Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  I’m very, very grateful to you. When I read through my last dejected and humble letter, I realised that I was really asking for praise and that you had sent it to me. And your praise—sincere, I know, although, I’m afraid, too partial—is very, very dear to me.

  I’m very annoyed that I made mistakes over the wedding, especially as I love that chapter.

  I’m afraid there may also be mistakes over the special subject which I touch on in the part which will come out now in April. [R. F. Christian footnotes this: “Presumably the chapters in Mikhaylov’s studio on the subject of art.”] Please write and tell me if you or other people find any.

  You are right that War and Peace grows in my eyes. I have a strange feeling of joy when people remind me of something from it as Istomin did recently (he’ll be staying with you), but it’s strange, I remember very few passages from it, and the rest I forget.

  Goodbye; a thousand thanks once more. I still hope to finish. But I shall hardly have the strength. In summer I often feel the physical impossibility of writing.

  The postscript:

  I wrote this letter several days ago and didn’t want to send it—so obtrusive was my author’s flattered vanity. But I’ve just written 7 letters and needed to write to you again, and decided to send this.

  Murder will out, and you know me through and through.LXXXVII

  Yes, Strakhov knew Tolstoy and his art and also saw his weaknesses—and still loved the novel and the man.

  Tolstoy’s other important friend of the period, Fet, was meanwhile experiencing something of the existential despair that was also overwhelming Tolstoy. Tolstoy wrote:

  […] I thank you for your idea of calling me to see you pass away, when you thought that the end was near. I will do the same, when I get ready to go there, if I shall have enough strength to think. I would need no one so much at that moment as you and my brother. Before death the communion with men who in this life look beyond its confines is dear and joyous; and you and those rare, real men whom I have met on a close footing in life, in spite of their wholesome relation to life, always stand on the very brink and see life clearly, for the very reason that they look, now into Nirvana, into unlimitedness, into the unknown, now into sansara, and this looking into Nirvana strengthens their vision. But worldly people, no matter how much they may speak of God, are disagreeable to men of our calibre and [it] must be painful in the time of death, because they do not see what we see, namely, that God [is] more indefinite, more distant, but higher and more indubitable, as it says in that article.LXXXVIII

  The God of Sabaoth and his son, the God of the priests, is just as little and ugly and impossible a God—indeed far more impossible—than a God of the flies would be for the priests, if the flies imagined him to be a huge fly only concerned with the well-being and improvement of the flies.LXXXIX

  Tolstoy hadn’t yet figured out how or if he was going to live. Fet and he were depressed and seeing only death:

  You are ill and you think about death, while I am well, and never cease to think about the same thing and to prepare for it. Let’s see who will be first.XC But various imperceptible facts suddenly revealed to me how deeply akin to mine is your nature—your soul (especially in relation to death), and I suddenly came to appreciate our relationship and began to value it far more than before. […] I have tried to express much of what I thought in the last chapter of the April issue of the Russian Herald. [That is, the death of Levin’s brother Nikolai.] XCI

  So even though he was despairing of his life, he had a kindred spirit in Fet. And even though death was waiting for them… there were, for now, horses! In the postscript Tolstoy noted, quite businesslike:

  Thanks very much for sending Hamlet. I’ll be waiting.XCII

  “Hamlet”? To buy or not to buy, that had been the question of the stallion that Fet had recently sold to Tolstoy. (Did Fet name him before or during his bout of despair?)

  Gusev points out that Levin’s attraction to philosophy doesn’t last very long; it’s like an intoxicant or frame of mind that can’t survive a return to everyday life:

  Tolstoy’s own philosophy, laid out in a letter to Strakhov, pleased him, apparently, not for long. In Anna Karenina he narrated that Levin, “At one time, reading Schopenhauer […] put in place of his will the word love, and for a couple of days this new philosophy charmed him, till he removed a little away from it. But then, when he turned from life itself to glance at it again, it fell away too, and proved to be the same muslin garment with no warmth in it.”XCIII

  Tolstoy could not suppress himself before anybody or before almost any idea for very long. He was always going his own way. He lit up problems, resolved them, then re-resolved them and encountered new problems; and meanwhile, somehow, he was creating glorious work.

  Somewhere near the time of the long, wrung-out letters to Strakhov and Fet in late April, Sofia went to Moscow with daughter Tanya to buy hats and shoes. From Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy communicated to Sofia not the state of his soul but the state of the family:

  Istomin came at 3 o’clock; when I only wanted to go horseback riding. He’s very sweet […].

  The children went for a walk, but warmly dressed and not freezing. The governesses are very careful. Everyone carries himself well. Rey with Istomin played chess. Ilyusha without Tanya slept on the couch. I was with Istomin in the carriage and shot a lot, but didn’t kill anything. Bewitching snipes.

  So, despite his worries expressed in Confession of turning the gun on himself, he again and again went hunting! And he worried not for himself but for Sofia:

  I’m afraid for you that in this cold you’ll get a cold. Please remember that purchases are very important, but your health is more. […] Farewell, darling. Without Tanya at the table it’s terribly empty. I kiss you, Tanichka. I’m bored without you.XCIV

  He was depressed, contemplating the end of life, ruing the lack of salvation in writing, yet for all that, he was still in his inconsistency human, and did go hunting, and did take note of expenses, and did miss his daughter!

  Anna Karenina is smarter than and truer than his convictions, than his philosophy, than Schopenhauer.

  A favorite daughter not being at the table matters. Horses matter.

  * * *

  The April issue of the Russian Herald, Chapters 7–19 of Part 5, was published on April 29 (they were numbered Chapters 7–20 in the book). Tolstoy began the new installment by rolling up three months of events of Anna’s life in a summary. Tolstoy makes life in its moment-by-moment experience completely vivid, but in his long-view summary he and we are emotionally distant. Weary apparently of trying to interest himself in the details of Anna’s daily life, Tolstoy had become quite cynical about what she was up to. From Chapter 8:

  The thought of her husband’s unhappiness did not poison her happiness. On one side that memory was too awful to be thought of. On the other side her husband’s unhappiness had given her too much happiness to be regretted. The memory of all that had happened after her illness: her reconciliation with her husband, its breakdown, the news of Vronsky’s wound, his visit, the preparations for divorce, the departure from her husband’s house, the parting from her son—all that seemed to her like a delirious dream, from which she had waked up alone with Vronsky abroad.XCV

  All those weeks in Europe boxed up as a “delirious dream.” Tolstoy had no sympathy for or imagination about Anna’s life on the lam. Her experience before and during Italy does not demonstrate artistic development of her character but Tolstoy’s evasion of artistic engagement.

  In the second paragraph, Tolstoy grouses:

  But, however sincerely Anna had meant to suffer, she was not suffering.

  This analysis by Tolstoy is on a par with that of the society gossips in the novel. But we sympathetic readers know that this woman is going to suffer. Tolstoy has given us her thoughts and conscience and guilt—and yet at this moment and in this installment of the novel, as the omniscient author, he begrudges her the little time that s
he has when she’s happy. He won’t let us readers appreciate these few fulfilled moments in her life. She will soon be crippled by suffering. Even knowing what she has in store, Tolstoy at this moment allows her nothing—she is on trial and has been found guilty for being happy.

  And then there is Tolstoy’s offhand summation:

  Separation from the son she loved—even that did not cause her anguish in these early days. The baby girl—his child—was so sweet, and had so won Anna’s heart, since she was all that was left her, that Anna rarely thought of her son.

  Just because Tolstoy writes that she “rarely thought of her son” doesn’t mean she isn’t thinking a lot about her son. She is still herself, just as Pushkin’s heroine Tatyana in Eugene Onegin is herself when she, to Pushkin’s surprise in the love story’s conclusion, turns down the attractive but cocky hero. Tolstoy suppresses Anna here; but we know that the Anna he has created would continually think about Seryozha.

  Then Tolstoy tries to settle this “unrooted” Vronsky person. We still don’t know Vronsky the way that we know almost all the other characters. With Vronsky, Tolstoy shows us that what he has done to create Anna and Levin is not easy. Vronsky is a hodge-podge. Tolstoy sometimes has a bead on him, and sometimes he doesn’t, like now:

  All the traits of his character, which she learned to know better and better, were unutterably dear to her. His appearance, changed by his civilian dress, was as fascinating to her as though she were some young girl in love. In everything he said, thought, and did, she saw something particularly noble and elevated. Her adoration of him alarmed her indeed; she sought and could not find in him anything not fine.

  Tolstoy couldn’t or didn’t want to show the development of Anna’s feelings. Instead, he informs us that Anna can see the magic in Vronsky. But her vision doesn’t create Vronsky’s character for us. Tolstoy is already checked out, disengaged from the runaway couple. Look at the vagueness of “all the traits,” “better and better,” “everything he said, thought, and did,” “she saw something particularly noble.”

  But then, suddenly, something happens: Tolstoy’s real interest (and ours, too, of course—can we ever not become interested when he gets interested?) is piqued by Vronsky’s new hobby of painting. While he is making short work of Vronsky’s intelligence and artistic feeling, Tolstoy now has a real subject, one that will occupy him and us for quite a while—all the way through Levin’s encounter with Anna’s portrait. Vronsky, we discover, “had a ready appreciation of art, and probably, with a taste for imitating art, he supposed himself to have the real thing essential for an artist, and after hesitating for some time which style of painting to select—religious, historical, realistic, or genre painting—he set to work to paint.”

  He appreciated all kinds, and could have felt inspired by any one of them; but he had no conception of the possibility of knowing nothing at all of any school of painting, and of being inspired directly by what is within the soul, without caring whether what is painted will belong to any recognized school. Since he knew nothing of this, and drew his inspiration, not directly from life, but indirectly from life embodied in art, his inspiration came very quickly and easily, and as quickly and easily came his success in painting something very similar to the sort of painting he was trying to imitate.XCVI

  Vronsky is inspired by the inspiration that the artists he imitates have actually had. That’s why painting is so easy for the former army captain.

  Not so easy was writing this Anna Karenina, “inspired directly by what is within the soul.”

  To continue with the April 1876 issue, Chapters 9–13 bring us to Tolstoy’s most self-revealing portrait of an artist (a portrait-artist at that). Mikhailov, the Russian painter living in Italy, comes from an unprivileged background but was given an opportunity for education and he flourished. His background does not connect him to Tolstoy; his artistic sensibility, however, is Tolstoy’s. He is serious, he is driven; he is aware of the accidents that help him see and evoke the essential life in his subjects. His past work is past. The work that enlivens him and torments him is what he’s working on now. But when these Russians—Anna, Vronsky, and a friend of Vronsky’s—come to look at his paintings, he has to stop working; while he observes them observing his work, he cares what they think, but, like Tolstoy, once his head is clear and their presence removed, he doesn’t care at all.

  Mikhailov (Mihailov in Garnett’s spelling) is a portrait of the author who was creating him. Mikhailov paints the portrait of Anna that is the imaginary visual equivalent of Tolstoy’s literary creation of her.

  It’s almost only in this installment where Anna’s light is not the brightest of all the characters; she is outshone by the cranky artist. While Anna is the subject of Mikhailov’s attention and revelation, Mikhailov is the focus of Tolstoy’s. Only later, in Part 7, in an installment a year away, as Levin gazes at Mikhailov’s portrait of her, will we understand what Tolstoy saw as his own accomplishment of creating Anna’s character.

  In Chapter 14, Tolstoy transports us from Italy back to Russia and to Levin’s surprised experiences of marriage:

  Altogether their honeymoon—that is to say, the month after their wedding—from which from tradition Levin expected so much, was not merely not a time of sweetness, but remained in the memories of both as the bitterest and most humiliating period in their lives. They both alike tried in later life to blot out from their memories all the monstrous, shameful incidents of that morbid period, when both were rarely in a normal frame of mind, both were rarely quite themselves.XCVII

  As he depicted Levin and Kitty flinching in remembrance of those “monstrous, shameful incidents,” I believe that Tolstoy was guiltily remembering his and Sofia’s honeymoon.

  Three months after the wedding, Levin and Kitty go to Levin’s estate. Levin tries to get back to his book about Russian agriculture and to his farming routines, but he keeps discovering surprises about what his married life entails. They hear from Levin’s dissipated brother Nikolai, who is living with a prostitute and suffering a fatal illness in a hotel in a “provincial town”; Levin argues against Kitty’s desire to go with him to minister to Nikolai. To his surprise, despite his being sure that he is right and that he’s the acknowledged decision-maker in the couple, Kitty wins the argument. They arrive at the hotel, and it’s Levin rather than Kitty who is discombobulated. Nikolai is difficult and unhappy, but Kitty is tactful and helpful and charms him. Levin is confused and can’t see anything straight, while Kitty understands that death is on the doorstep. In Chapter 20, Nikolai dies and Kitty finds out that she’s pregnant.

  There is quite a contrast between the halves of this installment. As he was writing the April chapters Tolstoy seemed to anticipate that there would not be another installment for several months, that he was quitting for the summer. He had wrapped up Anna and Vronsky’s time abroad rather tightly and had concluded Kitty and Levin’s early period of marriage with the finality of death and the promise of birth.

  Did Katkov and the subscribers to the Russian Herald know by now that Tolstoy’s summer vacations began in April?

  Strakhov wrote Tolstoy on May 8:

  In the last, April installment, I as usual read it through twice in a row. It seems to me that in general in the last three installments you were going at your full strength. What originality! The descriptions of the wedding, the confession, death, visiting the artist, the first jealousy—all these and so many other things of the ordinary kind that the high romantics neglect and all are looking for something more miraculous and important—this topic is obviously described by you for the first time, and by your descriptions they exist in narratives of somehow so simple and so good people, and here are seen with the full light of the artist.XCVIII

  Strakhov’s ecstatic response provoked a rare instance of Tolstoy feeling good about the novel. “I received your two letters, dear Nikolai Nikolaevich,” he wrote Strakhov, “and sigh with joyful excitement reading them.”XCIX

  The
n Tolstoy made light of the praise, again with the pigeon-peddler analogy: “Even if the pigeon-seller knows that the pigeon is worth just 10 kopecks, he is all the same glad that such a hunter values the tumbler-pigeon at 100 rubles.”C He mentions that there would not be a May installment but that he was dreaming of resuming publication in June. (No prophetic dream there. He missed that hopeful date by six months.) In the postscript, he asked Strakhov to lend him a book or two on pedagogy: “About general education, of the Ushinskiy anthropological kind, the newest, and artificial, as much as possible not stupid. Such books that A. A. Karenin would study in starting the education of the son left on his hands.”CI Tolstoy needed to read the books that a fictional character would read, and Strakhov, the perfect assistant, would know what they were.

  This bit of research led to the following passage in Chapter 24 of Part 5 (seven months later):

  When Alexey Alexandrovitch with Lidia Ivanovna’s help had been brought back anew to life and activity, he felt it his duty to undertake the education of the son left on his hands. Having never before taken any interest in educational questions, Alexey Alexandrovitch devoted some time to the theoretical study of the subject. After reading several books on anthropology, education, and didactics, Alexey Alexandrovitch drew up a plan of education, and engaging the best tutor in Petersburg to superintend it, he set to work, and the subject continually absorbed him.CII

  * * *

  Tolstoy wrote Fet that he had been meaning to write him for five days; he had received Hamlet the horse, so “Where do I send the money?” He explained that they had “begun spring-summer life, and the house is full of guests and bustling. This summer life for me is exactly like a dream; something remains from my real winter life, but more some sort of vision, now pleasant, now unpleasant, from some pointlessness, not guided by the common judgment of the world.” As for the crops at Yasnaya Polyana and the region, “What a terrible summer. It’s terrible and pitiful for us to look at the forest, especially at the young shoots that have grown. Everything is destroyed. The buyers have already started to trade the wheat. It’s apparent it will be a bad year.”CIII