Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Tolstoy asked Strakhov to send him inexpensive editions of David Hume and Francis Bacon, preferably not in Russian (“the worst of all”). He put off as usual any mention of his novel until the end: “About Anna Karenina, I’ll write nothing to you; and I will not write. If it comes out, you will surely read it through.”III

  In his letter to Nagornov, he thanked him for his accounting of the book sales in 1875 and said that he would like to visit him and Varya, but he had a strong cold: “But mainly, after the misery of the first half of the winter now, thank God, I’m working well and don’t want to lose any time, which I have so little remaining.”IV He had thirty-eight years to live; or did he mean he was trying to honor the publishing deadlines? He seemed surprised he was “working well,” so either way it was sensible that he wanted to continue striking while the iron was hot.

  Katkov, meanwhile, had announced in his December issue the resumption of Anna Karenina in the January issue (to remind ourselves again: all the issues came out about four weeks into, or just beyond the date of, the publication month), but he and Tolstoy had not been in contact about it.

  Tolstoy answered his sister-in-law Tatyana’s January 11 letter, expressing his happiness “at the thought we’ll be together as of old, spending the summer if it all turns out. The familiar joys are ten times a greater joy for us old ones.”V As a matter of fact, that summer he would complain about the visitors and the full house, and we know, from Anna Karenina, that for Levin, his wife’s family could upend his longstanding domestic arrangements.

  He dashed off a quick note to Strakhov and mentioned, “My A Karenina is getting on. I’m not publishing it only because I have no news from the Russ Hera.”VI Did this remark get back to Katkov? (“No news from me?” the editor could have exclaimed.) Tolstoy also nudged Strakhov to ask the booksellers about the New Azbuka and his “On Popular Education” booklet.

  In his letter to Nagornov at the end of January, he took care of publishing business concerning reprintings of War and Peace and Childhood.VII He was quite actively involved in the publishing of his work, but in a few years he would leave it all to Sofia to take care of.

  He also wrote to his sister Maria:

  I wanted to write you at length, dear friend Mashenka, but Sonya wrote everything. The only thing she didn’t write is that she herself is sick; and that for me at least, is the main change in our life, that from a healthy, energetic housewife, she is making herself a sick woman, or making herself worse. And generally we’ve changed a lot. We’re gradually walking off the scene, but the children remain. For a while the children have been good. One thing we haven’t changed is love for you. I feel this, having received your letter. […] Losing Auntie was very hard for me—much more than you think and that I would’ve thought. How good it will be to see you. […] I don’t count this a letter, so I’ll write you another one. Be angry, don’t be angry, be annoyed at me, but know that no one more firmly loves you than we do.VIII

  It seems that Anna Karenina shows us, through the siblings Stiva and Anna, evidence of the relationship between the siblings Lev and Maria. Tolstoy and Stiva were older than their sisters, and both treated their sisters with respect and love. There is no record of the harsh moralist Tolstoy ever expressing contempt for Maria’s having had a child out of wedlock (of course, so had he before his marriage and so had brother Sergei), and in the novel Stiva is Anna’s unwavering champion throughout her life.

  It turns out, though, that Tolstoy’s forty-six-year-old sister Maria was something like Anna, just one generation older.

  Maria Nikolaevna Tolstaya was born March 1, 1830, at Yasnaya Polyana, when Lev was one and a half. Tolstoy’s mother died August 4, 1830. I had long imagined, due to ignorance or inattention, that her death was connected with Maria’s birth, but it wasn’t. The Tolstoy children’s mother died from falling off a swing, hitting her head and having an “inflammation of the brain.”

  Maria married at sixteen or seventeen and lived at her husband Valerian Petrovich Tolstoy’s estate. He was a distant cousin and much older. Ivan Turgenev was Maria and Valerian’s neighbor; Turgenev became attracted to her and dedicated a story to her. She had three children with her husband but was so unhappy that she left him in 1857. In Europe she met a Swede with whom she had a daughter, Elena, in 1863. When Maria’s husband died in 1865, the Swede didn’t marry her after all, and she continued raising her daughter abroad. Tatyana (Bers) Kuzminskaya’s account of Maria’s life is wonderfully opinionated and vivid:

  Exceedingly spoiled from early childhood by her aunts […] she was contrary and headstrong, but had a generous heart and an original mind. Her candid religious faith was never clouded with doubts and helped her to bear many unhappy situations. Her married life was unhappy; the aunties had married her off when she was sixteen years old. She told me she was very “babyish” and didn’t care whom she married. […]

  Valerian Petrovich led a very immoral life and was unfaithful to his wife whenever the occasion permitted. His mother, who was very fond of Marya Nikolayevna, shielded her from unpleasantness as much as she could and always tried to conceal matters from her. But after her death, this was no longer possible: Marya Nikolayevna, realizing what had been going on, felt so embittered and lonely that Leo and Sergey Nikolayevich persuaded her to leave her husband. They brought her and the children to Pirogovo where a house had been built on the opposite bank of the river.

  Years later, when Leo Nikolayevich had changed his views on life and people, he said: “I always reproach myself for one thing—that I persuaded Mashenka to leave her husband and be separated from him for good. That is wrong. Whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder. My sister ought to have borne patiently everything God visited upon her.”

  I argued with him, saying that an immoral husband and father caused nothing but harm to his family.IX

  * * *

  On February 2, the January 1876 issue of the Russian Herald came out; it contained Part 3, Chapters 11–28, which correspond to the book publication’s Chapters 13–32.X For Tolstoy, chapter breaks are sometimes superficial and sometimes indicate no change of scene or time; other times, the new chapters force us to completely reorient ourselves: life, he suggests, has been continuously running elsewhere. This new installment begins with a big changeover.

  If I had been as big a fan of Anna Karenina then as I am now, I would have reread the previous installments in preparation for this new one. I would have finished that rereading all the way through Part 3, Chapter 10 (Chapter 12 in the book), where Levin has had a literal and figurative vision of Kitty. I wonder how long it took Tolstoy to decide that he would let himself get away with presenting this improbable coincidence:

  Forty paces from him a carriage with four horses harnessed abreast was driving toward him along the grassy road on which he was walking. The shaft-horses were tilted against the shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of the road.

  This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be, he gazed absently at the coach.

  In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the window, evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both hands the ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light and thought, full of a subtle, complex inner life, that was remote from Levin, she was gazing beyond him at the glow of the sunrise.

  At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up with wondering delight.

  He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the railway station. And everything that had been stirring Levin during that sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his dreams o
f marrying a peasant girl. There only, in the carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the road, and was rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly upon him of late.

  She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs was no longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking of dogs showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left was the empty fields all round, the village in front, and he himself isolated and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted highroad.

  He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and feelings of that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell. There, in the remote heights above, a mysterious change had been accomplished. There was no trace of shell, and there was stretched over fully half the sky an even cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets. The sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same softness, but with the same remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.

  “No,” he said to himself, “however good that life of simplicity and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her.”XI

  We would have originally read that last chapter on May 2, 1875, exactly eight months before. We would have guessed then that Levin and Kitty are going to get married. There is no real dramatic tension about that; Tolstoy will execute that romance the way a master carpenter will carry out an order for a casket.

  Tolstoy resumes the novel in Part 3 in a different mood, time, and place, catching us up on poor Karenin, whose secret vulnerability are the tears of women and children. Tolstoy’s change of scenes are so vivid and captivating, we hardly blink, even if we have to wonder for a moment, “Who? What’s this?”

  Tolstoy knows that we’ll catch on.

  In Constance Garnett’s 1901 translation, these seventeen chapters in the January 1876 installment of the novel cover eighty pages (in twenty chapters). Among the events:

  Now that he knows the truth of Anna’s adultery, Karenin settles down and is satisfied with his own behavior in response.

  Anna regrets, at first, having told Karenin the truth.

  Vronsky sees prospects for a political career.

  Anna visits Betsy’s gathering of frivolous women.

  Anna and Karenin meet to discuss their living arrangements.

  Levin takes a short trip in which he discusses ideas with his friend Sviazhsky, but Sviazhsky is leery of being caught up in* Levin’s arguments about land and the peasantry.

  A hundred and forty years ago, whoever I might have been, I would have read the January installment through in one excited sitting and then have had to end by pausing with Levin, gloomy after having hosted his sick brother Nikolai at the estate, as he (Levin) is about to head off to Europe. Tolstoy dramatizes Levin’s plight from enough distance so that, despite Levin’s low spirits, we cannot be too anxious about him. (In Chapter 8, above, Gusev discusses this scene in relation to Confession.)

  In Part 3, Chapter 13, I paused over this passage about Karenin:

  “No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her,” he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before—now these incidents proved clearly that she had always been a corrupt woman.XII

  Who could blame Karenin for renouncing and defaming his wife Anna here? He has just dropped her off at home after she has told him that she is Vronsky’s lover. Nobody has to think well of a spouse in such circumstances.

  But I noted this moment because I realized I keep wishing that Tolstoy had told us more incidents of “their past life.” Why do we have to know so little? Is a Life of Johnson–sized and –detailed biography of Anna what I really want? That is…

  Would I like to know about her birth and her habits as a toddler? Her first words, her childhood sayings? What her mother and father were like? From which parent did she get her beauty and from which her energy? Who taught her English and French? What were she and her brother Stiva like as children together? How old were they when their parents died? How did she react? How did the aunt who then raised them assess little Stiva and Anna? What did her voice sound like as a girl? Did she play an instrument? Did Anna sing? What exactly happened that made her aunt feel that Karenin could be coerced into marrying Anna?

  Would I really want to know everything, as if we were in a 21st-century novel? Why would I be interested in what her first time in bed with Karenin was like? Was it as ghastly as her and Vronsky’s first time?

  Does my fascination with brilliant, desperately suicidal Anna have limits?

  Would I really want to know about Anna’s amazement when she gave birth to Seryozha? Did nine years of married life with Karenin seem possible because she so loved their child?

  Would I really like to know all those thousands of details that we think we know about ourselves, but about Anna?

  Of course!

  We can say for Tolstoy that he makes it possible to imagine that such details (facts) could be known because they must have happened, as in life. This is his highest, finest morality—showing us again and again that no one is a walk-on, a bit player; everyone exists—seems to exist—beyond the confines of the novel, beyond their author’s presentation of them. We know ourselves in and by the moment and almost everyone we meet in his fiction seems to exist in that same way. The characters don’t know they’re in a novel and almost never behave as if they are. They think they exist in three dimensions, with their own minds, feelings, and bodies—and we, our moral senses sharpened by Tolstoy’s, take for granted that they do.

  True enough, Tolstoy didn’t know all the details because he hadn’t thought of them or written them all down. Oh, but he could have.

  Do I want to know what Anna wrote in her unhappy, idle-time children’s novel in Part 7, Chapter 10?

  I do! I want to pry that leather-bound manuscript from her hand and read it. One summer twenty years ago I spent way too long trying to figure out what it would have been about. (That is, I wrote Anna’s children’s novel, much to the embarrassment of some of my friends who read it.) And what were her writing routines? In the morning, like her creator, with a big glass of tea? In the long society-less afternoons? Did she revise extensively, as Tolstoy did? Did she (she could have) page through Tolstoy’s Azbuka to find the right tone and vocabulary? He had just revised and published that reading primer to great acclaim before he took on the serialization of Anna Karenina in 1875. Wouldn’t many of the people in her circle have read War and Peace? She was a big reader; I think that she would have read War and Peace—if Tolstoy could’ve imagined it. Wouldn’t reading that novel have made Anna conscious of herself in a way that Tolstoy’s sister-in-law Tatyana did in fact become conscious of herself through reading about Natasha in War and Peace?

  We see in drafts of the novel the transformation of scenes and characters; we see pieces of Tolstoy’s sudden or steady inventions and his abandonment of perfectly good or inert scenes. But there is absolutely no evidence of how, why, or exactly when a coarse, head-of-fluff flirt in the earliest drafts became the elegant, hyper-conscious Anna. I don’t believe in miracles, but that was a miracle.

  We readers can’t invent the unknown details of Anna Karenina, because we’re not Tolstoy, but he doesn’t seem to have invented them so much as to have discovered them, and then dug them out of the earth with his pen’s imagination.

  I could do with more Anna. For me, the greatest book that doesn’t exist is Life of Karenina.

  Having finished reading the January issue back on February 2, 1876, I would have wanted to talk about what I had just read. I would have encouraged my friends and my wife to read it. And then I would have proceeded with my life and daydreamed about Anna in anticipation of the next month’s issue. Probably I would not have been wondering about Tolstoy
at home at Yasnaya Polyana refining the writing, weighing anew each scene and moment, though that was indeed what was preoccupying him.

  In the midst of revising the February issue’s installment, Tolstoy wrote to request Strakhov’s response to his last letter’s (dull) philosophizing. He added, only at the end, as if by the way: “I’m very busy with Karenina. The first part of the book is dry and, it seems, poor, but now I’m sending the corrections of the second installment and it, I know, is good.”XIII The editors of the Jubilee Edition say the “dry and… poor… first part” that Tolstoy had in mind were the January chapters just published.XIV The “good” part, to him, is Part 4, Chapters 1–17,XV which starts with the awkwardness of Anna’s home arrangement: that is, still living with Karenin but seeing Vronsky on the side.

  Tolstoy’s next two bits of correspondence are to Sofia, but vaguely dated. The first is a postscript to their daughter Tanya’s letter to Sofia when Sofia was in Moscow for a wedding. It’s an unusual situation—Tolstoy home, Sofia away. This was one of the few times in their married life so far that she was away while he was home with the children. “I received your telegram and I’m very glad,” he wrote. “I slept downstairs and can’t understand how I lived alone. Please don’t hurry—stay even a few more days if you’re happy, but, mainly, don’t worry. The more money you spend on yourself the better. The children and teachers are fine, as you see.

  “I was occupied this morning.

  “I envy you that you see them together—groom and bride […] I’m glad I won’t be at their wedding or would cry all over the place. I’m going to eat blini.”XVI