Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  His letter to Strakhov, possibly written the same day, continued a variation on the same scaffolding theme:

  I haven’t written and answered you in a long while, dear Nikolay Nikolaevich, because everything at this time has been in such a bad state—I’m tormented by a sick household, and I myself am sick. I fling myself from one work to another, but I do almost nothing.

  Especially at the beginning of the work it’s apparent that it’s impossible to write on purpose. It seems that’s why the beginning is not continuing. You try, you see that the hands don’t reach that place where I left the work, and the harder you try, the clearer you see that you’re not doing what’s necessary but wasting material in vain. And raising the scaffolding depends not on me. And you sit and wait while under your feet grows this scaffolding.XLIV

  On October 26, Tolstoy wrote Nagornov concerning the Azbuka business, with the main point being, “I really need the money.” He also wanted “On Popular Education” to be sold in “all the bookshops for 15 kopeks apiece.” Tolstoy knew prices. He was particular; he directed Nagornov with precision, telling him to follow up with Sokovin, a bookseller who owed Tolstoy money for various editions, including War and Peace and even the earlier version of the Azbuka.

  And then, as usual with Nagornov, at the end of the letter Tolstoy added some family news. All spring and summer it had been illness; Sofia continued to be the worst sufferer: “As soon as the whooping cough began to pass away, a strong neuralgia began in her face.”XLV As soon as that trouble passed away, she had stomach cramps that kept her from sleeping for two days. At the moment, however, there seemed to be a little bit of relief.

  But something terrible was looming.

  On October 30, because Sofia had peritonitis, their doctor Zakhar’in’s assistant, Dr. V. V. Chirkov, came to Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy, in a grieved letter that day to Nagornov, wrote: “he did everything that he could.”XLVI Chirkov operated on Sofia for the peritonitis and relieved her pain, but then she prematurely delivered a girl, Vara, “who,” remembered Sofia, “lived for an hour and a half before passing on. […] I was so ill that her death did not upset me.”XLVII

  Tolstoy wrote again to Nagornov and apologized for not having written with the latest news about Sofia, but “everything was undetermined, and now it seems it can be said that things are getting better. There’s no illness and there is appetite, and her strength is increasing.”XLVIII

  The strain of worry on Tolstoy was terrible, and yet, perhaps with the relief at Sofia’s illness passing, it produced in him a bright excited light of discovery. He reflected in a short note to Strakhov: “All this time—2 weeks—I’ve been looking after a sick wife who gave birth to a stillborn child and has been at death’s door. But it’s a strange thing—I’ve never thought with such vigour about the problems which interest me as at this time. I read and reread carefully again the words of Wundt [R. F. Christian’s footnote: “Perhaps a reference to two contemporary fragments: On a Future Life Outside Space and Time; and On the Importance of the Christian Religion”XLIX], and understood for the first time the full force of the materialist, but for the first and last time only. Now I rejoice all the more at your plan and challenge you to a correspondence. And so—to a meeting of minds.”L

  Suddenly Tolstoy was engaged by his interest in philosophy, and he could for a moment think outside of the home. In his relationship with Strakhov, Tolstoy could wrestle over philosophical questions while having an opponent he could always defeat. To Strakhov’s credit—I don’t believe he was as enthusiastic to wrestle as Tolstoy—he was willing to engage and to use his position as confidant and debating partner to occasionally suggest, by the way, that Anna Karenina needed its author’s attention.

  Tolstoy concluded his note to Strakhov with a prima donna’s exclamation: “My God, if only someone would finish A. Karenina for me! It’s unbearably repulsive.”

  It would be another month before Tolstoy resumed the novel.

  * * *

  On November 8 or 9, Tolstoy had to tell his brother, “Don’t be mad at me”; he still didn’t have the money that he owed Sergei: “I will be in position to give it to you no later than in a month.” He continued: “Now onto the business of our life.”

  It has been really bad. The simple whooping cough finished very badly. My wife had an inflammation in the peritoneum (as the doctor called it). She gave birth to a six-month-old girl, who died right away, and she herself was near death. […] Generally, I spent two tormenting weeks. Now she’s better, but she is still not up. Moreover the whole house is full of masters, governesses and strangers. […] And so I await your decision about the money.LI

  Who were all those people in the house? The dying “Auntie” Pelageya Il’inishna, Sofia’s brother Andrei and her uncle Kostya, G. A. Kolokoltsev, P. F. Samarin and his wife, and “on the most severe day of illness, the Swiss governess from Geneva, Mademoiselle Rey.”LII

  More relaxed, less defensive, Tolstoy also wrote to Fet:

  I received your beautiful verses, particularly “The Eagle.” The latter one is not as good. [Tolstoy paraphrases two lines of the second poem…] I received your letter in the terribly severe moments when my wife was near death with illness, the inflammation of the peritoneum, and gave birth to a premature already practically dead baby girl. Fear, terror, death, the merriness of children, food, fuss, doctors, falsity, death, terror. It has been terribly heavy. Now she’s better, she’s not up, but there is no danger. She read your letter and is joyful at the thought of seeing you and Olenka on the 18th of December.LIII

  On November 9 or 10, he responded to a letter from his brother Sergei, who hadn’t apparently received Tolstoy’s previous letter yet. He caught him up, anyway, on Sofia’s health (“almost well,” “very weak”). But then he arrived at that inexplicable phenomenon: “I, as always happens, felt myself absolutely healthy at the time of her illness […].” That vigor had passed, however, “and now I have settled down and suppose that it’s time to die.”

  Last night I felt terribly bad; my temples blasted and became terrible. I thought to myself, I’m dying, and began to ask for whom this would interest and would give pleasure that I die. I sorted this all out and found that everyone would be merry or tell stories or pull themselves together, except for my wife and you.

  After that depressing and devastating thought, he concluded the letter with a shout of joy: “What a winter! Three days ago I went out with the dogs and without gunpowder caught 6 hares.”LIV

  What does this mean?

  It means that I have given up trying to believe whole-cloth in Confession as a chronicle, as a record of his actions. (Yes, “confession” suggests a strict adherence to the truth, but Tolstoy seems not to have bound himself to everyday, domestic-life “truth” in his religious and philosophical works. This, for me, reveals why his fiction is truer of the man than his nonfiction.) In Confession he professes: “I, like Sakya Muni, could not ride out hunting when I knew that old age, suffering, and death exist. My imagination was too vivid. Nor could I rejoice in the momentary accidents that for an instant threw pleasure to my lot.”LV

  Reading his letters and accounting for his everyday life, we realize that however debilitating Tolstoy’s depression was, as profound a despair as he describes it in Confession, there were actually, undeniably moments of pleasure, exhilaration, and, of course, hunting. Artistic genius contemporaries of his, among them John Ruskin and Van Gogh, were better at acknowledging the surges and rollbacks of depression and were less inclined to color the entire landscape of a period of their lives in one shade.

  * * *

  The most boring and perhaps longest letter that Tolstoy ever wrote is translated in full by R. F. Christian and was written on about November 30 to Strakhov in this long fall period of Tolstoy’s not working on Anna Karenina. It precedes by two weeks his return to writing the novel, but it would be difficult to give the letter any credit for somehow loosening him up for the resumption of his artistic and cont
ractual duty.

  The eight-page letter, more than 3,500 words, shows Tolstoy’s characteristic philosophical mode, a lecture-like exposition that brooks no interruptions: “The difference between you and me is only an external one. For every thinking man all three questions are inseparably joined into one—‘what is my life, what am I?’ ”LVI

  Tolstoy had the impulse here to declaim, and the only person in the world he knew who would listen was Strakhov. But even to patient, devoted, admiring Strakhov, he was rude, scolding Strakhov when he was sensing that he was making Strakhov impatient:

  (Please listen to me attentively, don’t be angry at this digression and do correct what is not exact, explain what is not clear and refuse what is untrue. This digression is essentially what is called an exposition of method.) I can see the mass of omissions, obscurities and repetitions, as well as the repulsive didactic tone in all that I have written, but I stand by my basic idea about the method of philosophy which I hope you will understand amid all this confusion.LVII

  As usual, Tolstoy nailed himself better than anyone else could: “the repulsive didactic tone.” Perfect! But he couldn’t stop that train; he let it go on and on and on.

  Andrew Donskov, the editor of Tolstoy’s and Strakhov’s letters to each other, reminds us that Strakhov “was often the first to read Tolstoy’s new manuscripts.”LVIII Together with Tolstoy’s insufferable November 30 letter, “Strakhov received the first draft of Tolstoy’s Ispoved’ [Confession]—showing that the creation of this work dates not from 1877 as is often considered (some scholars have put it even later), but from a significantly earlier date.”LIX

  So?

  So this proves Anna Karenina’s and Confession’s simultaneity and overlappings. And yet…

  Unlike Anna Karenina, it’s difficult to read or even dip into Confession without being plunged into despair. And in real life, Sofia also suffered in the gloom of her husband’s despair:

  Despite Tolstoy’s melancholy weighing on her, Sophia found strength to carry on. In her memoir, she recalls, “I was lonesome, working beyond strength… while Lev Nikolaevich would often tell me that his life is over, it’s time to die, and he can enjoy nothing.” Watching Tolstoy struggle with depression, “despondent and dejected for days and weeks on end,” she waited patiently and with hope “that God will light the spark of life in Lyovochka and he will be once more the person he used to be.”

  Sophia hoped he would return to the novel. Although she did not talk to him directly about it, he read this in her eyes. Once, he surprised her by saying: “Don’t nag me that I’m not writing, my head is heavy!” To sister Tanya, Sophia explained that she had not said anything: she did not dare.LX

  * * *

  In late November Tolstoy wrote to Nagornov, primarily about business, but he mentioned that “Auntie” Pelageya seemed better. In a follow-up letter, from the beginning of December, he added, “We have woe after woe. As soon as Sonya got righted, Auntie took to her bed, and is suffering and dying. I can’t do anything. I don’t have the main thing—a peaceful soul.”LXI

  And yet he would have reason to feel financially more secure. According to Gusev, “The New Azbuka quickly went into use in people’s schools. Already in December 1875 it went into a second printing…”LXII So his having put off Anna Karenina at times and throwing his energy and heart into revising and promoting the New Azbuka had paid off. It had success. The main thing, which he could continue to be satisfied by for the rest of his life, was not the educational debate over how to teach, but that through the Azbuka children had good stories as they learned to read and great stories as they became completely adept. He had enriched the dry soil of Russian literacy.

  Tolstoy continued to send Nagornov on business errands and continued to send him family news. On December 7 he wrote: “Auntie with each day weakens. We await her death every minute.”LXIII He wrote his brother to tell him Auntie’s situation, that she “would be very glad to see you, about this there can be no doubt.”

  He was watching her die, fascinated and maybe appalled: “She’s very pitiful. She eats nothing, she lies there, groans from pain in her leg, in her chest, in the heel of her other foot, and then suddenly freshens up and says she’s better. But a terrible weakness goes with her. And she doesn’t want to die. Only one time she recognized her situation and thought she was about to die. It would be good if you would come […] I received your letter by post and feel guilty before you about the money.” Tolstoy’s money was only now coming in. “But if you require it, I can get it.”LXIV

  Whether Sergei came to see Auntie or not, we can presume he agreed to wait for the money; nobody ever complained about being shorted by Tolstoy.

  Gusev comments: “Family unhappiness unavoidably deprived Tolstoy of peace for work, and only on December 12 was Sofia Andreevna able to write her sister that Lev Nikolaevich ‘began working on the novel.’ ”

  Yes, there was Auntie on her death bed, but “family unhappiness,” as Tolstoy himself liked to point out, never deprived him of being able to work. Sofia must have been relieved when she saw that he had gotten back to it. Did he bring her any manuscript? Did he wave the pages for her to see and hope that he could tempt her into copying them?

  Gusev continues: “At the end of the month the work was going very fast, and on December 25 Sofia Andreevna was already informing her sister that Lev Nikolaevich ‘had taken up Anna Karenina very firmly.’ ”LXV

  Sometime in the period of December 25–27, Tolstoy wrote an essay, “On the Soul and Its Life in What’s Known and Understood by Us of Life,” which, despite its impressive title, is as uninteresting as all discussions of the soul.LXVI

  Sofia recalled that holiday season:

  On the 28th of December the Golokhvastovs arrived, and Ol’ga Andreevna read us aloud her historical drama titled Dve nevesty {Two brides}. I don’t remember the drama, but I recall that Strakhov and Lev Nikolaevich did not like it at all—there was something sham about it.

  The Golokhvastovs were dear, clever, and talented people, especially him—he was a real knight when it came to order and decency. But somehow they didn’t quite fit in with us. Her Parisian outfits, coquettishness, and her whole outward appearance did not fit in with the simplicity of our family household. They brought the children magnificent gifts, all sorts of books, but when they left, for some reason we began to breathe easier.

  Despite the mourning period following Auntie Pelageia Il’inichna’s death, there was no stifling the children’s fun.LXVII […]

  Ol’ga Golokhvastova drove Tolstoy up the wall. In What Is Art?, completed twenty years later, Tolstoy mocks the kind of literary production that Golokhvastova seems to have indulged in:

  Some forty years ago a stupid but highly cultured—ayant beaucoup d’acquis—lady (since deceased) asked me to listen to a novel she had written. It began with a heroine who, in a poetic white dress and with poetically flowing hair, was reading poetry near some water in a poetic wood. The scene was in Russia, but suddenly from behind the bushes the hero appears, wearing a hat with a feather à la Guillaume Tell (the book specially mentioned this) and accompanied by two poetical white dogs. The authoress deemed all this highly poetic, and it might have passed muster if only it had not been necessary for the hero to speak. But as soon as the gentleman in the hat à la Guillaume Tell began to converse with the maiden in the white dress it became obvious that the authoress had nothing to say, but had merely been moved by poetic memories of other works and imagined that by ringing the changes on those memories she could produce an artistic impression.

  Just as we’ll see Vronsky thinking he can make art by imitating the manner of other painters, Golokhvastova communicated other authors’ affectations. Tolstoy explains what’s wrong with imitative, secondhand art:

  But an artistic impression, that is to say, infection, is only received when an author has in the manner peculiar to himself experienced the feeling which he transmits, and not when he passes on another man’s feel
ing previously transmitted to him. Such poetry from poetry cannot infect people, it can only simulate a work of art, and even that only to people of perverted aesthetic taste. The lady in question being very stupid and devoid of talent, it was at once apparent how the case stood; but when such borrowing is resorted to by people who are erudite and talented and have cultivated the technique of their art, we get those borrowings from the Greek, the antique, the Christian, or mythological world, which have become so numerous, and which, particularly in our day, continue to increase and multiply and are accepted by the public as works of art if only the borrowings are well mounted by means of the technique of the particular art to which they belong.LXVIII

  I take it that Tolstoy, out of consideration for his former friends, deliberately misdated the memory to the late 1850s. Ol’ga Golokhvastova had died in 1894.LXIX

  9 The Serialization of Anna Karenina Resumes: January–May 1876

  Tolstoy was in lecture mode again in his New Year’s letter to Strakhov and discoursed upon philosophical and scientific ideas. He also mentioned, as if by the way: “You write about spiritism, and I’ve just written about that. My article is ready.”I

  I thought that I had read everything Tolstoy had written during these Anna Karenina years, so I looked for this article. Frustrated, unable to track it down, I returned to the Jubilee Edition and read the letter’s footnote: “The article on spiritism was not written; by the word ‘ready’ Tolstoy apparently meant to say that the article was completely thought-through and it only remained for him to write it.”II

  In a manner characteristic of freelance writers and college freshmen, our hero was lying. So why does his deception about it please me? Perhaps Tolstoy had only goaded himself into competing with his friend. Oh, yeah? You’re writing an article about spiritism? Well, I have one in the works too! Perhaps a potential article by Tolstoy is more interesting than what Strakhov actually wrote? Or, perhaps, any unwritten article about spiritism is better than one that exists?