Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Tolstoy replied:

  I didn’t answer your last two letters, dear Nikolay Nikolaevich. You think up excuses to apologize to me, and I in the whole letter don’t know how to begin thanking you, and I’m not thanking you because otherwise the whole letter would be filled with only thanks: and you’re bored probably for all your work on this edition, and for the unusual attention that you give to it, and for the summations of the journals about Karenina, which I wouldn’t want to read but know that I’m very pleased. […] As to your proposal to add the words to the corrections, I’m grateful, but if possible have them send them to me and I’ll look. […] You understood from my letter that I was at work. No. I hunt and I assemble, but I can’t sit at my desk other than to write letters. […]

  I feel myself today in bad spirits and I’m writing poorly and, I’m afraid, coldly, but I always want to express how much I feel for you—always with a carefully respectful tenderness.LI

  The Jubilee editors write that Strakhov’s proposal was to restore Anna’s confused exclamations: “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” in the last paragraph of Part 7. Tolstoy had cut them from the book edition but he relented to Strakhov’s request and restored them.LII I could do without them.

  * * *

  Sofia wrote to her sister on September 28 about Tolstoy’s mood: “Levochka is somewhat gloomy. He either spends whole days hunting or he sits in the room silently reading; if he argues or speaks he’s gloomy and unhappy. The war very much disturbs him and so he can’t write.”LIII That same day, from where he was attending to regional election business, he sent Sofia a telegram to say that he would be home the next day.LIV Occasionlly we can see for a fleeting moment Tolstoy as Vronsky and Sofia as forlorn Anna. But unimaginative Vronsky, even though he once shot himself, never got depressed, or even gloomy, or sat at a desk not composing a novel. And Sofia, though she would try several times over the next four decades to kill herself, never committed suicide.

  In mid-October Tolstoy corresponded with Strakhov about the Anna Karenina corrections for the complete book, which would be called “the second edition,” as opposed to the “first edition,” which was the magazine serialization. “I’m ashamed to look at the last page of Anna Karenina which you copied out,” Tolstoy told Strakhov. “Of course I agree with you and with the insertion. […] I’m still doing nothing except hunting and shooting hares, and feel ill physically and morally. I’m depressed. But still I often think about you, as always, and love you.”LV

  Strakhov was working away at the corrections and Tolstoy was again in the dumps. He was free of what he thought of as the disgusting novel, which he had been blaming for his depression and sense of purposelessness—but he was now free of it and doing what he did in other fall-times: hunting! doing business! feeling low! He hadn’t decided to give up fiction, but the grand “people’s novel” was not coming to him and neither would the novel of the Decembrists.

  So was Anna Karenina really a distraction?

  No.

  He wrote out his own suicide in it and thereby prevented it from really happening. To disentangle his depression, the supreme literary artist needed the challenge of composing the novel; art forced him to reach his cleverest, deepest, best self. He complained about the novel being an obstacle, but it was exactly what he needed. Its flower was Anna.

  Depressed, he wrote again to Strakhov, who was grieving over the death of a friend:

  I only wanted to write you, dear Nikolay Nikolaevich, namely in order to ask you what you’re doing with yourself, whether or not you are in woe, if you really couldn’t be attracted to work, when I received your letter.

  I’m very sorry for you; by the tone in which you spoke about the deceased, I feel that he was very close to you and dear.—It seems to me that from what I know about him from you that I clearly understand his character, and he is very sweet to me. The more I feel for you the less I’m able to cheer you up, and I very lately was in the same depression, sadness, beaten state of soul. Really, I don’t know where it came from; if I knew, I would fight it. But the two main pretexts of my sadness are my idleness and complete shame, and the situation of my wife, sick and pregnant, in preparation of a December birth. A much less important reason: this tormenting war.LVI

  I know that it’s wrong of me to complain, but I do so in my own heart, and to no one but you. It’s agonising and humiliating to live in complete idleness and it’s repulsive to console myself by saying that I’m sparing myself and waiting for inspiration. It’s all petty and worthless. If I were alone I wouldn’t be a monk, I would be a yurodivy [a holy fool], i.e., I wouldn’t value anything in life and wouldn’t do anybody any harm.

  Please don’t try to console me, especially by saying that I’m a writer. I’ve been consoling myself like this for too long already, and better than you can, but it has no effect; just listen to my complaints and that will console me. […]LVII

  They were both in low spirits.

  Tolstoy resorted to his usual remedies: first, the complete indulgence of his passion for hunting. Sofia remembered: “Lev Nikolaevich was alarmed by my situation [her pregnancy; she couldn’t walk “without assistance”]. He often said there was an emptiness in his head and he couldn’t work. So all during October he would go on daily hunts either with the borzois or with the hounds. Every feast-day and every Sunday he would take with him his elder sons, Serezha and Ilya. Neither the weather or any sort of fatigue would stop Lev Nikolaevich—except for guests, but sometimes not even then.”LVIII

  But the weather did finally interfere with his outdoor recreation, she recalled: “When hunting got uncomfortable, in November Lev Nikolaevich began taking up music once again, and would play for up to several hours at a time. Sometimes we would play four-handed pieces. I was not a skillful player to begin with, and my large tummy kept making this activity more and more impossible. My situation kept causing more and more embarrassment and alarm for Lev Nikolaevich.”LIX

  Can we imagine Tolstoy embarrassed and alarmed by her pregnancy? Was he always like this? Sofia had been pregnant at least nine times. Does she mean that he worried she would bump the unborn baby’s head as she leaned into the keyboard? Where does the embarrassment come into it? Were they playing for company and was her pregnancy especially conspicuous at the piano? Did she simply mean us to understand that he was fussy and annoying when she was pregnant, a “situation” that he had put her in?

  On November 11, Strakhov wrote to complain about the slowness of the printing of Anna Karenina by Ris. It was only half-done and Ris wasn’t answering Strakhov’s letters.LX Tolstoy replied to Strakhov to say that for his part he was just sitting around, feeling disgusted by the war and playing the piano.

  We learn from his letter to his brother from the second half of November that Sofia was due December 2, “carries very heavily,” and “is quite unwell.”LXI Tolstoy communicated much the same about Sofia’s health to Fet.LXII

  Her health was plenty to worry about, but we seem to be in a different atmosphere. The creating of Anna Karenina has gone clear out of his head.

  And what does that mean?

  It means that when Tolstoy-the-artist’s work was done he was no longer in that spirit. It’s not exactly the shoemaker’s reaction to having made another pair of shoes; it’s more like an architect’s having completed a project and now that it’s done, he doesn’t have much to do with when or how the tenants move in.

  But his mood continued to be gloomy. So Tolstoy bought more horses. In late November he wrote Fet again, asking him to send him the stallion “about which we spoke” and wondering if Fet would sell the gray mares. He added: “I recognize that I’ve fallen out of spirits and I’m not even fighting it. I wait.”LXIII

  Sofia gave birth to their son Andrey at three in the morning on December 6.

  Tolstoy wrote to D’yakov and to his sister on the birth date to give them the news. It was, he told Maria, “easier than we expected.”LXIV Sofia, however, remembered it differently: �
�The labor was difficult and dragged on for an extended period of time. The baby’s head was exceptionally large, and it took me a fairly long time to recover after the birth.”LXV

  * * *

  I confess that even after I had been working for years on this book I became so accustomed to the renunciating Tolstoy that I kept ignoring all the evidence that he was an active businessperson. We are used to believing in Tolstoy’s dramatic breaks from his past because he himself made such a big deal of them. But Tolstoy, like all the rest of us, never stopped being himself. There was business to be taken care of, and sometime in the week after his son Andrey’s birth, he wrote a good business note to Nikolay Nagornov. (It was also about family business, as Tolstoy told his niece’s husband that baby Andrey hadn’t even been named yet.) He insisted to Nagornov that he wouldn’t pay a bookseller of Anna Karenina 35% but only the agreed-upon 30%.

  He was not on a religious crusade or a guilt trip. He was wheeling and dealing again, but his interest in business feels surprising, similar to finding out that one’s priest or rabbi or imam is good at poker. But why am I surprised when for forty years I have been reading how Levin, Tolstoy’s conventional alter-ego, alertly does business?

  Is it that Anna Karenina is for me a holy book, a work of art, and so how could its creator think of money?

  No.

  Reading of Trollope’s life, I always admire his publishing negotiations; I root for him to get the largest sums for his novels, and so I do here, for Tolstoy.

  Tolstoy wrote V. A. Islavin about buying land for him. He also mentioned that Sofia had just had a baby: “And though for me it’s an old thing, it always excites and touches and makes me feel joyful.”LXVI

  On the same day as his letter to Islavin, he wrote Strakhov. He mentioned his wife’s childbirth and that he had started writing. The Jubilee editors say that he was working not only on the Decembrists novel but on an unfinished religious-philosophical work, by which I believe they mean Confession.

  The third letter of the day, the longest and most personal, was to B. N. Chicherin, an old acquaintance who had sent him a book. It’s on these days of multiple letters that we can see the evidence of Tolstoy’s mood and audience. We can’t really see that in the novel. We can’t point at a sentence or paragraph or chapter and say: Tolstoy was in a bad mood, a feisty mood, a cheerful mood. We can make those assessments with the letters. Tolstoy would soon develop an unpleasant attitude about child-death (they’re better off!), but here he was speaking as one with experience of suffering. The Chicherins had lost their infant children a few years before:

  I heard about your woe, and both my wife and I sympathize. I’m glad that you now have hope and a goal in life, but my judgment argues with yours. I don’t agree that for the health and safety of the baby it’s more convenient to live in Moscow. In the village the doctor is far but God is much closer than in the city. At least it always seems so to me. Especially in the Samara region, where we were living with a baby at the breast 130 versts from town. And this baby died within a month after we returned—in the hands of a doctor.

  I’m writing you from the birth room of my wife, who 5 days ago gave birth to a little one, the 9th baby in all, of whom 6 are living and the oldest boy already speaks with a bass and translates Cicero.LXVII

  He was in an energetic mood as he encouraged the Chicherins not to give up on having children nor to worry too much about where to have the children.

  He wrote his brother to invite him to Andrey’s christening.LXVIII

  In late December, Strakhov wrote Tolstoy about the final corrections of the novel:

  Maybe you’re finding Karenina a strange juxtaposition to your new baby. But for me it is so. Three days ago I sent off the last sheet of corrections—and ever since then I’m still full up with Karenina; toward the end of the reading of corrections, the excited delight continued (for me) and I was nearly in tears. I fell terribly in love with your novel. When I hear judgments of it, which continue (in The Voice three articles by Martov I still haven’t read), everything comes to my thought from the old princess about Levin: “He’s so light-minded!” That’s absolutely the way all the judges understand your novel—judging your light-mindedness by their own.

  I say only the seriousness of your tone is simply frightening. There has never been such a serious novel in the world.

  In reward I ask you—have them send me two copies of the novel—one for me, the other to give to reading.LXIX

  Strakhov is reminding us that amid its everlasting attractions, Anna Karenina is most terribly serious and that despite his own recent wholly absorbed work on it, he knows that he will want to read it again. There is no literary experience like it.

  * * *

  As 1877 came to a close, Anna Karenina remained seemingly completely out of Tolstoy’s head and heart. Whatever labor he had put into it, whatever feeling he had poured into it, it was past. The novel came to represent a kind of life and type of fiction that he could not approve of; it was full of his life during an unhappy and difficult time. It evoked shame. In 1881, he wrote V. V. Stasov: “Concerning Karenina, I assure you that for me that abomination does not exist, and it is only annoying to me that there are people to whom it is of any value.”LXX

  The Jubilee editors tell us that in the Moscow News of December 25, 1877, an advertisement appeared: “In the bookstore of Ivan Grigor’evich Solov’ev, on Strastniy Boulevard, in the house of Alekseev, is the just published and put out for sale book Anna Karenina. Novel. (In 8 parts, 3 volumes.) By Count L’ev Nik. Tolstoy. Cost 6 rubles, by post 7 rubles. At the same time for sale: The Works of Count Tolstoy, 11 volumes, in which are placed Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, stories, War stories, War and Peace and the novel Anna Karenina. Price 16 rubles, 50 kop., by post 18 rubles.”LXXI

  But is it possible that Solov’ev had advance copies on December 25? Or was he just tantalizing the appetites of his customers for the mid-January publication? According to Strakhov, after all, the last corrections had only just been made.

  On December 29, Tolstoy was in Moscow “to look for a new teacher,”LXXII recalled Sofia, after they had fired the drunk tutor Jules Rey, who, Tolstoy wrote Strakhov, “had become intolerable because of his rudeness and bad character.”LXXIII

  Poor Rey never wrote his own account of living with the Tolstoys and neither did their other employees, except one German governess. Why didn’t they? By the 1890s, they would have understood that Lev Tolstoy was world famous. The Tolstoys’ tutors and governesses were discreet in ways that many visitors, relatives, friends, and future biographers would not be.

  * * *

  Cover of the first book edition of Anna Karenina.LXXIV

  The appearance of Anna Karenina in book form did not shake the world and inspire Russian-language learning. But it should have. In my own time-traveling fantasies, I like to think that I would have been the first in line at Solov’ev’s shop the morning it went on sale and that I would have celebrated by reading it right away, cover to cover.

  In 1878 there were no publication parties or bookstore signings. Sofia, however, recalled how she came by her “Anna Karenina ring”:

  When the novel Anna Karenina was completely finished and published, I asked Lev Nikolaevich for a small gift in return for all my zealous transcribing. And when he went to Moscow [she does not indicate the date], he bought me a very fine ring, with a ruby in the centre and two diamonds—one on either side. I always liked any kind of jewelry, finery and sparkling stones, and I am wearing this ring right now on my finger.LXXV

  Sofia’s “Anna Karenina” ring.LXXVI

  I can imagine Tolstoy at a bookstore or toy store, but how about at a jewelry store? Was he a tough customer, or did clever salespeople (salesmen, I suspect) rub their hands in happy anticipation?

  * * *

  Tolstoy’s comments on the novel would be few and far between, but a couple of weeks after publication of the complete edition, he was provoked into a famous statement by a teacher, S.
A. Rachinsky. Tolstoy wrote:

  Your opinion about Anna Karenina seems to me wrong. [Christian’s note: “Rachinsky had complained of a fundamental weakness in the construction of Anna Karenina. ‘There is no architecture in it. Two themes are developed side by side, and developed magnificently, which are in no way connected with each other.’ ”] On the contrary, I’m proud of the architecture—the arches have been constructed in such a way that it is impossible to see where the keystone is. And that is what I was striving for most of all. The structural link is not the plot or the relationships (friendships) between the characters, but an inner link. Believe me, this is not unwillingness to accept criticism—especially from you whose opinion is always too indulgent; but I’m afraid that in skimming through the novel you didn’t notice its inner content. I wouldn’t quarrel with the man who said “que me veut cette sonate” [“what does this sonata want me to do”], but if you wish to speak about the lack of a link, then I can’t help saying—you are probably looking for it in the wrong place, or we understand the word “link” differently; but what I understand by link—the very thing that made the work important for me—this link is there—look for it and you will find it. Please don’t think that I’m touchy—really, I’m not writing because of that, but because when I got your letter I began to think about all this and wanted to tell you. And the first impulse est le bon [is the good one].LXXVII

  Having considered all of Tolstoy’s numerous restarts and revisions of the novel (not to mention his misgivings and expressions of disgust), this post-game claim of his about its architectural “keystone” and the all-important “link” is puzzling. Did we miss something? Tolstoy never let on what link or keystone it was that he meant.