Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  She leaves in the coach with the driver.

  In Chapter 28, Anna rides through Moscow observing the street signs. It could be an aimless unimportant wandering observation. We know it’s not, but it’s just like one as she notices the seemingly random signs—one of which, or in combination with something, gives her a memory that we never had access to (unlike in the movies, where the stirred memory almost always comes from the events already pictured in the movie):

  And she remembered how, long, long ago, when she was a girl of seventeen, she had gone with her aunt to Troitsa.X

  Were we thinking of Anna at seventeen? No. But she could and did. And we realize that there’s all that full life she has had that we know nothing about—except this, that at seventeen she went to Troitsa with her aunt:

  “Was that really me, with red hands?”

  Perfectly neutral—observed, remembered, but not judged.

  But then she reflects and it gets really bad:

  “How much that seemed to me then splendid and out of reach has become worthless, while what I had then has gone out of my reach forever! Could I ever have believed then that I could come to such humiliation? […]”

  She resumes observing—then when Vronsky comes to mind she muses on something even more terrible:

  “What’s so awful is that one can’t tear up the past by its roots. One can’t tear it out, but one can hide one’s memory of it. And I’ll hide it.” And then she thought of her past with Alexey Alexandrovitch [Karenin], of how she had blotted the memory of it out of her life.

  And she now turns the neutral observations into cynical readings of the people she sees. She sees boys playing and remembers Seryozha and then pushes her son out of her thoughts, replaced by Vronsky.

  It seems amazing that when she arrives at Dolly’s house Kitty is there. This coincidence sends her thoughts back through the novel (not her life but the novel) and seems less believable than her thoughts that brought her back to age seventeen.

  When she leaves, after some awkward moments with Dolly and Kitty, Kitty is almost infatuated again but Dolly sees something ominous:

  “She’s just the same and just as charming! She’s very lovely!” said Kitty, when she was alone with her sister. “But there’s something piteous about her. Awfully piteous!”

  “Yes, there’s something unusual about her today,” said Dolly. “When I went with her into the hall, I fancied she was almost crying.”

  Our desperate friends whom we can’t help! Our desperate selves, whom our friends can’t help!

  In Chapter 29, Anna, back in the carriage, resumes watching people, but all her thoughts become infected with despair. Seeing two men talking…

  “What can he be telling the other with such warmth?” she thought, staring at two men who walked by. “Can one ever tell anyone what one is feeling? I meant to tell Dolly, and it’s a good thing I didn’t tell her. […]”XI

  She decides—comes to believe what we all believe when we’re depressed—that no one understands anyone else. Had Tolstoy felt this?

  A man tips his hat to Anna, then realizes she is not after all an acquaintance:

  “He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. […]”

  Then, because there are no innocent pleasures left, she is cynical about boys wanting ice cream. She’s able to twist even that thought into a swipe at Kitty and into a proverb on perpetual hatred:

  “If not sweetmeats, then a dirty ice. And Kitty’s the same—if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me, and hates me. And we all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. Yes, that’s the truth. […]”

  It’s almost unbearable to watch her, feel her, in this state of mind as she goes through her house:

  She longed to get away as quickly as possible from the feelings she had gone through in that awful house. The servants, the walls, the things in that house—all aroused repulsion and hatred in her and lay like a weight upon her.

  She packs for the train:

  She knew she would never come back here again.

  And then there’s her food aversion. What does it mean about our state of being when we lose a most fundamental appetite?XII

  Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She ordered the carriage and went out.

  She goes to the train station. From here on (maybe from even further back), all her thoughts, except until the last couple of moments, are suicidal.

  In Chapter 30, we see another sign of suicidal depression: complete self-confidence:

  “[…] Again I understand it all!”XIII

  Beware of revelations!

  And now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about.

  As she is thinking of Vronsky, up pops in her consciousness the English phrase “The zest is gone.” All her persecuted and persecuting nonsense is “true.” Beware all infuriated insight:

  This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing light, which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human relations.

  More build-up of nonsense:

  […] she opened her lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. “[…] And where love ends, hate begins.”

  She mocks—or does Tolstoy mock her?—her old aspirations to happiness:

  “[…] Come, let me try and think what I want, to make me happy. Well? Suppose I am divorced, and Alexey Alexandrovitch lets me have Seryozha, and I marry Vronsky.”

  Then back to her inspired clarity—she enjoys it! Yes, isn’t that part of the delirium of cynicism and spite? We enjoy it:

  And the clarity with which she saw now her and all people’s lives pleased her.

  In this flight of feelings and thoughts, she is conscious and clear, possessing Tolstoy’s artistic penetration; Levin is only a reflection of Tolstoy, but Anna embodies Tolstoy’s consciousness.

  Her second-to-last chapter ends thusly:

  Then she thought that life might still be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully her heart was beating.

  In Chapter 31, Anna, seated on the train at the station, in a fury of attention, notices:

  A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise, shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was nothing for anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her agonizingly, and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to hear it.XIV

  These same feelings almost drove Tolstoy himself to suicide a couple of years before.

  “Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn’t conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”

  God sees the truth, Tolstoy sees the truth, Anna sees the truth. Beware of seeing the truth. If you find it, how to escape it?

  Tolstoy never ever condemns Anna for killing herself. Anna will have her moment, her last moments of existence, of regret, and will realize that she doesn’t after all want to die, but Tolstoy does not condemn her.

  Anna overhears a woman saying, “Why are people given reason but to save themselves?” And that clicks for her. She looks with hatred at this couple and has a Tolstoyan disgust at having Tolstoy’s creative imagination—reflexively imagining others’ lives:

  Anna seemed to see all their history and all the crannies of their souls, as it were turning a light upon them. But there was nothing interesting in them, and she pursued her thought.

  Tolstoy will himself react upon his own fiction this way. He became ashamed of imagining the lives of fictitious characters. What’s the use of seeing the souls of other people?

  Her thoughts, any
way, are clear with truth. And they get her meditating:

  “Yes, I’m very much worried, and that’s what reason was given me for, to escape; so then one must escape: why not put out the light when there’s nothing more to look at, when it’s sickening to look at it all? But how? Why did the conductor run along the footboard, why are they shrieking, those young men in that train? why are they talking, why are they laughing? It’s all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all cruelty!…”

  The truth that things are bad and that this truth is conclusive brings us to the very edge of the world, at which point we are rescued by luck or life-overflowing or… we “escape” and kill ourselves.

  As Tolstoy wrote in Confession:

  The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways […]XV

  This is Anna’s last day, her last hour!

  Tolstoy and Levin tried to find salvation in religion. Anna doesn’t; for her, there is no generous, mollifying spirit:

  “No, I won’t let you make me miserable,” she thought menacingly, addressing not him, not herself, but the power that made her suffer, and she walked along the platform.

  Now I don’t know what to say:

  A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself.

  Wait! That physical reflex of crossing herself awakens something:

  That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys.

  Why is it too late? Why does she have to complete her “escape”?:

  But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” she tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

  I had forgotten that she does after all ask God for forgiveness. Was that just another reflex? Doesn’t Tolstoy show us that our reflexes matter?

  Tolstoy resisted killing himself, but Anna did not. He had been terrified. He thought he could have done it, but he didn’t.

  Why not? Maybe because Anna did it for him.

  13 Finishing Off: May 7, 1877–January 1878

  Strakhov, Tolstoy’s most important reader, wrote him on May 7:

  […] I read through Anna Karenina just three days ago. The Petersburg half was news to me—and very impressive. How laughable and how terrible! Oblonsky, the representative of rationalism and Karenin and Lidia Ivanovna of mysticism! This is amazing and seizes the heart; such a mass of lies, such shallowness of mind and heart. […]

  The second half of the story—Moscow—felt confusing to me. You have developed with unbelievable simplicity and clarity—the relations between Anna and Vronsky. Of such further realism than Flaubert (I reread him a bit), Zola and such ones. For example, the sticking-out little fingerI, exciting hatred in Vronsky, and Anna understood his feelings.

  But you have taken from me that tenderness I experienced three years ago in your room and which I expected now. You’re pitiless; you don’t forgive Anna even at the moment of her death; her bitterness and rage grew up until the last moment, and you have deleted, as it seems to me, some places expressing the softening of her soul and pity for herself. In such form, I didn’t weep but became very gloomily thoughtful. Yes, this is truer than what I imagined. It is very true and more terrible.

  Her reasoning and impressions were so simple and so striking! Who is right? one asks oneself. She, seeing the final thoughts of her life, or this merchant crossing himself and this young rascal glancing at her beneath her hat? But in her soul it is so terrible, such a hell, that she exits it, as if this coarse, stupid, frivolous life is the truth, more truthful than her despair.

  In the newspapers the appearance of each part of Karenina comes out just as immediately and is construed just as earnestly as about a new battle or a new speech of Bismarck. And just as suddenly. So just yesterday I read that Karenina decided on suicide being convinced that Vronsky loved another. You see that otherwise they probably cannot understand by tradition, by French novels, and not by the feeling of one’s own heart.II

  Strakhov then refuted Tolstoy’s pooh-poohing of his earlier admiring criticism:

  But as for my praises, I think that they make you happy only because they are true; I don’t write what I don’t think. I try very hard for this; you praise me that you give such value to my words, but I know that this applies only to the truth. You note that I write the truth but not the whole truth. To that I say this. I write you what is most clear in my soul. […]

  I know one thing: a great work in Russian literature has happened, a new great production […]III

  Tolstoy, reading that, should have nodded and admitted, “It’s true.” If his head was turned by this praise, he didn’t say so.

  When Tolstoy wrote Fet in early May, he expressed all his usual pleasure about Fet’s impending visit: “Let me know exactly when you’re coming and I’ll send a cart to the station or even meet you a few stations up the line and ride in with you.” Tolstoy explained: “I’m completely taken up with my work or I would come to you.”IV That is, he was working on corrections for the May issue of Anna Karenina, corrections of the Epilogue that he didn’t yet know would never be published by Katkov’s Russian Herald.

  On May 18, Strakhov, not having heard back from his friend, wrote again:

  The last part of Anna Karenina [Part 7, he means] has produced an especially strong impression, a veritable explosion. Dostoevsky waves his arms and calls you the God of Art. This amazes and overjoys me—he so determinedly opposed you. Stasov wrote in a pseudonymous article in New Times in which he pronounced you a great writer, equal with Gogol and Shakespeare, and ordered your everlasting fame. […]

  It turns out that the others praise you no less than I do. With the greatest impatience I await the last part, which I still absolutely don’t know, even in draft. I’m convinced that you have risen to your full height, so high that it torments me with curiosity.V

  By May 21 or 22, Tolstoy had learned of Katkov’s objections to the Epilogue and he wrote Strakhov:

  I just received your second unanswered letter and I’m ashamed.—I was prevented from writing you because I was very busy with writing and mainly because I didn’t want to say anything to you until you had read through the last part. It was typeset long ago and twice already corrected by me and in a few days they’re sending it to me again for a final look. But I’m afraid that all the same it’s not going to come out soon. And so I want to consult with you about this and ask for your help.

  It seems to me that Katkov doesn’t share my views and that it can’t be otherwise as I blame namely such people as he; mumbling politely, he asks me to soften what’s coming out; it terribly sickens me, and I’ve alre
ady explained to them that if they don’t publish it in the way I want I absolutely won’t publish it with them, and so that’s what I’m doing; but despite the inconvenience of everything being published in a booklet and selling it separately, the inconvenience is the necessity of getting it past the censor. What do you advise—separately with the censor or some uncensored journal—the Herald of Europe, Cornfield, the Wanderer, it’s all the same to me—only that I want it published as soon as possible and no conversing over softenings or deletions. Please advise and help. Maybe I’ll still arrange things with Katkov, but I would very much want to know what to do in the event of a disagreement.VI

  Tolstoy was in Moscow on or around May 28–29 and wrote Strakhov from there:

  […] I’m very grateful for your advice and offered help. I’m taking the advice and am rescuing the writing and giving it to RisVII to publish in Moscow. He promises that in a week it will be ready. I terribly want your help, but I don’t know how it will be. Ris is coming to me right now bringing the original, and I’ll ask him if he can send you the corrections. Moreover, this depends on when you’re leaving Petersburg and coming to us. Of your visit I only repeat with words, thought, and heart: the sooner the better. […] The proof of the sincerity of what I’m saying is that I would desire you to finish the work.—I’m finishing in two, three days; so tell me to send it after you to Tula or Kozlovka on the 3rd of June. That is, in truth, I want you to read the corrections of the epilogue without me and throw out and correct everything that you find necessary and come to us as soon as possible.