurry, because I wanted to use all efforts to disentangle the matter. “If I cannot unravel matters, there will always be time,” and it was then that I, a man favoured by fortune, hid a cord from myself lest I should hang myself from the crosspiece of the partition in my room where I undressed alone every evening, and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life. I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.XLI

  When Tolstoy later wrote up this autobiographical experience as Levin’s experience, the fiction is not as harrowing as it is in Confession. In Confession, Tolstoy’s terror seems quite possibly inescapable, with suicide the most likely option, no matter that we know that the author didn’t kill himself.

  The truest fictional representation of Tolstoy’s depression is Anna’s, which affects not just Anna’s balance but Vronsky’s. (Levin’s melancholy only slightly touches his newlywed bride.) Tolstoy’s despairing outlook in Confession is Anna’s.

  * * *

  In late October, perhaps overcoming his “dreary, apathetic state” and fulfilling Strakhov’s prompt, Tolstoy wrote Katkov his excuse letter for Anna Karenina not being ready. He denied that he didn’t want to publish the second part of the novel: “I’m very sorry, esteemed M.N., that the rumors, not having any basis, have disturbed you.” The rumors’ basis, of course, was Tolstoy’s constant grumbling to friends that he was disgusted by the novel and didn’t want to write it.

  “I’ll make use of the opportunity to repeat what I wrote Lyubimov [Katkov’s editor in chief],” Tolstoy tried to assure Katkov. (The letter to Lyubimov has not survived.) “I now have only one desire, to finish the novel as soon as possible in order to print it in the Russian Herald, but I cannot promise this, as the continuation depends on the capability to work, independent of me, and so I cannot promise.”XLII

  Katkov could have reasonably exclaimed: “On whom, on what, does your capabilit
y to work depend then?”

  Some of Tolstoy’s best meditations on art seem to have come when he was not, at the moment, producing it and was thinking about what he needed for it to happen. He now wrote Fet what has become a famous letter about artistic “scaffolding”:

  I haven’t written to you for so long, dear Afanasy Afanasich, because I’ve been unwell myself all this time and have been distressed to watch the illness in the family. Now both they and I are a little better, and I hope—I only hope—to settle down to work.

  Our work is a terrible thing. Nobody knows this except us. In order to work it is necessary for the scaffolding to be erected under your feet. And this scaffolding doesn’t depend on you. If you start working without scaffolding, you will only waste material and make a mess of the walls and not be able to go on with them. You feel this particularly once the work has begun. You keep thinking—why not go on? And all of a sudden your arms fail you and you sit and wait. This is what I’ve been doing. But now, I think, the scaffolding has been erected and I’m rolling up my sleeves. […]XLIII

  He was blocked and used this image to justify to himself why he hadn’t been working. It would in fact be another six weeks before he, his sleeves for a long while rolled up, returned to the scaffolded Anna Karenina.

  He discusses a book, “a collection of information about the Caucasian mountain tribes […] It contains the legends and poetry of the tribesmen and some remarkable poetic treasures.” He wouldn’t send the book to Fet yet, because “I’m rereading it on and off.” Some of it would be worked into the first draft of Hadji Murad about twenty years later. He quoted many lines and remarked, “Marvellous!” Then he quoted some more lines and suggested that Fet could use them in a poem, and Fet did.