Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  In those thousands of pages written by the person she regarded as the supreme author in the world, there was something she wanted to find out:

  I was very excited, and experienced a wealth of impressions. But I realised I could never write that biography of him as I had intended, for I could never be impartial; I avidly search his diaries for any reference to love, and am so tormented by jealousy that I can no longer see anything clearly. I shall try to do it, though. I am afraid of my resentment of Lyovochka for leaving me just when I loved him so much, but in my soul I blame him constantly for causing me so much worry and misery. It seems odd that although he is always so anxious that I should not fall ill, he should torture me by going away at a time when my health was so poor. I now cannot sleep for worry and eat practically nothing. […] God help me survive, perhaps for several more days. “What is he punishing me for?” I keep asking myself. “Why, for loving him so much.” And now all my happiness is in pieces, and I feel very bitter that my good humour and my spontaneous loving feelings have once again been crushed.XXIII

  Her anxiety (“What is he punishing me for?”) was on a par with Anna’s when Vronsky goes away to the elections, but Sofia would in fact dabble at writing up a short biography for the next few years. The Tolstoys’ daughter Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya’s biography of him is impressive for how moderately toned and impartial it is. Sofia knew herself well enough to know that she could not write like that. (A few years before, when Tolstoy was on the steppe in July, he wrote and told her, with fondness, that he couldn’t read her letters without crying: “I tremble all over, and my heart beats {fast}. And you write whatever comes into your head, while for me every word is significant […].”XXIV) She let herself remember as the memories returned and as she created those memories. She didn’t trouble herself to check all her own materials for facts or to review her own diaries for her actual contemporary responses.

  The next day’s diary: “I had a telegram from him in Syzran today saying he will be home the day after tomorrow in the morning. I suddenly felt more cheerful, and the house was all happiness and light, the children’s lessons went well, and they were adorable. […] My heart leaps when I think that the day after tomorrow Lyovochka will be coming back, lighting up the house.”XXV (He also sent a telegram from Syzran on the 17th, announcing that he was shipping the horses.)

  In her memoir, Sofia gilds the page:

  Lev Nikolaevich returned home in two-and-a-half weeks, more in love {with me} than ever and feeling completely refreshed in his soul.XXVI

  As she was writing that sentence, probably decades after the event, I imagine she simply wanted to believe that he had been more in love with her than ever. If Tolstoy had actually told her so, she would have happily declared it in her diary that he had. She acknowledged that his adoring love for her was going to end very soon, so perhaps she needed to convince herself that the perverse downturn of his feelings happened at love’s very height.

  As usual on his return from trips, Tolstoy wrote his friends, but he was deflated, despite Sofia’s recollected impression that he was “completely refreshed in his soul.”

  Tolstoy told Golokhvastov, “After an extended and wearying trip, I’m tired and not fully well. It’s my intention to sit at home, not leaving, and make up for the lost time of summer—that is, heartily work a lot. My wife was only waiting for my return and in a few days, that is, around the 27th, leaves for Moscow for a few days to look for and choose a governess for our daughters. Small children, small worries, big children…”XXVII

  He wrote to tell Strakhov only that he was back home and that indeed all was well with him and the family.XXVIII To Fet, however, on the same day or so, he confessed: “I returned well, but became terrible, and having arrived got a cold and I lie at home in low spirits with no strength to do anything. My trip was very interesting. I took a rest from all that Serbian thoughtlessness.”XXIX (Tolstoy was referring to the nationalistic rallying for Russian intervention in the war in Serbia; that intervention would lead to Vronsky’s grief-inspired participation in it in 1877.) As for the horse Gunib, Tolstoy paid one hundred rubles to an office in Fet’s name.

  Over the next three weeks there are no extant letters, but we know that Tolstoy could not get himself back to writing—and completing—Anna Karenina. Sofia complained on October 10 about this to her sister Tatyana that he “still hasn’t taken up the writing… he reads a lot and takes walks, and thinks, and gathers himself to write.”XXX

  We remember that he wanted to read the books that Karenin would have read in order to educate Seryozha, but otherwise it’s hard to see how reading could help him with the novel. Or is it that reading helped him turn the inner wheels?

  Sofia remembered that his “main activity this winter was still the writing of Anna Karenina, and somewhere I have recorded that in October [not true, according to her own diary, as she recorded there that he didn’t start writing again until mid-November] he wrote the chapter about Aleksej Aleksandrovich Karenin’s relationship to Lidija Ivanovna [she names this detail in her November 20 diary entry]. I recall how pleased he was at the humour he had infused into their relationship. I also recall the affection with which he wrote the scene of Anna Karenina’s meeting with her child, and I wept as I transcribed this chapter.”XXXI

  What this memory proves again, unfortunately, is that she wrote at least some parts of My Life without even opening her own diary, and specifically that she hadn’t even reread the small special section that she had dedicated to Tolstoy’s writing activities. She ignored or couldn’t find the world’s best source, her own “somewhere I have recorded” diary.

  Let me try to forgive her carelessness, just as I will need to be forgiven many more offenses and carelessnesses in this biographical study.

  So what did Tolstoy think or say when Sofia told him that she had cried transcribing that tearful scene of Anna and Seryozha’s last reunion? She was at liberty to tell him so, even if there were times that he ignored her suggestions and regrets. She loved this transcribing job, despite that recopying had given her a pain in the right shoulder the previous year. While Strakhov was the first reader of the complete book, she was the first reader of most of the drafts. She took in the novel through her head, heart, and hand.

  In her “The Teachers’ Seminary” chapter, Sofia recalled: “In our Tula […] Lev Nikolaevich wanted to found a university in bast shoes, as he himself put it. The future teachers trained in this seminary were not to leave the peasant milieu—they were to spend their summers ploughing, sowing, cutting grain, etc., and to teach and work on their own further self-education in the wintertime. But this was a dream, one of many which Lev Nikolaevich had in various areas of life.”XXXII

  In mid-October, Tolstoy was preparing rooms and furniture for these courses and had found a teacher who had graduated from a university.XXXIII (This project was refused funding by the Tula government on December 12, but by then his heart for it seems to have disappeared anyway.)

  He resumed correspondence by writing a note to Fet; he praised a new verse by Fet (“I retold it twice and each time my voice broke off from tears”), and took care of some horse business, and reaffirmed their friendship: “It’s amazing how closely we’re related by mind and heart.”XXXIV

  In “The Blind Woman and a Trip to Moscow,” Sofia recalled how Tolstoy had ordered for her “a black velvet cloak to be made out of the light kidskin material which Lev Nikolaevich had brought me back from Orenburg. I wrote my sister that covering the cloak with velvet was something Levochka insisted on, even though this year we had significant losses […] and the only income we had was from Lev Nikolaevich’s writings.”XXXV Sometime in late October, Tolstoy asked Nagornov to go “if you have my money” and pay “Madam Reno on Nikitskiy Boulevard,” and have the coat sent.XXXVI The coat must not have been sent, because Sofia later wrote that Tolstoy had to go to Moscow himself to get it.

  Tolstoy heard from Strakhov: “I imagine that you’re now busy with the en
d of Anna Karenina or even some other thing just as serious and very important.”XXXVII We know that discreet and tactful Strakhov did not believe that there was anything in the world that Tolstoy could be writing or working on as “serious” or “important” as Anna Karenina. Strakhov went on:

  About Anna Karenina the talk here doesn’t stop. Everyone waits and scolds you. I admit I firmly hoped that it would appear in the Oct installment; yesterday I found out that it’s not. What does this mean? Is Katkov being cunning? He expressed the opinion to me that now there is no counting on finishing the novel this year, that it would be better to put off the end to the next.XXXVIII

  According to the Jubilee edition, Tolstoy was in Moscow November 8–10,XXXIX though Sofia placed him there just a bit later:

  Lev Nikolaevich first gave me money for the cloak, as well as the clothing and shoes for me and the children I had obtained in Moscow, and then later, on the 11th of November, he himself went to Moscow for the same purpose. He bought himself a black bearskin fur coat for 450 rubles, and ordered shoes and other clothing. Lev Nikolaevich was buying his clothes then from the best Moscow tailor, Ayet, saying he had no time to deal with poor tailors, with all the measuring, re-sewing, etc., and how it was much more profitable to have clothes made by a good tailor, since they will last much longer.XL

  Sofia continued her recollection (and now contradicting her own earlier statement that he began writing again in October):

  After returning from Moscow Lev Nikolaevich was restless for a while and kept saying: “My mind’s asleep.” But then all at once something seemed to blossom forth in him, and he began writing feverishly. Once he said to me:

  “I was looking at the white silk band on the sleeve of my dressing gown, which is very beautiful. I thought about how people are led to think up all sorts of patterns, embroideries and trimmings… A whole world in a woman’s life. And I realised that that could be something lovable… And, of course, right now my thoughts are on my novel, Anna Karenina. And this gave me a whole chapter, where Anna, as a lonely woman, is bored, since all the women have rejected her.”XLI

  An interesting statement, and one that has often been quoted. But it cannot have been taken down verbatim. That is, he would not have had to explain to Sofia which novel he was referring to. Again, Sofia did not fuss about exactitude, though this time there is no diary entry concerning it to contradict her.

  Gusev believes that “Tolstoy’s bad mood was even intensified by the political situation taking shape in the country.”XLII Granted, the political situation affected his mood; but while he in fact said it inspired his trip (“I went to Moscow to find out about the war”XLIII), we also know he went shopping.

  Tolstoy’s response to Strakhov’s last two letters (October 12 and November 4) was written November 12–13:

  You are a true friend, dear Nikolay Nikolaevich. Despite my silence and the silence on your important letter, you all the same gladden me with your letters. I cannot express how grateful I am to you for the last, not deserved by me, of your letters. In order to explain and justify my silence I ought to speak about myself.

  Having come from Samara and Orenburg now two months ago (I had a miraculous trip), I thought that I would take up my work, finish the work given me—finishing the novel—and take up a new thing; and suddenly instead of all this, ever since I have done nothing.XLIV I am spiritually asleep and cannot wake up. Ill health, depressed.XLV Despair for my powers. What fate has predestined for me, I do not know, but to live through my life without respect for it—and respect for it comes to me only through work of a certain kind—is agonizing.XLVI […]

  The last question of yours in our philosophical exchange was: what is evil? I am able to answer that for myself. I am going to explain this answer and will give it to you another time, I hope at Christmas.XLVII

  He also wrote Fet, regretting their missed connection in Moscow, and added, “Pity me two things. (1) A son of bitch driver in Samara drove the stallions almost 15 miles and wanting to take a shortcut, he got Gunib drowned in a marsh. [Perhaps Sofia did not tell him of her suspicions about the driver?] (2) I sleep and cannot write. I despise myself for my idleness and can’t get myself to take up other business.”XLVIII

  He answered Ya. P. Polonskiy, “an old acquaintance,” granting permission to a woman Polonskiy knew who had translated Tolstoy’s 1859 novella Family Happiness into French: “I’m often addressed in letters by translators, and as I don’t understand why it [my permission] is needed, I never answer.”XLIX (While contemporary French and English novels were being translated and published in the Russian Herald, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were still unknown except by hearsay in France and England.) Tolstoy mentioned that for sixteen years he hadn’t been in St. Petersburg, where Polonskiy was, and hoped never to be there again. (He in fact went again.)

  Tolstoy’s next letter to Strakhov was unusually cheerful as, to Tolstoy’s relief and ours, he had resumed, finally, Anna Karenina:

  I’ve come to life a little, dear Nikolay Nikolaich, and have stopped despising myself, and so I feel like writing to you. “That’s a true friend,” I couldn’t help saying to myself when I saw your handwriting on your last letter enclosing Polonsky’s. […]

  Literature is a terrible abomination, except for its highest manifestations—true scholarly work without any bias, philosophical impartiality of thought and artistic creativity which, I flatter myself with proud hope, has descended on me these last few days. […]

  While his definition is cranky (“Literature is a terrible abomination, except for its highest manifestations”), it is also a recognition—for once—of what he was doing in Anna Karenina, obviously one of literature’s “highest manifestations,” though he only gives himself credit for the little he had most recently written. Meanwhile…

  What do you say about Christmas? I shall await your reply anxiously. Only you will have to get up on a chair and decorate the Christmas tree and tie ribbons on to sweets.

  It seems we can’t avoid the Golokhvastovs, and my wife has invited them […] to come for Christmas. […] He’s nice, but she’s intolerable; she is literature and a bit of The Citizen [for which publication Strakhov was writing], only without the Christianity. […]L

  We can imagine Tolstoy grumbling to himself in anticipation of Ol’ga Golokhvastova’s visit and wonder how he was going to manage to talk civilly with her.

  In “Various Notes for Future Reference,” dated November 20 but remembered in her memoir as October, Sofia wrote:

  All this autumn he kept saying, “My brain is asleep.” But suddenly, about a week ago, something within him seemed to blossom and he started working cheerfully again—and he seems quite satisfied with his efforts, too. He silently sat down at this desk this morning, without even drinking his coffee, and wrote and wrote for more than an hour, revising the chapter dealing with Anna’s arrival in St. Petersburg and Aleks. Aleks.’s relations with Lidia Ivanovna.LI

  The next day, this time in the section of her diary titled “Notes on Remarks Made by L. N. Tolstoy on His Writing,” Sofia wrote:

  He came up to me and said: “This bit of writing is so tedious!”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, you see, I’ve said that Vronsky and Anna were staying in the same hotel room, but that’s not possible. In St. Petersburg at least, they’d have to take rooms on different floors. So as you see, this means that all the scenes and conversations will have to take place in two separate places, and all the various visitors will have to see them separately. So it will all have to be altered.”LII

  This discussion with Sofia about his resolving of a scene is a rare occurrence. But little mistakes like this particularly vexed Tolstoy. We remember that Strakhov had to mollify him after Tolstoy got frustrated with two little errors in the depiction of Levin and Kitty’s wedding.

  Strakhov was Tolstoy’s and our man on the ground, reporting live for now from St. Petersburg on November 28, but gratefully accepting Tolstoy’s invitation
to spend Christmas at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy’s state of mind alarmed him:

  Your first letter saddened me, the second didn’t at all console me. What agitation is in you! From an abstract point of view I ought to have been gladdened because this agitation of effort promises good fruit. But, knowing your delicate constitution, I understand that you are in a moment of depression, and this situation torments me. Really, while a person lives he cannot be at peace? You, famous, independent, surrounded by a charming family and even having perfected work that will forever remain great—how can you speak about the moments when your life is not worth respect? Such moments cannot be, ought not to be. And in good moments you yourself, of course, feel how little basis your woe has in your bad moments.LIII

  Tolstoy’s note in reply to these generous, kind words was unusually reassuring: he reconfirmed Strakhov’s visit over Christmas and New Year, despite the presence of others: “Your barrel of honey won’t be spoiled for me by a spoonful of Golokhvastovs. […] I, thank God, have been working already for some time and so—have a calm spirit.”LIV

  He also wrote Fet, for the most part about a poem of Fet’s, which was “quite exceptionally good,” and about Alexei Tolstoy’s poems, which were “terrible. I opened him in various places, each worse than the last. For example, a picture of night: ‘the steps do not creak in the vestibule.’ Why not have said: ‘the pigs do not grunt in the pig-sty’? And all in the same vein.”LV

  Sofia wrote her sister Tatyana: “We’re writing Anna Karenina finally now, that is, without interruption. Levochka, enlivened and focused, each day adds a new chapter. I with effort recopy, and now even under this letter lie ready pages of a new chapter, which he wrote yesterday. Katkov telegraphed three days ago, begging to be sent some chapters for the December issue, and Levochka himself is bringing the novel in a few days to Moscow.”LVI