Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  What did Sofia expect us to think when she quoted us this last sentence? The “bed” has been inserted by the 21st-century editors of My Life, but Sofia had to have expected us to understand that Tolstoy was saying that he was missing her sexually. In her frankness or lack of embarrassment she was so different from her husband, who could never catch himself thinking of sex without later chastising himself. Is it overstepping to say that she was proud of his appetite for her? And wasn’t it obvious anyway? So many children, and so much desire on his part for more of them.

  But why was Sofia reluctant to quote the entire letter? She only mentioned her husband’s shame at getting angry with Tanya; didn’t his confession of the fight and Tanya’s notes on the letter show that father and daughter had reconciled, that he had done his parental work with love? She withheld giving him his due credit here. As for the money, another common marital issue—what did he say? Go ahead, honey, spend! Take your time; no need to rush back. We’re okay! She didn’t include that, either.

  Day three, January 17, produced a reasonably shorter note, as he didn’t even know if she would get it:

  I write you, dear friend, even though this letter won’t reach you if you have left as you wished. If you’re staying, it will calm you. Everything is fine. The children are well and have done nothing naughty and they study well. They went out for a walk today but didn’t skate—too cold. I didn’t go out all day, mostly because today I feel myself better than the previous days and I worked all morning—I finished the corrections [he was doing corrections of the first half of Part 6 of the novel for the January issue].

  Farewell, darling. About the children especially, don’t worry, and when we’re both home, we’ll be busy with each other […].

  But now there’s nothing more to do than worry about them. We haven’t received letters from you.

  It’s now Monday, 7 in the evening. Right now I’m going to Yasenka.

  Yesterday I played lotto with all of them.

  Tanya is running the house.XXXI

  Sofia could not have complained about Tolstoy’s communications to her during her trip. She returned to Yasnaya Polyana on January 22.

  In Sofia’s “Back at Yasnaya,”XXXII she described an incident in which Seryozha had a concussion skating on a Yasnaya Polyana pond on January 23. Having received the news, she writes: “Lev Nikolaevich and I ran down the allee {preshpekt}, holding hands.”

  As I’ve pointed out, it’s not clear in My Life how or when Sofia worked from her diaries and letters. Was she referring to materials at her desk that she had collected and gathered? Was she infusing into her recollections a mention from a letter? (There’s no surviving diary entry here.) We don’t know; we know that she wrote that she remembered the two of them running down that beautiful wide path from the house while holding hands. It’s a wonderful image: it collects in one picture a concerned father and mother, a loving husband and wife.

  Sergei L’vovich Tolstoy remembered the accident this way:

  Tania, Ilya, and I swept several paths on the snow-covered pond and on 1/23 chased one another on skates.… trying to elude Tania, I butted into her and we both fell down. She was not hurt, but I struck my head so violently against the ice that I lost consciousness and began to have convulsions. I was carried home unconscious, ice-packs were applied to my head and a leech behind the ear. When I woke up after 24 hours I had completely lost my memory which, however, I recovered after a short time.XXXIII

  Tolstoy’s letter of January 24 to Dmitry D’yakov crisply narrated the previous day’s incident. “You can imagine,” he wrote, “that yesterday, Sunday, the children went skating, but we stayed back.” I wonder what Tolstoy expected his old friend D’yakov to “imagine”; the first thing I imagine, with the kids out of the house after his wife’s healthy return, and Dr. Botkin’s assurance that she was fit to get pregnant again, is that they would have been cavorting in bed. Tolstoy continued: “I go to the door, I meet the puffing breathless Mademoiselle Gachet. ‘Serge has fallen. He was brought to the little house.’ ‘Which? How?’ ‘I don’t know anything.’XXXIV I run along the Proshpekt and meet the Russian teacher. ‘What? How?’ ‘He was brought off without sign of life,’ and he continued past. Sonya caught up to me [here’s where he should mention their holding hands] and we ran to the worker-hut. When we came in, he looked around but didn’t remember anything. He was brought home and a doctor was sent for. He woke up, had leeches applied, and today we’ve calmed down. He remembers everything and has become almost completely well. Maybe you can imagine yourself our terror and how bad this was for Sonya’s nerves.”XXXV

  His own peace of mind restored at least, he encouraged the D’yakovs to come for a visit.

  That very day he also wrote to Alexandrine, but to her he mentioned nothing of the accident. To her, he expressed his thanks for her help to Sofia, and then, unusually, discussed Alexandrine’s praise of Anna Karenina and why her words made him squirm: “it’s very pleasant what you write about the last installment of my novel. I can’t say I’m unfeeling to the praise, but with reservations. The first praise, as yours was, when I myself don’t yet know whether what I’ve written is decent or very bad, I’m very joyful by the praise and I don’t reproach myself; but when I’m praised a lot I begin to be moved by myself and make myself disgusting to me. I walk in the wood alone and I praise everything as myself. I haven’t yet reached this, thank God, but I could.”XXXVI

  This confident man didn’t like the effect that admiration had on him.XXXVII If his head got turned, he lost his ability to commune with his beloved woods. He spent the walk thinking about himself, and he didn’t like that.XXXVIII

  * * *

  When Tolstoy wrote Strakhov to thank him for his kindnesses to Sofia while she was in Petersburg, he also wanted to discuss St. Petersburg’s response to the December issue:

  […] The success of the latest installment of Anna Karenina also, I confess, gave me pleasure. I hadn’t expected it, and really I’m surprised that such an ordinary and insignificant thing should be liked, and still more than that, being convinced that such an insignificant thing is liked, I haven’t started to write any old thing at random, but have been making a choice which is almost incomprehensible even to me. I say this frankly, because it’s to you, and especially because, having sent off the proofs for the January issue, I have faltered over the February issue,XXXIX and am only just getting back into my stride mentally.XL

  Was he modestly making light (“really I’m surprised that such an ordinary and insignificant thing should be liked”) or was he, from self-consciousness, ducking Strakhov’s praise and reports of others’ praise? Aw, shucks! But we couldn’t have blamed Tolstoy if he had said, You’re right, Nikolai Nikolaevich, Anna Karenina is the most marvelous thing a writer’s ever done!

  To continue with his letter to Strakhov: Tolstoy turned to the topic of his former friend, the author Ivan Turgenev. Turgenev’s faults seemed to inspire Tolstoy’s thoughts about how lying betrays art. Tolstoy admitted that he hadn’t read Turgenev’s latest novel, but he had read everything else by him and could guess:

  I haven’t read the Turgenev [Virgin Soil], but judging from all I hear, I sincerely regret that this spring of pure and excellent water has been polluted by such trash. If he had simply recalled in detail a day of his and described it, everyone would have been full of admiration.

  Turgenev was so good an author that he didn’t need to be clever. He didn’t need to invent. He didn’t need to lie:

  However trite it is to say so, there is only one negative quality needed for everything in life, particularly in art—not to lie.

  In life, lying is nasty, but it doesn’t destroy life, it smears it over with its nastiness, but the truth of life is still there underneath, because somebody is always wanting something, something is always giving pain or pleasure; but in art, lying destroys the whole chain which links phenomena, and everything crumbles to dust.

  That train of Tolstoy’s thought
abruptly stopped there; had it occurred to him because of what he was writing in Anna Karenina? Wherever it had come from, he checked himself and resumed a conversational manner with Strakhov: “What are you doing, i.e., writing? Send me your Citizen articles. God grant you the leisure and inclination to write.”

  Tolstoy was in a new good mood. I imagine it was because he knew for sure, maybe for the first time, that he was going to get Anna Karenina across the finish line. He could encourage his friend about writing rather than rue his own efforts. He was busy with the job and, it seems, had abandoned that daunting scholarly pursuit he had been on while depressed:

  I haven’t for a long time been so indifferent to philosophical questions as this year, and I flatter myself with the hope that this is good for me. I very much want to finish what I’m doing quickly and begin something new.

  Goodbye; my wife sends her regards.XLI

  To be over the “philosophical questions” seems to mean that he had crawled out of the quagmire of depression described in Confession.

  Writing fiction resisted him more than philosophy or pedagogy, because he had to create something, not just analyze it, explain it, argue it. The greatest literary artist in the world could not perfect art. He couldn’t, as he did with ideas about education, sex, war, vegetarianism, farming, figure it all out, slam the door on his predecessors, and say, “I got it!” Fiction, as it resisted him and forced him to be creative, was indeed good for him.

  * * *

  The January issue of the Russian Herald was published on February 1. The corresponding chapters in Part 6 for us book readers are 1–15. I’ve already laid out the briefest of summaries of the second half of Part 6 (see above, page 304), which Tolstoy was still working on, but here we’ll retreat: Dolly has brought her children with her to Levin’s estate for the summer. Kitty’s family overwhelms Levin: “And though he liked them all, he rather regretted his own Levin world and ways, which were smothered by this influx of the ‘Shtcherbatsky element,’ as he called it to himself. Of his own relations there stayed with him only Sergey Ivanovitch, but he too was a man of the Koznishev and not the Levin stamp, so that the Levin spirit was utterly obliterated.”XLII The visitors include Varenka, Kitty’s saintly friend from abroad, and, because Kitty is pregnant, Kitty’s mother. Chapter 2 dramatizes the jam-making dispute between Kitty’s family and Levin’s longtime family housekeeper, Agafya. In Chapter 3, Kitty and Levin have their own private discussion. Chapters 4–5 show us the mushroom hunt, where Sergei Koznishev resolves to propose to Varenka and then, to his and Varenka’s relief, does not do so. Chapter 6 brings Stiva and his handsome, bumbling friend Veslovsky to Levin’s estate. Levin is almost immediately jealous of Veslovsky, and in Chapter 7 Kitty tries to quiet Levin’s jealousy. Chapters 8–13 take in Stiva, Veslovsky, and Levin’s hunting trip. Veslovsky botches the hunting and spoils the pleasure for Levin until the morning, when Oblonsky and Veslovsky are sleeping off a night of carousing with the peasants. Only then do Levin and his dog Laska have time to themselves, and Levin has success shooting birds. Back home at the estate, in Chapters 14–15, Levin grows so jealous of Veslovsky that, despite knowing he is exposing his jealousy to mockery and violating good manners, he commands Veslovsky to leave.

  The installment ends: No Anna. No Vronsky. No Karenin.

  Strakhov wrote ecstatically to Tolstoy about these chapters: “This part of the novel has left me with lively pleasure, not only upon reading it, but then in those arguments and conversations that come up every day.… But do you know, there’s not one part of Karenina that has had such success as this. Your worshipers not only weep and grow excited, but they can’t find the words to express all the fine charm and mastery of these idyllic scenes.… The successes are really unbelievable, crazy.”XLIII

  Probably before he received that letter, Tolstoy wrote Strakhov on February 3 or 4 and in a teasing tone critiqued one of Strakhov’s Citizen essays: “I see in your article a study, excerpts from that work you’re writing; but for an article about spiritualism, you did what often I sin doing: from the desire to say too much you weaken what you wanted to say.”XLIV

  Tolstoy, still in his new forward mode, and seeing the end of his odyssey with Anna, tried again to patch up his friendship with his conventionally religious relative Alexandrine. He had survived his depression and was more temperately addressing her about an agitating topic:

  [… ] the problem of religion is exactly the same for me as the one facing a drowning man—the problem of what to clutch at to save himself from the imminent death which he senses with his whole being. For a couple of years now religion has seemed to offer the possibility of salvation. […] the point is that as soon as I clutch at the plank I go down with it. Somehow or other je surnage [I float] as long as I don’t seize hold of the plank. If you ask me what stops me I won’t tell you, because I would be afraid to shake your faith […] and so I won’t tell you, but will rejoice for you and for all those who are sailing in the boat in which I am not a passenger. I have a friend, Strakhov, a learned man and one of the best people I know. We are very much alike in our religious views: we are both convinced that philosophy has nothing to offer and that it’s impossible to live without religion, but we cannot believe. This summer we intend to go to the Optina Monastery. There I shall explain to the monks all the reasons why I cannot believe.XLV

  And what of Anna’s belief? How is it that Tolstoy’s heroine is seemingly not at all religious? “In Variant No. 22 (Mss. No. 17) are crossed out lines […]. Feeling herself powerless to help her brother in his family estrangement, she tells him: ‘There is One who knows our hearts, who can help us,’ and later is said, ‘Oblonsky grew silent. He knew this bombastic somewhat cloying excited tone of religiousness in his sister and was never able to continue a conversation in this tone.’ ”XLVI In that draft, Stiva knows this fakeness of hers. He can’t fake it here (though he can in the real novel). In the real novel Anna is unconcernedly unreligious. (In Variant No. 23, Dolly also remarks on Anna’s overdone piety.) It was a significant change in Tolstoy’s outlook on Anna to take away her religiousness. In the final draft, she will address God only once.

  * * *

  In My Life Sofia composed a chapter titled “Lev Nikolaevich’s Trip to Moscow—Zakhar’in—The Ending of Anna”:

  In February Lev Nikolaevich went to Moscow to personally proofread Anna Karenina. There was something he needed to correct in order to speed up the release of the February issue of Russkij Vestnik. Apart from that Lev Nikolaevich’s health was alarming me. He began to have hot flashes in his head, and we were both afraid he might have a stroke. [In her diary, she does not mention her worry about a stroke.]

  It was decided he should go see Professor Zakhar’in in Moscow, who was always ready at any moment to treat Lev Nikolaevich free of charge. There in Moscow Zakhar’in applied leeches, but the trouble didn’t abate; however, it gradually passed with time.XLVII

  On February 27 Tolstoy sent a telegram home at noontime to tell Sofia that he had finished the corrections on the February issue of Anna Karenina and he had seen Dr. Zakhar’in (who had applied the leeches to Tolstoy’s spine) and that he was fine.

  Sofia’s diary of that same day:

  As I was reading through some of Lyovochka’s old diaries today, I realized I would never be able to write those “Notes for a Biography” […]. His inner life is so complicated and his diaries disturb me so much that I grow confused and cannot see things clearly. […]

  The other day, when I asked him to tell me about something from his past, he said: “Please don’t ask about these things; it disturbs me to think of my past and I’m much too old now to relive my whole life in memories.”XLVIII

  It seems to me Tolstoy only meant: “Please, dear, I’m busy.”

  On March 1, the February installment, the second half of Part 6 of Anna Karenina, was published (Chapters 13–29 in the Russian Herald; Chapters 16–32 in the book). The most important matter is that we see that Anna
is beginning to lose her grip. Dolly, her biggest advocate besides Stiva, is confused and unhappy over her friend’s use of contraception and her hopelessness about a contented domestic life with Vronsky. (But why hasn’t Dolly ever wondered about Anna having had only one child with Karenin? Had Anna used contraception with Karenin?)

  […] “Dolly.”—[Anna] suddenly changed the subject—“you say I take too gloomy a view of things. You can’t understand. It’s too awful! I try not to take any view of it at all.”XLIX

  Dolly encourages her to get the divorce and marry Vronsky. Anna reacts wildly:

  “[…] You tell me to marry Alexey, and say I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it!” she repeated, and a flush rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the room, stopping now and then.L

  How alarmed, with Dolly, do we feel, and how close to Anna! We even feel her characteristic “light step.” But she’s beyond herself, beyond her own command:

  “I don’t think of it? Not a day, not an hour passes that I don’t think of it, and blame myself for thinking of it… because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!” she repeated. “When I think of it, I can’t sleep without morphine. […]”LI

  It’s understandable why Dolly is eager to go home and can now count her own blessings. Her wonderful friend is losing her mind.