Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  “[…] And now more than ever,” she said with a mournful, confiding expression, ostensibly addressing her brother, but unmistakably intending her words only for Levin, “now when I have such need of some occupation, I cannot.” And suddenly frowning (Levin saw that she was frowning at herself for talking about herself) she changed the subject.

  She needs something; her attempt to educate girls didn’t take—she never turns to religion or philosophy as her creator had. But writing? She has written a children’s novel. But that isn’t enough, either.

  He sees another new expression on her face:

  […] she sighed, and her face suddenly taking a hard expression, looked as if it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait.

  He compares her again to the portrait:

  Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.

  We also have that very same “tenderness and pity” for her, but we don’t wonder at ourselves for it. Levin and Tolstoy may get over their enchantment, but most of us readers never do.

  After Levin and Anna’s greatly pleasurable conversation resumes, Tolstoy shows his hand, lays bare the allegory of the artist and his subject:

  While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her—her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and talked, 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.LXXIII

  Tolstoy has brought himself from condemnatory judgment to love and admiration and curiosity. Anna Karenina is that beautiful tragic woman whose feelings we are all “trying to divine.” This seems to be Tolstoy’s account of how he, the novelist, was won over by his fully imagined heroine.

  The evening ends; Anna sends her greetings to Kitty, and in Chapter 11, on the late night ride with Stiva back to his in-laws’ house, Levin is “Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her.”LXXIV

  Within moments of her husband’s arrival, however, Kitty, having interrogated him about his night out, reads his feelings:

  “You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you!”

  Vronsky found Anna more fascinating than Kitty and now Levin has too! A wife’s persecution of her husband for his tender feelings for another woman is not the road to truth any more than torture is. Tolstoy has shown us what understanding feels like; Seryozha and Levin understood Anna and rightly sympathized with and adored her; but now Levin, as a dutiful husband and expectant father, has to show repentance. Levin renounces Anna to his jealous wife and never thinks of Anna again. It’s fair to note, tit for tat, that Anna “liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of him.”LXXV

  Speaking of sympathy and understanding, in Chapter 12 we see that Vronsky is as good and sympathetic here as it is in his power to be. He tries to stop a fight with Anna:

  “Anna, what is it for, why will you?” he said after a moment’s silence, bending over toward her, and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.

  She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender.LXXVI

  “Some strange force of evil” is not Tolstoy being clever, evasive, or deliberately vague. He didn’t know what it was either, but he had experienced that perverse force himself. She confesses her real despair and fear: “If you knew how I feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how afraid I am of myself!”

  Vronsky says the right things again, but he really has no idea:

  “Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am ready to do anything to make you happy,” he said, touched by her expression of despair; “what wouldn’t I do to save you from distress of any sort, as now, Anna!” he said.

  This is why it’s not fair to feel disappointed in Vronsky: we should instead be disappointed that Tolstoy didn’t make him a better man. He’s a good man, in his way. He is never deliberately cruel. But he’s just no match for her. He couldn’t and can’t imagine her “distress.” I don’t blame him, but Levin would have understood her. Her brother understands her and so does her son.

  In the final four chapters of this installment, Levin is occupied by Kitty’s pregnancy. That very next morning after Kitty’s snit-fit, she wakes Levin to tell him that the birth is going to happen soon. Levin gets into a tizzy familiar to involved fathers everywhere and goes for the doctor (the women need Levin out of the way and occupied). After many hours, Kitty has the baby; she’s happy and Levin is glad that she’s alive and yet he remains in confusion about his feeling of estrangement from this new creature, his baby.

  * * *

  By the time the March installment had come out on March 28, Tolstoy seems to have finished the rest of Part 7 and even nearly the Epilogue, with the aftermath of Anna’s suicide. The next installment of the novel, the April issue, with the second half of Part 7, would come out in May.

  In good spirits, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov on April 5 about the Epilogue: “I’m completely, completely finished, I only need to correct it.”LXXVII

  Strakhov on about the same date wrote Tolstoy: “You and your novels—for already a long time are the best parts of my life.”LXXVIII How many of us have since felt this and also would have declared it to him if we could have?

  Tolstoy was feeling unbound. The next week he opened a new topic with Fet… God:

  You won’t believe how joyful it made me what you wrote in the one before last, of as you say “the existence of God.” I completely agree and very much want to talk, but in a letter it’s impossible and there’s no time. You for the first time speak to me about a deity—God. I for a long time already haven’t stopped thinking about this major problem. Don’t say it’s impossible to think about. Not only can one but one must. In all the centuries, the best, that is the real people, thought about it. And if we cannot do so, as they, thinking about it, we are obliged to find how. Have you read Pascal’s Pensées?, that is, recently, with an open mind. When, God willing, you come here, we’ll talk about a lot of things and I’ll give you this book. […]

  If I were free of my novel, whose end is already drafted, and I were making the corrections, I would come to you now on receiving your letter. […]

  I’m hoping to celebrate my freedom and the end of my work around April 28.LXXIX

  This is the only instance in the course of Anna Karenina that Tolstoy beat an estimated time of completion. He would finish April 22.

  In the meanwhile, he wrote Alexandrine:

  I’m terribly busy and I’m using my first free (and not free) day to write you a few words. I’m afraid to write about what I wanted to, because it would lure me away. I wanted to write you, objecting to the observations you made in passing on my writing. They offended me and I wanted to prove that I was completely right in what I wrote. But it’s good that I then didn’t answer you. I mainly would have started to prove it. At this moment, as we write, we are very persnickety. Now I’m no longer writing. Everything is sent off and it’s only left to correct. On the contrary, please make observations to
me, as many and as severe as possible. I’m praised too much or I don’t hear how I’m scolded. But your remarks I value. You say, “Veslovsky doesn’t need to be sent off.” But if an impoverished Englishman in a hat came to you in the evening and was going to look at the icons, you would find it very correct that the attendants would lead him out.LXXX

  Alexandrine was confident enough and stupid enough to critique Anna Karenina to her friend and relative, its author. And so Tolstoy had to refight Levin’s battle in Part 6, Chapter 15, and throw Veslovsky out again.

  On April 21 or 22, Tolstoy finished Anna Karenina. But…

  Before we celebrate that date, it hadn’t all been published and he hadn’t proofread it yet. It hadn’t been collected into its book-format. He hadn’t heard from Katkov that the Russian Herald wouldn’t publish the Epilogue unless Tolstoy excised his criticism of the Serbian war mania.

  But he had finished writing it.

  Was there a letdown? Was there relief?

  Tolstoy wrote Strakhov:

  For the first time, today, after many days, I’m left without work: one set of corrections has been sent off, another not yet sent off, and I have no more manuscript, and I’m sad and lonely but free, and so I use the time to write you, dear Nikolay Nikolaevich.

  As least as far as the letters reveal, he was in the sweetest mood he had been in since he began the novel. Whatever conclusions we can make about his depressions, his religious stirrings, his relations with Sofia, he was a Samson and he even today continues to burst all the bands we try to tie him with. While Delilah eventually wheedles the secret out of long-haired Samson, we still don’t know the secret of Tolstoy’s artistic power.

  He had done his job; it seemed there was only the tidying up to do. He was calm, at peace. He continued to Strakhov:

  I still have in my heart your last letter with the approval of the last part of Karenina. I’m afraid I don’t love critiques and, even less, praises, except yours. They bring me to excitement and firm up my strength for work. I cannot help thinking, however, that you say to me more than you say to yourself, knowing how this pleases me. Summer is approaching and my hope is to see you. When is your vacation? How much of it are you sharing with us?LXXXI

  I’m a crab for critiquing Professor Christian’s edition and translation of the letters, but what was going through his mind when he left out the first twelve lines (the two quoted paragraphs above) and begins only with “Please let’s go as soon as possible to the Optina Monastery”?

  My point? Tolstoy had just finished Anna Karenina.

  On the list of individual human artistic achievements, this ranks as… let’s see, let me do the math… I’ve got it: Number 1. But from the way Professor Christian has clipped the letter you wouldn’t know that Tolstoy had done anything that week. It sounds as if Tolstoy just wanted to get away!

  To resume: Christian’s excerpt continues:

  You say in your last letter that you are cooling off toward your work. I refuse to believe it. You wouldn’t believe how necessary your ideas are to me. I wait for them like facts and figures which are necessary to confirm beyond doubt the conclusion I’ve already formed. [… I’m cutting Tolstoy’s criticism of Turgenev’s translation of Flaubert and Tolstoy’s praise and misquotation of Hugo.]

  I’m hurrying off to Tula for Seryozha’s exam.LXXXII

  What’s most important from R. F. Christian’s translation’s clip of the letter is Tolstoy’s parting line. He may well have finished Anna Karenina, but he had parental responsibilities to attend to.

  Sofia, in “Serezha’s Examination and the Children,” narrates:

  That spring Lev Nikolaevich did a lot of hunting for woodcock, along with one of our guests, a German who had once taught my boys—Fedor Fedorovich. The woodcock hunt was a favourite outing, for all of us. But that spring I wasn’t up to accompanying Lev Nikolaevich. Pregnant again, I worked unceasingly—teaching the children, transcribing for Lev Nikolaevich and sewing.

  I wrote my sister that I felt I had a yoke around my head and that my back was constantly aching. Besides having a lot of work to do, I was so accustomed to taking advantage of every moment of my life—for example reading an English novel while I breastfed a baby. Since I breastfed ten children, I managed to get through a lot of novels—especially English ones, so as to better study the language. There would always be some sort of book lying beside my low chair in the children’s room.

  […]

  I think {Serezha’s success} was largely due to the fact that his father spent a great deal of time working with him personally and making him realize the necessity of getting into university. Lev Nikolaevich was quite strict with Serezha, sometimes even too strict.LXXXIII

  Sofia didn’t explain what she meant about that over-strictness. We know from the Tolstoy children’s memoirs that as a teacher Tolstoy could be impatient; that January, we remember, Tolstoy confessed to Sofia his shame about getting angry while teaching Tanya. (Seryozha’s exams started on May 3 and, Sofia proudly recalled, he passed them all.)LXXXIV

  * * *

  In the Jubilee Edition the undated April letters to Katkov at the Russian Herald are bunched together but were probably written both before and certainly after the April 21–22 letter to Strakhov.

  While offering apologies to Katkov for being late with his corrections, Tolstoy betrayed little anxiety about not being forgiven again for his tardiness: “With great regrets I only now can send you five chapters, which tormented me. They ought to be printed between what I sent at the beginning and what I sent after; but if it’s too late, there’s nothing to do and they can be placed in afterward. I’m hoping you’ll be so good as to send me what I sent earlier in corrections. Finally, feeling guilty for the delay of the book, I don’t dare ask to have it sent to me, but all the same I can hope for you and your corrections.”LXXXV

  The second letter enclosed more manuscript and promised two more chapters “the day after tomorrow”; he apologized for the many scrawled corrections on the manuscript.

  He was not trying to offend Katkov, but he also didn’t worry about offending him. He believed Katkov would accept what he had done, late or not.

  But he was wrong; there are no surviving explanatory letters from Katkov; all we find is Tolstoy’s shock, recounted in Tolstoy’s letters to others, about Katkov’s refusal to publish the Epilogue.

  What was the imperious Katkov thinking as he read the passages that offended him? Did he immediately recognize that he wasn’t going to publish them? Was he wracking his brain how he was going to tell his equally imperious author that he wanted to delete passages? Was he trying to think up arguments to bring Tolstoy around to a sympathetic view of the war? Did he consult friends to ask how to do this? If he had really known Tolstoy, he would have guessed that Tolstoy would not compromise. Perhaps he, like editors everywhere, would feel annoyed at being expected to grant ever more additional favors to an ever-tardy writer.

  Tolstoy’s third April letter to Katkov: “Despite all efforts, I couldn’t finish the corrections of these 3 chapters that need to be between what I sent earlier and what was sent after, and so I’m afraid to hold you back and decided on the following: be so kind, much esteemed M.N., and send the laid out sheets as they are. If God gives me on these days 3 hours of light, I will correct them and send them, and if it’s fine with you, order to assemble and print them to the end. Their transposition will not interfere with the course of the novel.”LXXXVI

  This seems to be the last actual surviving business letter between Katkov and Tolstoy.

  Katkov deserves no sympathy. The nationalistic trumped-up war that he had helped to instigate was plainly wrong; he had the world’s greatest author concluding the world’s greatest novel; he should have published anything Tolstoy wanted, no matter how controversial, no matter how annoyingly late.

  And yet, the scholar Susanne Fusso cautions us (me, that is), “As far as we know, Katkov allowed all of Tolstoy’s attacks on his favored projects to p
ass without objection or amendment. Just as he gave Tolstoy special treatment in financial matters, during most of the publication of Anna Karenina he refrained from the intrusive editorial practices that had plagued Tur, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky.”LXXXVII

  Tolstoy’s aggravation about Katkov’s surprising refusal to publish the Epilogue would not come until the third week of May.

  Tolstoy’s correspondence this spring was the lightest it had been over any of his Anna Karenina springtimes. He was busy. He was nearing completion. He was neither down in the dumps nor struggling to right himself to write. He was free from wheeling and dealing about the business of publishing other projects. He was not particularly restless.

  * * *

  The April issue of the Russian Herald, the last serialized appearance of Anna Karenina, was published May 2.

  How long would it have taken a hungry reader to read the second half of Part 7, those last devastating fifteen (in the book, divided into sixteen) chapters?

  I imagine I would have sat home reading them and then taken a long tearful walk through the muddy countryside or along the Moscow River. Persuaded by my own feelings, I imagine every single one of the estimated five thousand subscribers of the Russian Herald (and the subscribers’ novel-reading friends and families) weeping.LXXXVIII I sympathize with every stricken reader’s response as they follow Anna to her last moment of consciousness. We only have the reactions of one of those Russian Herald subscribers, a bureaucrat named Prince Vladimir Mikhailovich Golitsyn, who responded unpretentiously and mostly uninterestingly in his diary to several of the installments.LXXXIX