Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  But because Tolstoy has been showing us how we actually live and think and act, I also manage to imagine an outlier beyond Prince Golitsyn: Akaky Bobovich Durakiy. He’s a middle-aged man with a graying beard who comes home after a night out. May 2 has reached midnight and turned into May 3; he picks up the copy of the Russian Herald from the desk in his study and takes it to his bedroom and starts to read and as he gets to the most intense momentum of Anna’s crazed determination… the page seems to swirl, his head becomes a sack of flour, his neck tilts forward, and he falls asleep. The agitation he feels in his sleep is not because he dreams of Anna’s unhappiness but because in the dream he thinks he remembers an appointment, but he doesn’t know what it’s for. He arrives at a governmental building that resembles his childhood home in Kursk. A rooster is walking down the corridor from the entry-hall, and he follows it. He wakes up smacking his lips, mouths the word “Poulet!” and while he notices the bent copy of the Russian Herald in his bed it doesn’t make him reflect for a second. At the office that day or the next, someone mentions Anna’s suicide and he nods knowingly, mutters, “Terrible! So sad!” and thinks: “I should read that myself,” but never does.

  I can or should imagine as well Tolstoy’s friends’ and loved ones’ reactions: they are proud that they know this man who wrote this! No matter how well they knew him, however, their relationship with him didn’t overwhelm the experience they went through reading about Anna’s suicide. Even so, there was something about Tolstoy that they could never have known better or more deeply than through these chapters. This was as deep as Tolstoy ever went into his own terrors.

  Only Sofia could have stood off from it. Only Sofia already knew this Tolstoy. She didn’t know the novel only as the gift of art. She knew it in all its painful creation; she knew it the way the characters in the novel know Anna: personally, complicatedly. It had to be more than a literary experience for her. Her artistic responses were naturally enough mixed up with her personal responses and knowledge of her husband. No one else would ever read Anna Karenina as she did at this time. All of us can read it more or less as Strakhov did: with amazement and awe and shock.

  12 Suicidal Tendencies

  Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.

  —G. K. ChestertonI

  Tolstoy didn’t see suicide as a sin. He would remark to a friend: “I can’t understand why people look upon suicide as a crime. It seems to me to be a man’s right. It gives a man the chance of dying when he no longer wishes to live. The Stoics thought like that.”II In The Kingdom of God Is Within You, completed sixteen years after Anna Karenina, Tolstoy would write: “People are astonished that sixty thousand suicides are committed in Europe every year, reckoning only the recognized and recorded cases and excluding Russia and Turkey; but they ought rather to be surprised that there are so few. Every man of our time, if we go deep enough into the contradiction between his conscience and his life, is in a most terrible condition.”III Anna does not survive that “most terrible condition,” but Levin does and Tolstoy did. How? Why? What was the difference?

  * * *

  The final installment of Anna Karenina in the Russian Herald begins by bringing us back to Stiva’s money problems. Stiva needs Karenin’s help to get a better-paying position. Tolstoy doesn’t want us to feel amused or charmed by Anna’s brother anymore. Karenin exposes Stiva’s base motivations for the position: not for service or his particular fitness but simply for the money. Stiva also needs to convince Karenin to grant Anna a divorce now; Karenin consents to consider it. Having promised Karenin he wouldn’t speak to Seryozha about Anna, Stiva does, and Seryozha breaks into ashamed tears. Then, thrown off from his usual poise, Stiva finds himself too far into a game of flirtation with Betsy. Finally, at a séance hosted by Lidia, to which Stiva feels obliged to attend to get on his brother-in-law’s good side, Stiva is denounced by the French spiritualist Landau, whose advice and whims Lidia and Karenin cater to. Stiva flees, unsuccessful for the first time in the novel: no help from Karenin for a position for him, no divorce for Anna.

  The remaining nine chapters dramatize in unsettling hyper-focus Anna’s last two days.

  In Chapter 24, Vronsky tells Anna, in a newsy way, trying to keep her from getting mad, about a dinner party he has returned from and how a swimming instructor who was there demonstrated her new method of swimming. Vronsky insists that the instructor was “old and hideous”; he wants to drop the topic, but jealous Anna asks: “[…] did she swim in some special way, then?”IV (Anna will compare herself, as she is about to jump under the train, to a swimmer: “A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself.”)

  Vronsky wants to get them away from this subject:

  “There was absolutely nothing in it. That’s just what I say, it was awfully stupid. Well, then, when do you think of going?”

  Anna shook her head as though trying to drive away some unpleasant idea.V

  There is no other “unpleasant idea” for her than the one goading her toward suicide. (We might recall now Tolstoy’s terrifying description in Confession of his impulse toward death being stronger than the usual one toward life.)VI

  Anna knows that she has been impossible with Vronsky, and she decides “it must be ended.”

  “But how?” she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before the looking glass.

  “How?” We know how. We don’t want her to figure it out, but we know. This is not something we want anybody to figure out. Don’t give her any hints! But the answer is in her head, and Tolstoy is sweeping us readers along into her feeling of hollowness:

  […] At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, but she could not get clear sight of it.

  And this is where almost anybody, except the suicidal, would divert themselves from further clarifying. Anna, however, is “interested” and goes on:

  Thinking once more of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her at that time. “Why didn’t I die?” and the words and the feeling of that time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all. “Yes, to die! […]”

  Her reason cannot bring her to the feeling of wanting to live. Even though we rereaders know what happens, most of us hope that this time she’ll turn back from the train. As I’ve shown, to my own unhappiness, from her first appearance in the novel, her fate is sealed. A train station is where she’s going to die. But Tolstoy somehow also makes us feel as if she could, after all, turn away. I don’t think that’s just my sentimentality. It’s certainly what people in families that suffer a suicide feel. It may have seemed inevitable, but until the last moment, she could have stepped away.

  In Chapter 25, Anna decides that she wants to leave Moscow. She’s in a “good” mood that is teetering; the slightest vibration tips her. She cannot control or assert any balance except by sticking hard to a position.

  Vronsky reacts to Stiva’s letter’s news of the unlikely prospects for the divorce—but Anna asserts that it doesn’t matter. The person who’s always flying off the handle is set off by people thinking she could fly off the handle. Vronsky tries to bring up something else:

  “No,” she said, irritated by his so obviously showing by this change of subject that he was irritated, “why did you suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to hide it? I said I don’t want to consider it, and I should have liked you to care as little about it as I do.”VII

  She gets madder because of his tone, not his words. She has no margin for forgiveness, for patience. She is torturing him. She ignores what he says; she has lost distance from
her mood; her mind and mood are too coordinated.

  He, trying so hard, is bewildered and doesn’t know which way to move:

  “Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake,” he repeated, frowning as though in pain, “because I am certain that the greater part of your irritability comes from the indefiniteness of the position.”

  Vronsky is doing as well and as much as any spouse or lover could here—and it’s not enough:

  “Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred for me is apparent,” she thought, not hearing his words, but watching with terror the cold, cruel judge who looked mocking her out of his eyes.

  And then she goes after his mother: the worst arguing strategy in the history of domestic relationships:

  “You don’t love your mother. That’s all talk, and talk, and talk!” she said, looking at him with hatred in her eyes.

  It’s unbearable.

  Vronsky’s friend Yashvin drops in, and Tolstoy makes us wonder what does it mean about us human beings that in the middle of a personal catastrophe, we can flip a switch and appear as our social selves?

  Why, when there was a tempest in her soul, and she felt she was standing at a turning point in her life, which might have fearful consequences—why, at that minute, she had to keep up appearances before an outsider, who sooner or later must know it all—she did not know. But at once quelling the storm within her, she sat down and began talking to their guest.

  Why, indeed! Is it shame before others? Is it our socializing reflex?

  Another visitor comes by to buy a horse, and Anna exits the room. Before Vronsky leaves with his guests, he goes to her.

  All her continual attacks on Vronsky are part of her suicide. Each act of her own cruelty is killing her, taking her steps closer to the abyss.

  Though Vronsky is fed up, he is still responsive to her:

  “I’m not to blame in any way,” he thought. “If she will punish herself, tant pis pour elle [too bad for her].” But as he was going he fancied that she said something, and his heart suddenly ached with pity for her.

  “Eh, Anna?” he queried.

  “I said nothing,” she answered just as coldly and calmly.

  “Oh, nothing, tant pis then,” he thought, feeling cold again, and he turned and went out. As he was going out he caught a glimpse in the looking glass of her face, white, with quivering lips. He even wanted to stop and to say some comforting word to her, but his legs carried him out of the room before he could think what to say.

  Again with the mirror—which, unlike her face, does not lie.

  When he returns that night she has her maid tell him she has a headache and doesn’t wish to be disturbed.

  In Chapter 26, her hopelessness sweeps her away and takes her beyond where anybody should be. Tolstoy shows us the sharpest, most painful division between a couple. One cannot see or know the obvious suffering that the other is experiencing:

  Was it possible to glance at her as he had glanced when he came into the room for the guarantee?—to look at her, see her heart was breaking with despair, and go out without a word with that face of callous composure?VIII

  But wait, Anna: Was it possible to look at Vronsky and not see his suffering?

  She is in a panic and sliding deeper into her depression. Again, depression is where one’s mood… no, I don’t know what it is, but Anna is sliding and can’t stop herself:

  All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them.

  “But didn’t he only yesterday swear he loved me, he, a truthful and sincere man? Haven’t I despaired for nothing many times already?” she said to herself afterward.

  Then, instead of reflecting, she comes up with a test of proof of whether he still loves her or not: sending him a note to say she has a headache:

  “If he comes in spite of what the maid says, it means that he loves me still. If not, it means that all is over, and then I will decide what I’m to do!…”

  Can we knock thoughts out of somebody’s head? Isn’t that what I, her loving reader, want to do here? Knock that alluring suicidal thought out of her head?

  She becomes possessed by the spirit of righteous indignation—it’s not quite revenge because she hasn’t got anything on Vronsky that he’s actually done. Her need to “punish” him is a kind of self-obliteration: murder and suicide. If she’s going down, he’s going down. How can we sympathize with her? I don’t know how or why, but I do.

  This next passage is terrible:

  And death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession of her heart was waging with him.

  […] The one thing that mattered was punishing him.

  She imagines dying and his reaction. She lies down after an opium dose and looks around her room…

  … while she vividly pictured to herself how he would feel when she would be no more, when she would be only a memory to him.

  She cannot be “just a memory”! Whatever it is she “vividly pictured to herself,” I’ll bet it isn’t the bitter grief that Vronsky will actually suffer. She probably doesn’t imagine his anger and resentment and the poisoning of his memories of her. No, she imagines her own feelings of satisfied vengeance.

  The only vengeance in a novel preceded by the most famous of all literary epigraphs (“Vengeance is Mine, and I will repay”) is enacted by Anna.

  She has a nightmarish vision as the candle goes out; then she revives and decides what everyone else knows already: she loves him, he loves her. They can go on. Is her suicide inevitable, just because Tolstoy has decided it is, that he conceived the story so?

  No matter how many times I read it, I never remember this dreamy scene of her going to Vronsky’s room and shining her candle on him. She decides against waking him up, lest he look at her coldly and she accuses him of something. So she goes back to her room and takes more opium and has an agitated sleep. She has the terrible recurring dream of the peasant.

  Every time Anna tries to right herself, the smallest details throw her off—e.g., seeing Vronsky accept a letter from a young woman that his mother has sent over. Anna goes in to Vronsky to tell him that she’s not leaving with him and he decides to disregard this nonsense, the only tactic of response that he hasn’t tried before. She watches him leave. Even if he had returned to her within moments and apologized (insincerely, for nothing), she would have cracked again sooner or later. He is not to blame. Whatever Vronsky is in his own limited self, he is not to blame.

  The next day, Chapter 27, Anna knows she has lost her wits. While she’s beyond me and my own experiences, she’s not beyond Tolstoy. Tolstoy knows and Dostoevsky knows and Chekhov knows these madnesses and they have all written about them. I only think I know because I have read those fellows.

  She asks a servant where Vronsky has gone; she writes a note to send to him:

  “I was wrong. Come back home; I must explain. For God’s sake come! I’m afraid.”IX

  And in a nightmare that’s real, she rushes to the children’s room and is disappointed and surprised to see her daughter, not Seryozha.

  Anna continues to see everything, to register, like Tolstoy, all the details with startling clarity. It’s then what she does with those perceptions that shows us her derangement. She sees her daughter:

  The little girl sitting at the table was obstinately and violently battering on it with a cork, and staring aimlessly at her mother with her pitch-black eyes.

  Then, seeing Vronsky in her daughter’s expression, she panics and leaves, thinking:

  “Can it be all over? […]”

  And then, so weirdly and in a way that brought tears to her eyes, she can’t remember, now anticipating Vronsky’s return, whether she brushed her hair yet or not:

  She felt her head with her hand. “Yes,
my hair has been done, but when I did it I can’t in the least remember.” She could not believe the evidence of her hand, and went up to the pier glass to see whether she really had done her hair.

  This—this having to confirm with her eyes what her hand knows—brought tears to my eyes:

  She certainly had, but she could not think when she had done it. “Who’s that?” she thought, looking in the looking glass at the swollen face with strangely glittering eyes, that looked in a scared way at her. “Why, it’s I!” she suddenly understood, and looking round, she seemed all at once to feel his kisses on her, and twitched her shoulders, shuddering. Then she lifted her hand to her lips and kissed it.

  At first, I misread the end of that in Russian; as I recopied it I was as surprised as she—she raises her own hand to her lips and kisses it! (I had thought she was imagining Vronsky raising it and kissing it.)

  With so much of Anna Karenina, I think biographically of Tolstoy—but not here. Why? How does Tolstoy know this? Why don’t we reject this moment as fantasy? What does it take to drive a person of supreme consciousness—Tolstoy and Anna for example—to suicide? This, apparently. It’s not Vronsky’s limitations or the loss of Seryozha or her ostracism from society, or even the opium: it’s madness. Twice in this chapter she realizes that she’s going “out of her mind” (“Why, I’m going out of my mind!”; “I shall go out of my mind”).

  She is in a continual panic:

  “Yes, I mustn’t think, I must do something, drive somewhere, and most of all, get out of this house” […]