Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  The original, insincere, melodramatic Anna could have said all that as could any raving drama queen. “Now I’m my real self” is the most blasphemous statement in the book. She is not! When Tolstoy first imagined this event, it was the original Anna that he had in mind and he despised her, but for some reason he was quite moved by it: “The scene, describing the reconciliation of Karenin with Udashev [Vronsky] by the bed of the dying wife, which, doubtless, Tolstoy gave a lot of meaning to and was writing it, perhaps, ‘with tears in his eyes,’ was written straight off and, without essential changes, it reached the finished text,” writes Gusev.XXXIX

  Coming to the now ill-fitting material while writing for the serial deadline, Tolstoy’s artistic vision was not alert to the new, real Anna. I reject or don’t want to accept that Anna is melodramatic. (Yes, I know she will throw herself under a train, I know!) But this scene of Anna’s delirium, recognizing and not recognizing Karenin, babbling about Karenin’s goodness and forgiveness, and next her insisting on her two Alexeis to shake hands and forgive each other! I don’t like it. We know that for now she’s not going to die; I get the feeling, in spite of the doctor’s insistence that she’ll die, that everyone knows she’s not going to die and that they’re all playacting. Tolstoy did not believe in doctors’ evaluations, he said, and yet he hung on their words anyway: “The doctors said that it was puerperal fever, and that it was ninety-nine chances in a hundred it would end in death.”XL “Ninety-nine chances in a hundred” was not a scientific estimate based on studies conducted by the Russian Medical Association. At best, it meant the doctors were guessing she would die; they were only admitting that they couldn’t help her. It’s La Traviata, except that no one is singing beautifully, and Anna doesn’t die! I can’t recall my first response to this chapter, but I cannot read it anymore without feeling embarrassed.

  Anna Karenina, in a novel named after her, cannot die yet.

  In 1871, when Sofia was suffering the same childbirth infection, Sofia could have died (Tolstoy heard back then the doctors’ assessment of there being a “one percent chance” of her survival), and Tolstoy was in real agony. By 1876 they knew death close up, losing three children in the last two years. Death was no stranger to either of them. Here, in the novel, however, everyone’s just pretending.

  * * *

  While Tolstoy never expressed admiration for Anna Karenina and never asked anyone to admire it, he didn’t mind continually expressing his bewilderment at the lack of admiration of the Azbuka. On February 29, he replied to the children’s book author Evgeniy V. Lvov: “[Your letter] gave me great pleasure, dear Prince, and also made me sad. It gave me pleasure because you appreciated the form of my stories for the people, but it also made me sad because in the 5 years, I think it is, since these stories came out, you have never come across them and, like the public, you considered me either a speculator, writing for the people for money, or a 50-year-old fool talking about something he knows nothing about. I fought against German pedagogy precisely because I have devoted a big part of my life to this matter, because I know how the people and the people’s children think and because I know how to talk to them, and this knowledge did not fall out of the sky because I have talent (a most foolish, nonsensical word), but because I acquired this knowledge by love and hard work. The stories and fables written in the booklets are what has been sifted out from a quantity of adapted stories 20 times as great, and each of them was revised by me as many as 10 times, and cost me more hard work than any passage in any of my writings. The Primer cost me even more hard work. I have been praised for everything I have written, but not a single word which is not abusive has been said in print about the one really good and useful thing that I have done, the Primer and these booklets. You read them and appreciated them because you write yourself, and want to write, and because you have taste and feeling. But anyone with taste and feeling reading these booklets could say: ‘Yes, all right, simple and clear, but in places bad and false.’ And anyone who read them and said this would be absolutely right. But if anyone tries to write stories like these he will see how hard to come by these negative virtues are, which consist merely in a thing being simple and clear and having nothing superfluous or false about it.”XLI

  Was Tolstoy dissatisfied with Anna Karenina because it wasn’t simple or clear enough? No one has ever criticized the novel as difficult or obscure. But perhaps he wasn’t reconciling what he had achieved by hard work in the Azbuka with what was necessarily more complex and difficult: the problems dramatized in Anna Karenina of how to live, why to live, and, finally, how to survive one’s suicidal thoughts.

  On the same day as his letter to Lvov or the day after, March 1, Tolstoy followed up with Nagornov on the marketing strategy concerning Childhood and War and Peace. When the business planning was complete, Tolstoy moved on to family news. Sofia “continues sick” and that night was so sick that they telegraphed for Dr. Chirkov—but when Sofia was better in the morning, they telegraphed again to Dr. Chirkov that they didn’t need him after all, but now, that day, they didn’t know if he had got the second telegram or if he was about to arrive.XLII

  Tolstoy was impulsive in his use of the new technology, and in Anna Karenina Dolly kvetches that Stiva loves to telegraph. Anna also sends hasty telegrams.

  In a letter to Fet, Tolstoy mentioned that because of Sofia’s poor health, ranging from fever to migraines to pain in the stomach, he had no “peace of mind, which I especially need now for work. The end of winter and the beginning of spring are always my more productive times, and it’s necessary to finish this sickening to me novel.”XLIII He jokingly wished Fet a pain in the tooth that would take him to Moscow so that Tolstoy could see him. For perhaps the first time in a few years of letters to Fet, Tolstoy didn’t mention horses.

  Dostoevsky found something annoying about Tolstoy’s men being so smitten with horses and wrote in an essay: “characters, such as Vronsky (one of the heroes of the romance), who can speak of nothing but horses, and who is even unable to find a subject for conversation other than horses, are, of course, curious from the standpoint of ascertaining their type, but very monotonous and confined to a certain taste only.…”XLIV

  Fet answered Tolstoy: “If I hold back from sending a letter to you, dear Lev Nikolaevich, it’s to spare Katkov, the public and myself. When someone builds such a splendid cathedral as your novel, the sins get pulled under the elbow.”XLV

  This late winter, Tolstoy was anxious that Alexandrine Tolstaya had not written him in a while; he sensed or feared that he had done something wrong or had offended her and he asked her to reassure him by writing him back. “My life,” he explained, “goes on as of old, only with new losses. I wrote you about the death of Auntie Ergol’skaya; since then I have buried three young children and the relative-aunt Yushkova, who lived lately with us.”XLVI

  Sofia, in the “New Projects” chapter of My Life, remembered, “While Lev Nikolaevich continued work on Anna Karenina, his imagination was already exploring new themes, new images, and the germ of a new novel was sprouting in his thought, which he told me about in the following words, uttered on the 3rd of March 1876”:

  “For the work to be good, {the author} must love its basic underlying thought. In Anna Karenina I loved the thought of family. In War and Peace I loved the thought of the people (in the sense of all the Russian people). And now I have the clear feeling that I shall love the thought of the Russian people in the sense of the power of conquering {new lands} (migration).”

  And Lev Nikolaevich wanted to write a story about a cultured person who rejected the life of his own milieu and went off with migrants to new places. Lev Nikolaevich was always fascinated by this life in new places, this populist appeal of the life of a Robinson Crusoe. […]XLVII

  Sofia didn’t notice, it seems to me, that through his Robinson Crusoe fantasy her husband was describing his own unfulfilled dream of leaving home and her. He seems never to have extinguished this desire.

  After con
ceiving this story about the migrants, Lev Nikolaevich spent a good deal of time walking along the high road, talking to the local populace and, as always, recording in his notebooks anything that seemed interesting to him in the stories told to him. Or he would simply jot down many of the folk idioms he heard from passing pilgrims, travelers, or peasants on their way to and from work in various parts of Russia and speaking the dialects of the area whence they hailed.

  “I toss all that into a drawer in my mind and select from it what I need for my writing,” Lev Nikolaevich told me.

  Tolstoy’s notebooks from this time do not exist, and he didn’t record folk idioms and stories in his diaries. Did he have a scrap pile of “jottings” from this time that Sofia was unable to squirrel away and preserve for us? (No, not that I have discovered.) Was Sofia misremembering or confused about there being actual notebooks? She quotes him saying “a drawer in my mind,” which is similar to the way in Anna Karenina Mikhailov takes note of people’s faces and then, as he sketches, selects what he needs for his paintings:

  He walked rapidly to the door of his studio, and in spite of his excitement he was struck by the soft light on Anna’s figure as she stood in the shade of the entrance listening to Golenishtchev, who was eagerly telling her something, while she evidently wanted to look round at the artist. He was himself unconscious how, as he approached them, he seized on this impression and absorbed it, as he had the chin of the shopkeeper who had sold him the cigars, and put it away somewhere to be brought out when he wanted it.XLVIII

  But back to the travelers that Sofia remembered Tolstoy encountering near Yasnaya Polyana: they made him think about the Russian people’s “union of friendship,” how the pilgrims could travel everywhere and be provided for.

  If you, too, want to be included in this union of friendship, Lev Nikolaevich reasoned with himself, you have to confess the same faith as the people. He spoke about this with me as well, and began seeking truth and religion in carrying out all the rituals of the Orthodox Church. I would emphasize that in 1876 this was still just a faint stirring in Lev Nikolaevich’s heart, which did not reach its full development until 1877, and by 1878 had already begun to give way to denial.XLIX

  I am often skeptical of Sofia’s accounts, but I completely trust her on this. She was there with him every day and studied his moods; this was one of those dark periods about which he wrote in Confession. Sofia recalled:

  […] When Lev Nikolaevich wasn’t busy writing, he would play the piano for four to six hours a day, or spend his time out hunting. It seemed as though he was trying at any cost to forget about himself, to avoid thinking about the emptiness of his life and his desire to end it.L

  In “Family Life,” her next chapter, Sofia took a long but forgetful view: “We had very few visitors at the beginning of 1876, and I can’t recall any details of our life during that period.”LI

  She may not have recalled that in the beginning of March she wrote her sister Tatyana that Tolstoy was preparing the chapters for the March issue, and yet he was also so worried about her health that it prevented him from working.

  * * *

  Tolstoy could expect regular responses from Strakhov, so when he didn’t receive them, he grew anxious. He wrote Strakhov in early March: “You can’t imagine how much I desire to know your opinion on what I wrote you in the last letter and with what conviction in the firmness of my position I await you and desire a strong attack in order to show my firmness.”LII These philosophical debates continued being for him a kind of exercise, like fencing or chess. He didn’t even mention Anna Karenina.

  He wrote Alexandrine again, apparently in answer to a March 6 letter from her, and explained the winter’s unhappinesses:

  My children died like this: after 5 living (merciful God), the 6th was a strong boy, who my wife loved very much, Petya. At a year he got sick one night, and in the morning, as soon as my wife left him, they called to me that he had died—the croup. The other after him, a charming baby (already at a few months it was seen he had a miraculously sweet nature), also at a year old. He got sick with water on the brain. And ever since it’s very painful to remember that terrible week of his dying. This winter my wife was near death with illness. She had whooping cough. But she was pregnant. She was near death and prematurely gave birth to a daughter, who lived only a few hours and who was terribly pitied only later when her mother was out of danger. My wife hadn’t even got up (she couldn’t for six weeks), when the fresh, lively old woman, Auntie Pelageya Il’inishna, who only in that year came from a monastery to live with us, lay down and in terrible torment passed on. Strange to say, but this death of an old eighty-year-old acted on me like no other death acted. It made me so sad to lose her, so sad, the last memories about the past generation of my father, mother, sad for her suffering, but in this death was something else that I can’t describe to you and I’ll tell you sometime. Not an hour passes that I don’t think about her.LIII

  He was in a low mood and even seemed to blame his novel’s heroine for disappointing him: “My Anna has become a bore, insipid as a bitter radish. I have to worry along with her as one would with an ill-natured pupil; but do not speak ill of her or, if you must, do it with ménagement, for after all I have adopted her.”LIV

  This was a rare expression of paternal feeling in Tolstoy in regard to a character. As a narrator or author he wasn’t inclined to express fondness or sympathy for characters, as Trollope so regularly does. Tolstoy here seemed to be amusing himself with the idea that his Anna was acting out.

  When he wrote Fet, he asked for family news and told him his own. Then he wanted to know if Fet had a stallion with Arabian blood, not too expensive, to mate with Tolstoy’s Kirgiz mares, and maybe he could also buy some mares “for recreation.”

  How many horses does a man need?

  Tolstoy had the same kind of appetite for horses as a particular kind of 20th-century American might have had for cars. One can’t have too many!

  He returned to the topic of his wife’s health: “We’re as of old. My wife became worse but is now tolerable.” And finally to Anna Karenina: “I still dream of finishing the novel by summer, but I’m beginning to doubt that.”LV It was already mid-March.

  The darkness Tolstoy was living in seems, in Confession, to cover 1875 and this year of 1876 and then 1877. But at this moment in March, despite his blues, he was busy, and he was eager to hear from friends. He still had so many interests. He was not a monomaniac, though his nonfictional writings, so powerfully focused, can make it seem as if he was. Confession is a peculiar and disturbing book because of its relentless focus.

  Meanwhile, Sofia was “again becoming ill.”LVI A new grief came. Sofia recalled that “on the 17th I had {another} miscarriage, which I soon recovered from.” For a year she would not become pregnant again. (Or at least she would not have another baby until December of 1877.) Tolstoy, meanwhile, was trying to balance himself, doing something repetitious, rhythmical, while unintentionally driving that repetition into the brains of his wife and children. Sofia recalled: “I got terribly tired of listening to Lev Nikolaevich’s practicing on the piano.”

  His scales and exercises would go on for hours. I recall he learnt to play a Weber sonata, which greatly appealed to me. His musical accomplishments gave him cheer and distracted him from his more weighty thoughts.LVII

  Sofia wrote her sister Tatyana on March 17: “Have you read Karenina? The January issue is not very good, but the February one, to me, is miraculous, and now Levochka, without a break, sits over the March issue and it’s still not ready. However, soon it will be ready. Katkov showers us with telegrams and letters.”LVIII

  Although behind schedule himself and feeling pestered by Katkov for his promised installment of the novel, Tolstoy wrote Golokhvastov to scold him about procrastinating:

  Thank you, dear Pavel Dmitrich, for remembering me—the only unfortunate thing is that you send me bad news about yourself—firstly the fact, as I see, that you are not working, t
hat you are not up to your eyes in work. That’s the only real way. I don’t even want to know what you ought to be working at. That doesn’t matter. I only know that there are things which you know and others don’t—poetic or philological, scientific or artistic—and that only you ought to express these things, and that in order to do so you must immerse yourself up to your eyes in work. And you are not doing so, and that’s bad.LIX

  Considering that Golokhvastov must have known how much Tolstoy had been dragging his feet while writing Anna Karenina, this was rather rich. His own procrastinating thoughts having drifted to the location where Golokhvastov was goofing off annoyed Tolstoy further:

  Secondly, the fact that you are living abroad, and in Italy. You wouldn’t believe that I would rather live in Mamadysh [R. F. Christian notes: “A small town in the Kazan province used by Tolstoy to mean any provincial backwater”] than in Venice, Rome, or Naples; these towns and the life in them have such a conventional, and invariably identical, grandeur and elegance for everyone else, but such vulgarity for me, that it makes me sick to think about them, and it’s unbearable to read about them (Strakhov recently sent me his article about Italy and art).

  Tolstoy’s annoyance with the thought of Italy worked fortunately like a grain of sand in an oyster and seemed to have helped him produce for the April issue (published on April 29) the pearl of Mikhailov, the Russian artist in Italy who, with contempt in his heart and on his face for these Russian aristocrats touring Europe, paints Anna’s portrait. Tolstoy’s rant to Golokhvastov continued: