Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Note the “We’re writing”: Sofia was happy. The use of “we” was her habit when Tolstoy was writing and she was helping him. Through her recopying of it each night, she was making it easier for him to continue. This month of work would be, it seems, Tolstoy’s only pleasant memory of writing Anna Karenina:

  On June 25, 1902, Sergei Yakovlevich Elpat’evskiy accompanied Tolstoy, leaving Crimea:

  “Lev Nikolaevich asked me about the business with which I was much occupied at the time—about the system in Crimea for the poor visiting tubercular people—and excitedly spoke his feelings about this business and then suddenly unexpectedly asked: ‘How old are you?’ I answered forty-eight. To my amazement, his face right away became serious, even severe—and I can’t find another phrase—and with an envious glance, turning away, moodily said: “Forty-eight!… The best time of my work… I never so worked like that.” […] “I was writing Anna Karenina.”LVII

  Well? Secondhand testimony, twenty-five years after the fact… We can hope that it’s true.

  On or about December 10, he wrote to Fet to say that he would soon be in Moscow and would stay at the Paris Hotel on purpose in order to see him there. He mentioned: “My work goes well and is almost ready for the journal.”

  He continued in this satisfied mood and wrote his brother: “The largest of all of my writings was delayed for me, which is going successfully for me. I was unable to get going for a long time, but now it goes and it’s a very joyful feeling.”LVIII He also invited Sergei and his wife and twelve-year-old daughter for Christmas.

  Glad to be making progress with the book, Tolstoy was clear of his depression, it seems, and looking forward to hosting the Christmas festivities.

  The chapters from Part 6 that Sofia had copied she dated December 9 and 10. This means Part 5 was finished. Was it now packed and carried by Tolstoy when he went to Moscow? In Moscow, in the middle of December, he met the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who was twelve years his junior. Tchaikovsky admired Tolstoy so much that he had asked the head of the Moscow Conservatory, Nikolai Rubinstein, to set up a quartet ensemble in Tolstoy’s honor.

  Tchaikovsky remembered, “Maybe there was never a time in my life I was so flattered and touched in my authorial self-love as when L. N. Tolstoy, listening to the Andante of my first quartet and sitting beside me, filled up with tears.”LIX

  Having returned to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy wrote Tchaikovsky a lively letter:

  I am sending you the songs, dear Pyotr Ilich. I have looked through them again. They will be a wonderful treasure in your hands. But for goodness sake, work them up and use them in a Mozart-Haydn style, and not in a Beethoven-Schumann-Berlioz artificial style, striving for the unexpected. How much I left unsaid to you! I really said nothing of what I meant to say.

  Imagine that, Tolstoy tongue-tied.

  There was simply no time. I did enjoy myself. Indeed this last visit of mine to Moscow will remain one of my best memories.

  I have never received such a valuable reward for my literary works as that wonderful evening. And what a nice man Rubinstein is! […]

  I haven’t looked through your pieces yet [R. F. Christian footnotes this: “Tchaikovsky presented Tolstoy with some of his own compositions”], but when I settle down to them, I will give you my opinion—whether you need it or not—and give it boldly, because I have grown to love your talent. […]LX

  Tolstoy was not daunted by a genius in another artistic genre. Tchaikovsky, however, having received the “folk songs for him to arrange,” wrote appreciatively of Tolstoy and his writings but had to point out that he couldn’t manage to work with those particular songs. R. F. Christian explains: “Despite a favourable first impression, Tchaikovsky was offended by Tolstoy’s persistent and outspoken criticism of Beethoven and the two men never met again.”LXI

  * * *

  The second half of Part 5 of Anna Karenina came out in the December 1876 issue of the Russian Herald, which subscribers received on December 31.

  Readers had been without a new installment since April 29. They might have remembered that Levin’s brother Nikolai had just died and Kitty was pregnant. They might have wondered if Kitty and Levin were back on the estate now. And of course what was going on now with Anna and Vronsky? Anna was bored in Italy and she and Vronsky had returned to Russia. Now what?

  Like the arrival of a late bus, all the impatience and anxiety is forgiven when it finally rolls up to the curb.

  Here we are, serial readers of Anna Karenina, Chapters 21–33 of Part 5. We thank (or not) the servant who brings us the mail; Stiva Oblonsky, though friendly and warm with his valet Matvei, doesn’t thank him for bringing the mail to his desk. (And I’m sorry I’m imagining us as privileged idle people with servants. But if we were subscribers to the Russian Herald… we had servants.)

  Where does Tolstoy reopen the story? How are we going to spend our New Year’s Eve, 1876?

  With Karenin.

  In Part 5, Chapter 21, Tolstoy brings us back to two days after Anna and Vronsky left Russia. To Karenin’s own surprise, he cannot compose himself and there is no one to whom he can appeal for consolation. He feels himself a “laughing-stock.” Tolstoy opens up Karenin’s whole life, back to childhood, to explain to us why Karenin cannot find help from a friend or relative. He was orphaned at age ten when his mother died. Raised by a politically well-connected uncle, he and his brother went into government service. And only now, with Anna certainly gone out of his life forever, does Tolstoy tell us how and why he got married in the first place:

  While he was governor of a province, Anna’s aunt, a wealthy provincial lady, had thrown him—middle-aged as he was, though young for a governor—with her niece, and had succeeded in putting him in such a position that he had either to declare himself or to leave the town. Alexey Alexandrovitch was not long in hesitation. There were at the time as many reasons for the step as against it, and there was no overbalancing consideration to outweigh his invariable rule of abstaining when in doubt. But Anna’s aunt had through a common acquaintance insinuated that he had already compromised the girl, and that he was in honor bound to make her an offer. He made the offer, and concentrated on his betrothed and his wife all the feeling of which he was capable.LXII

  How curious! He was apparently bamboozled into marrying an extraordinary twenty-year-old. Though by nature emotionally detached, Karenin threw himself into the relationship as far as he could. And there, in his intimacy with Anna, he found himself at home: “The attachment he felt to Anna precluded in his heart every need of intimate relations with others. And now among all his acquaintances he had not one friend.” Can we feel no sympathy for him?

  It’s difficult to imagine reading this a hundred and forty years ago. It’s difficult to imagine reading this without the knowledge that poor Anna is going to kill herself at least partly because Karenin and others will fold up all their decency into stony hearts. Can I go back a hundred and forty years? Even if I could, I know it took me many readings to become at all sympathetic to Karenin. Because the information Tolstoy provides us here is fascinating, it only makes me wish even more that Tolstoy had also written a novel of Anna and Karenin’s first years together.

  Finally, the first chapter of this installment clears the way for the invasion or infection of Karenin’s new friend, who will represent herself as the moral standard-bearer but whom we see as the representative of high-society hypocrisy: “Of his women friends, foremost amongst them Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Alexey Alexandrovitch never thought. All women, simply as women, were terrible and distasteful to him.”LXIII

  In Chapter 22, Lidia, who is in fact “terrible and distasteful,” comes as a friend to his rescue. She will not be deterred:

  […] she gave Alexey Alexandrovitch moral support in the consciousness of her love and respect for him, and still more, as it was soothing to her to believe, in that she almost turned him to Christianity—that is, from an indifferent and apathetic believer she turned him into an arde
nt and steadfast adherent of the new interpretation of Christian doctrine, which had been gaining ground of late in Petersburg. It was easy for Alexey Alexandrovitch to believe in this teaching. Alexey Alexandrovitch, like Lidia Ivanovna indeed, and others who shared their views, was completely devoid of vividness of imagination, that spiritual faculty in virtue of which the conceptions evoked by the imagination become so vivid that they must needs be in harmony with other conceptions, and with actual fact.LXIV

  Two people “completely devoid of imagination” take over the education of poor Seryozha. What a comedown for the boy. Had Anna been able to see Lidia in action, she would have absconded with her son. In Chapter 23, Tolstoy reviews Lidia’s short miserably unhappy marriage and explains what seems to be her hobby of high-society busybodying and her unattractive predilection of “falling in love.” More than twenty years later, Chekhov would make such a predilection comic and sympathetic in “The Darling.”

  Tolstoy, however, makes it impossible to sympathize with Lidia.

  In Chapter 24 Tolstoy shows us the gossiping at a St. Petersburg high-society party about both Karenin and Lidia and Anna and Vronsky. Lidia finds Karenin at the party to break the news to him that Anna and Vronsky are in town. Back at home in Chapter 25, Karenin is inclined to let Anna see Seryozha; Lidia persuades him not to permit it, and she writes Anna a perfectly calculated wounding note.

  Chapters 26–30 free us from the high-society snakepit and bring us to Seryozha himself in the series of chapters that brought Sofia, recopying them, and every reader thereafter to tears. We see Karenin’s lack of tact with Seryozha, and how earnestly Seryozha tries to be the boy Karenin unimaginatively imagines that he should be. Seryozha is on the eve of his ninth birthday. Meanwhile, we see the awkwardness of Vronsky and Anna’s life in the capital. He can make his way anywhere, but Anna is shunned by her former friends. In Chapters 29–30, despite Lidia’s denial of her request to visit, Anna, bearing toys, goes to the house to see Seryozha on his birthday. There is bustle and confusion among the servants and tutors; we and the servants weep with sympathy, and Anna flees upon Karenin’s appearance at Seryozha’s room.

  Tolstoy keeps reminding us about understanding a situation.

  People understand or they don’t; when they do they are with God. Understanding a situation is godliness.

  In that silent observing way that Serozha has in the paragraph I’m about to quote, Tolstoy is showing us how God would see Anna’s situation, how God would see Anna, and that she is indeed not guilty:

  How often afterward she thought of words she might have said. But now she did not know how to say it, and could say nothing. [This poignant moment begins with the thoughts that Anna will have; this is interesting because Tolstoy in narrative mode almost never gives us a glimpse of the future.] But Seryozha knew all she wanted to say to him. He understood that she was unhappy and loved him. He understood even what the nurse had whispered. He had caught the words “always at nine o’clock,” and he knew that this was said of his father, and that his father and mother could not meet. That he understood, but one thing he could not understand—why there should be a look of dread and shame in her face?… She was not in fault, but she was afraid of him and ashamed of something. He would have liked to put a question that would have set at rest this doubt, but he did not dare; he saw that she was miserable, and he felt for her.LXV

  All right, I’m pausing here, with this moment, to make my case—my case, to Tolstoy, my hero, and it’s his own case: “You believe in the moral vision of children, and here it is. This child Seryozha, who sees with love and understanding, he is the ultimate judge of Anna, not society or ‘God’ or you in your other moods—true or false?”

  In Chapter 31 Anna is deflated, and so are we. She can’t deny to herself that she feels little for her daughter compared to what she feels for Seryozha, and she knows that she is a pariah in St. Petersburg. She tells Vronsky they need to leave. Part 5 ends with Anna peeved with Vronsky for his privilege of having his personal connections open to him. She seems to have decided to burn all bridges back to society by going, against all sensible advice, to the theater performance of a famous singer. Vronsky is angry at her for deliberating attracting the hypocritical outrage at her shamelessness in appearing there. They retreat to Vronsky’s country estate.

  Reading these chapters is how I hope I would have spent my New Year’s Eve before entering 1877.

  11 The End of Serialization: January–May 1877

  … and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and was also sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand her.

  —Anna KareninaI

  There were plenty of family and friends at Yasnaya Polyana for Christmas, which in Russia then and now follows New Year’s. “Never again!” may have been what Tolstoy and Sofia said to each other as they saw off the Golokhvastovs shortly after Christmas. Sofia wrote her sister on January 4, 1877: “The Golokhvastovs’ presence made everyone gloomy.”

  To Strakhov, who had returned to Petersburg, Tolstoy wrote: “The Golokhvastov nightmare has only now begun to let up.”II Tolstoy wrote his brother Sergei, who hadn’t come for the holidays: “Though the noise—tree, dances, mummers—was a lot, it was needed for the children. The children study well, the teachers are good, except the Russian teacher, who, it seems you didn’t see. He is very good but he drinks.” Tolstoy himself was fine. “I’m writing my A K, and dreaming about a new one.” To the pride of all of us Anthony Trollope fans, he added: “The Prime Minister is excellent.”III Indeed, it is. In one shocking incident, the complicated, ambitious villain (a once admired acquaintance of the prime minister’s wife), commits suicide by stepping in front of a speeding train.IV

  Though Tolstoy was in good health for the moment, he was anxious about his brother and concerned about Sofia, who was about to leave to see a doctor in St. Petersburg about her shortness of breath; her brother Stepan, who had been with them over the holidays, would travel with her there on January 14. “Every day, especially at night when I lie in bed,” Tolstoy continued in his letter to Sergei, “I torment myself by thoughts about you, that I know nothing about you.” But Tolstoy couldn’t visit Sergei right now because of “family; the year and work (writing) prevent me. Write me, please, about yourself and yours, in detail, and I will write you right away. Sonya is so unwell. She skates and puts up the Christmas tree and sometimes is merry, but I see that her health is undergoing misery. She coughs, she complains about pain in her side, she does not sleep nights and sweats at night.”V

  Writing to Alexandrine, Tolstoy anxiously explained, “My wife is going to Petersburg to see her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in three years. I remain here with the kids. If it weren’t for that, I would be with my wife with you. Right now, she will be alone and she will tell you everything from me and from her. One thing that she won’t tell you that I would is about my growing and growing worry about her health from the time of the deaths of our last children.”VI

  Tolstoy wrote Fet and seemed to be wanting to make connections: “I always speak about you with Strakhov because we three are related by soul.”VII

  In his letter to Strakhov, Tolstoy confessed: “I still can’t get into that state of happy work as I was in before them [the Golokhvastovs]. But it seems that if no one interferes, I’ll finish, I hope, in one period of work to clear out space for a new work, which keeps more and more asking for it.”VIII Finally Tolstoy mentioned to Strakhov that “in the Decem issue of the Russian Herald there are errors [in Anna Karenina], but not very big.”IX He didn’t identify these minor errors.

  Tolstoy never described himself in the moment of writing as happy, but in the Strakhov letter he recalled “that state of happy work” from just a few weeks before. Was writing so serious a business for him that it precluded happiness? Could it activate only satisfaction or disgus
t? A job that required physical exertion like mowing certainly gave joy to Levin and Tolstoy. They were happier probably than the peasants they accompanied in the labor, just as amateur athletes can seem to take more pleasure in their sport than professionals. Tolstoy never wrote a passage about an artist or writer taking joy in the production of a work in the way that he described Levin’s ecstatic mowing. For Tolstoy, making art didn’t activate a joyful physical consciousness, and, as far as he could see, it didn’t for other people, either. But what about Anna’s moody portrait-painter Mikhailov? Does he ever experience “that state of happy work”? Back in Part 5, on the morning of Vronsky and Anna’s first visit, Mikhailov is caught up by a painting he has been struggling with:

  Never did he work with such fervor and success as when things went ill with him, and especially when he quarreled with his wife. “Oh! damn them all!” he thought as he went on working. He was making a sketch for the figure of a man in a violent rage. A sketch had been made before, but he was dissatisfied with it. “No, that one was better… where is it?” He went back to his wife, and scowling, and not looking at her, asked his eldest little girl, where was that piece of paper he had given them? The paper with the discarded sketch on it was found, but it was dirty, and spotted with candle-grease. Still, he took the sketch, laid it on his table, and, moving a little away, screwing up his eyes, he fell to gazing at it. All at once he smiled and gesticulated gleefully.