Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  She has also mentioned in her conversation with Levin’s half-brother that “Karenin came to the funeral. But we tried to prevent his meeting Alexey.” Hearing of such a scene secondhand, I realize that Trollope, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Hugo would have given us the funeral: we would have seen Karenin and Vronsky over her coffin. I think of what Trollope did for Glencora Palliser, who, we discover when we open The Duke’s Children, the sixth and final novel in the Palliser series, has died! All through that novel, she scarcely leaves her husband’s or children’s memories—or Trollope’s. We continuously recall her follies, her wit, her personality. But Tolstoy doesn’t roll that way.

  He has us revisit the memory of Anna, but only several weeks after her death, and it’s grim, grim, grim.

  In Chapter 5, Tolstoy makes the usual genius stroke that no one else in the world ever would have thought of: Vronsky, grieving, organizing troops to go to Serbia with him, has a terrible toothache. At a moment when the tormented Vronsky is grateful for Sergei’s cheerful encouragement, he perceives beside him, along the rails, a big wheel of a train rolling in:

  And all at once a different pain, not an ache, but an inner trouble, that set his whole being in anguish, made him for an instant forget his toothache. As he glanced at the tender and the rails, under the influence of the conversation with a friend he had not met since his misfortune, he suddenly recalled her—that is, what was left of her when he had run like one distraught into the cloak room of the railway station—on the table shamelessly sprawling out among strangers, the bloodstained body so lately full of life; the head unhurt dropping back with its weight of hair, and the curling tresses about the temples, and the exquisite face, with red, half-opened mouth, the strange, fixed expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the still open eyes, that seemed to utter that fearful phrase—that he would be sorry for it—that she had said when they were quarreling.XXIX

  It goes on—Vronsky tries to remember Anna as she was at the beginning, but he instead remembers everything and sobs. Poor man!XXX He didn’t know her as much as we seemed to, but he is now in his suffering beyond us. We can have tears in our eyes, but we don’t have his suffering. As wrecked as we know we would be in real life, we are only reading a novel and can return to her again and again in all her vividness; we can remember her as she was in the beginning, as she is in her vitality up to her very death.

  Vronsky’s breakdown is for me another end of the novel.

  But where is Levin? In Chapter 6, Sergei and Katavasov travel to Levin’s estate.

  Levin’s suicidal-thoughts drama creates no tension.

  All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments of horror.

  “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; and that I can’t know, and so I can’t live,” Levin said to himself.

  “In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”

  It was an agonizing terror, but it was the sole logical result of ages of human thought in that direction.

  This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated by human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. It was the prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as anyway the clearest, and made it his own.

  But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit.

  He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil. And there was one means—death.

  And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.

  But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.XXXI

  There is on the other hand tension in Tolstoy’s description in Confession of his own very similar situation:

  It was indeed terrible. And to rid myself of the terror I wished to kill myself. I experienced terror at what awaited me—knew that that terror was even worse than the position I was in, but still I could not patiently await the end. However convincing the argument might be that in any case some vessel in my heart would give way, or something would burst and all would be over, I could not patiently await that end. The horror of darkness was too great, and I wished to free myself from it as quickly as possible by noose or bullet. That was the feeling which drew me most strongly toward suicide.XXXII

  Anna has the same conviction, logic, and terror as Tolstoy described there. But when this same exact string of events happens to Levin, it doesn’t touch me and it sure doesn’t touch Tolstoy; it’s as if he’s reviewing last year’s bad storm. When Tolstoy is talking about his terrors in Confession, the effect is the same as when he presents them as Anna’s.

  So why is Levin able to go on living when Anna couldn’t?

  In Chapter 12: “Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them) as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before.”XXXIII

  I remember being completely caught up in Levin’s joyful clear understanding—and I used to feel his joy as he triumphs over the cunning cheat called Reason:

  […] he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.

  Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or shoot himself.XXXIV

  My comment at the moment of rereading this was “Does this have anything to do with Anna?” It is a comment rather than a question, because I’m suggesting that Tolstoy doesn’t have Anna on his mind anymore, either. Even though readers are still thinking about her, to Levin, she is out of sight, out of mind. Levin does not think of her in connection to himself and suicide, and Tolstoy does not think of Levin’s suicidal thoughts in connection to Anna.

  Why not? Why wouldn’t the smitten Levin remember suicidal Anna when he himself—so soon after—became suicidal?

  Nikolai Gudziy, in his account of the drafts of the novel, points out that in Variant 198, Levin went to see Anna’s dead body.XXXV

  In her study of the editor Katkov’s influence on the history of great Russian novels, Susanne Fusso points out that despite Katkov’s many faults, particularly concerning this novel and its epilogue, “He makes the keen-eyed observation that […] the characters seem strangely unaffected by her terrible death. [In his Russian Herald article “What Happened after the Death of Anna Karenina”] Katkov inserts his journal into the fictional world of the characters: ‘Quite a few people have gathered at the family home of the Liovins [In Slavic studies, Liovin has become the new English rendering of Levin], Sergei Ivanovich is there, and Katavasov, and the old prince, and Dolly with her children, they talk about a lot of things, but for this whole company it is as if the terrible episode which so struck even readers who knew Anna only from stories, and not from personal acquaintance like these people, had not happened. As if the fourth issue of the Russian Herald had not yet reached Liovin’s estate.’ ”XXXVI

  Tolstoy had had Anna on his mind the entire time that he was going through his suicidal period. So Anna saved Tolstoy. Who or what saved Levin?

  Why is Levin, a person who has everything going for him, having to hide a gun from himself?

  […] it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

  “What should I have been, and how should I have spent my li
fe, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.” And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

  “I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my question—it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have gotten it from anywhere.

  “Where could I have gotten it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because it’s irrational.”XXXVII

  If that’s not a good philosophy, it’s at least a good dramatization of how we satisfy ourselves with homespun philosophizing.

  “This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling for my child. There was no surprise in this, either. Faith—or not faith—I don’t know what it is—but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.

  “I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”XXXVIII

  Levin’s happy and inspiring resolution is satisfying and gives us hope.

  Tolstoy followed Anna, on the other hand, to the ultimate end. He imagined suicide as far as the imagination can go. Doing so, he pulled himself up just short of the abyss.

  * * *

  In the beginning of July Tolstoy wrote a gossipy letter to Fet about his old friend D’yakov’s wedding: “I went off to my sister at Kresta and there found out striking news—D’yakov was marrying Sofesh, his former governess. My wife writes me that she’s going to the wedding and calls me. I went to Nikol’ski and from there to D’yakov’s, where I was present at an unpleasant to me wedding of a fifty-five-year-old old fellow to a thirty-two-year-old young woman and at his caresses and such in front of his married daughter. It’s impossible to judge; but to me it was oppressive and awkward.”XXXIX (At the moment, Tolstoy was a forty-eight-year-old old fellow; Sofia, a thirty-two-year-old young woman.)

  He wrote Strakhov: “My adventures without you are the following: I went to an unpleasant for me wedding, then, having returned, found guests, went hunting, and played croquet [my italics] and received guests, and despite all this succeeded in rereading and redoing Karenina—so that in three days I hope to finish. Yesterday Ris was here, he brought the last part. There are mistakes, but the edition is good.”XL

  It’s important for me to remember, and which I do wish Tolstoy would have specifically mentioned in Confession: In the midst of his searching for the meaning of life in the 1870s, he was also taking trips, attending weddings, hunting, writing the greatest novel in history, and using a mallet to hit little round wooden balls through tiny gates. Chekhov might describe in stories such details as that, but not Tolstoy.

  In Tolstoy’s letters from the end of June and here, on July 11–12, he had moved on from buying horses from Fet to buying dogs from him. He asked Fet to send along to him “that dog.”

  In late July, Tolstoy and Strakhov set off for the Optina Monastery, where they had wanted to visit the previous summer. Tolstoy wrote Sofia a note from there about his plans and return. Strakhov and Tolstoy were at Fet’s on July 29–30.XLI Did Strakhov feel as if he was one of the boys, or an extra?

  Tolstoy wrote Sofia a note from Tula in the beginning of August mentioning Katkov’s response to his letter to New Times, “but,” he declared, “I won’t be further annoyed.”XLII

  Tolstoy was back home by August 10–11, intending to take up again a novel about the Decembrists. He seems never to have written a creative word in July or August, so his impressive excuse to Strakhov for not starting, which came in the midst of his indulgence in his passionate pastime (“I’ve been hunting, and also to my brother’s, and tomorrow I’m going hunting again a long way off for wolves”), should be taken with a pood of salt: “There’s now only the family here—just Styopa—and I would like to begin work but I can’t because of the war. Whether I’m in a good or bad frame of mind, the thought of the war overclouds everything for me. Not the war itself, but the problem of our insolvency which must be resolved at once. […]”XLIII

  Sofia sympathized with his writer’s block. She recalled him explaining to her at the time of this Turkish war: “I can’t do any work. I can’t write while the war is on. Just as when a fire is raging somewhere, there’s nothing that can be accomplished.”XLIV Nothing except visiting a monastery and hanging out with friends and hunting wolves.

  In mid-August, Tolstoy wrote and thanked Strakhov again:XLV “How grateful I am to you for your work on Anna Karenina.—I read through [Katkov’s] Russian Herald article and was very annoyed at this confident impudence […] but now I’ve calmed down.”XLVI

  About Anna Karenina being blamed for a perceived increase of suicide, Strakhov wrote Tolstoy: “In the Voice, from August 14, a columnist writes: ‘but suicide doesn’t stop and even more often ones are throwing themselves on the rails, like Anna Karenina; isn’t this the influence of this novel?’—this is strange! I would think that at the time of war there wouldn’t be suicides.”XLVII

  Not only that, but could anyone be persuaded to commit suicide by Anna Karenina? How many suicides besides Tolstoy’s own did it prevent?

  Strakhov, still devotedly on the job, wrote Tolstoy: “If it would at all alleviate you that you don’t read the corrections of Anna Karenina, I’d be very glad to, because, really, that work is especially pleasant to me. I very much love that finally it will be published spaciously and clearly so that it will be doubly easy for the reader; I attribute a lot to my punctuation—and I imagine with how much delight the readers will be who are reading it for the first time.”XLVIII Tolstoy of course accepted his pal’s offer.

  In a September letter, in the midst of proofreading the novel, Strakhov summarized for Tolstoy the reviews of Part 8, and had a suggestion:

  Of the reproaches that they have made, only one has sense. Everyone noticed that you don’t want to dwell on Karenina’s death. And you told me that you were against heightening that pity which was excited there. I ever since have not understood that feeling that has guided you. Maybe I can guess, but help me. The latest version of that death-scene is so dry that it’s frightening. I, however, think that it’s scarcely comfortable to offer readers a new edition when all the details of that ending have already been etched into their memories. I am sending you both editions—copied out, and I’m ashamed to trouble you, tearing you away from your new work [ha!]—I ask you to look again whether you want to leave the second?

  The printing is going along all right, though the typography does not do what it could. I, however, am corresponding with Ris.XLIX

  Strakhov’s assessment of Anna’s death as “dry” is one that has puzzled me. Tolstoy drives with Anna down to Hell. Tolstoy’s revisions for the book edition
only heightened the intensity, and this upset Strakhov.

  Here is Anna’s suicide in the Russian Herald:

  The first wagon came, the second only began to come up. Taking off from her arm the red little bag, she went even closer and bent under the wagon. And feeling that she was completing something important, more important than anything that she had done in her life, she as by habit raised her hand, crossed herself and leaning with her hands on her shoulders on the crossties, went down on her knees and bent her head. The customary gesture of crossing herself called up in her soul a whole series of memories of the important moments of her life, particularly as a girl and child. She felt that she loved life in a way she had never loved it before. “Where am I? What am I doing? Why?” She wanted to get up, but something gigantic, relentlessly merciless, gripped her, pushed and dragged her by the back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said. The dirty sand and coal came nearer to her sight. She fell face first onto them. A peasant saying something worked on the iron. And the candle by which she was reading the book filled with anxiety, misery, insults and evil, flickered, flared, reddened, and completely extinguished.L

  Those two sentences I italicized did not get into the novel. They provide a hard detail. It’s a true detail, but Tolstoy didn’t after all want it. It would dirty Anna, if only superficially.

  If the magazine scene was not as intense as in the final version, it was because in Tolstoy’s head her suicide was not over. There was more he had to see and imagine, and Strakhov was shocked—because the final version is even more devastating. There’s no gainsaying Strakhov’s argument that Anna’s death wouldn’t have etched itself into the memories of the readers, but its intensification or heightening (increased “dryness”?) would be felt rather than compared to the original. Her death is so overwhelmingly, terrifyingly experiential. There’s nothing comparable to it in the arts except perhaps Don Giovanni’s being dragged into Hell near the end of Mozart’s opera.