Tolstoy shows us a parallel storyline, that of Levin and Kitty, who enjoy a stable if somewhat dull marriage that is based not on carnal love, but on mutual respect and sacrifice. Is Tolstoy against the idea of romantic passion?
Kind of. Levin, Tolstoy’s alter ego in the novel, is motivated not by his passion for Kitty, but by the intellectual notion of domestic life, the concept of creating a family.
Anna Karenina is punished by Tolstoy, who writes the story from an omniscient God-like point of view. In a way, Anna’s punishment is to be expected – Lev Nikolaevich had forewarned readers by giving his book an epigraph of a scary Bible quote: ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.’
So Anna Karenina pays, first with her social status, then with her sanity, finally with her life. All because she made the wrong choices. But what are those wrong choices? What is, in the end, the fateful decision Anna has to pay for?
She doesn’t pay for having an extramarital affair. Nor does she pay for abandoning her child, something Tolstoy would not have considered particularly wrong. Karenina is punished for betraying her own nature, her Russianness. Trying to feed her romantic and sexual desires, Anna Karenina forgot Tatyana’s lesson: that life is not about happiness – it’s about meaning. For that, she deserves to be crushed by a train.
29
THE MORNING AFTER THE first snowfall I awoke to the sound of metal shovels scraping the asphalt in the street. I made coffee and toast and sat by the balcony. Down in the courtyard, street sweepers in orange uniforms were gathering piles of snow, then loading the snow onto their trucks. The sky was cloudless, cosmos blue. The roofs of the city were covered in white.
I checked my phone and saw that Lena had not replied to my text message. I showered, put on winter clothes, went down to the street. In the metro, I prepared mentally for my monthly meeting with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. Typically, after talking about the weather, I would tell her what I was reading, which, to her disappointment, was rarely academic books or articles but mostly novels, the classics, which she thought I should have known by now. She would then give me some pointers for my research, recommend further reading and, when we ran out of things to say, we would discuss politics, history or whatever was in the news.
I had to admit that I wasn’t dedicating much time to my research, at least not to the more conventional part – reading scholarly papers, meeting professors, visiting the library. Come to think of it, I hadn’t been to the library in weeks. Not that I wasn’t working, but getting to know Russian women was taking up most of my time. Why should I bother with dusty old literary theories – I thought, as the metro sped through the tunnels – when I can spend my time reading Chekhov and meeting real women?
I arrived at the university before eleven, just in time for our meeting. When I entered her office, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was reading at her desk, hidden behind stacks of books and papers.
‘Please sit down,’ she said. ‘Let me boil some water.’
She approached a side table under the bookshelves, switched the rusty kettle on. The water must have been hot because it boiled in a few seconds.
‘Finally, the snow,’ she said, sitting at her desk with two steaming cups of tea before her. ‘So late in the season. If the weather keeps changing year after year, soon we’ll have no winter at all. You know, in soviet times winters were cold and dry. They always came at the same time of year.’
‘Everything was better organised in the Soviet Union,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ she said, missing the irony of my remark. ‘Everything worked back then. Not like now. Don’t believe what they tell you in the West, Martin, life was much better then. Life was dignified.’
I sat across from her at her desk, keeping steady, afraid to lean back in case my wobbly chair fell apart. ‘It must have been an interesting time.’
‘Good times indeed,’ she said softly, speaking not to me but to the tea bag she was taking out of her cup. ‘You know, back in the 1970s, I used to travel a lot. I had to attend academic congresses and literary seminars all across the Soviet Union. It was wonderful. We even had seminars in Sochi, Martin, can you imagine?’
‘Yes, Sochi.’
The fabled seminars in Sochi must have been important for Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, because she mentioned them almost every time we met.
‘We stayed in a beautiful dom otdykha by the sea,’ she went on, ‘very quiet and peaceful, and we had academic discussions until late in the night. And everything was paid for by the trade union! Everything, Martin, can you imagine?’
‘Everything.’
She took a sip of tea, placed the cup back on the table. She looked at me, her thick glasses steamed up. Her golden tooth was framed by a dead smile, her thoughts surely lost in the 1970s. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna belonged to the generation of Muscovites who were too old and too soviet to embrace the changes that the perestroika had brought to the country.
‘Believe me,’ she said. ‘Train, accommodation, meals, everything was covered. And look at things now, with our pitiful university salaries, we can hardly afford to buy bread and kolbasa. And the streets of Moscow are full of brainless oligarchs driving expensive German cars. Russia is a bardak.’
‘Some things seem to be better now,’ I said, trying to cheer her up a little. ‘You know, with the new president. The economy is doing great.’
‘Nothing’s changed. Don’t be fooled because you live in the centre of Moscow, Martin. Most people in this country don’t have enough to eat.’
I unwrapped a block of chocolate I had bought in the metro, broke it into pieces and placed it on the desk, among the stacks of books. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna took the biggest piece and bit it with gusto.
‘Martin, you are going to have to work a bit harder, you know. I haven’t seen any real work from you in the last two or three months.’
She took a sip of tea.
‘I’ve been doing some interesting reading lately,’ I said. ‘I’ve gone through a lot of Chekhov, as you recommended.’
‘It’s good that you read the works of Anton Pavlovich,’ she said, ‘but, as I told you before, proper research is not only about reading the books. You need to read academic papers, talk to experts, compare views. You need to check those sociological studies of women that we talked about. I suppose that’s not what you do when you go out at night. After all, Martin, you are in Moscow to write your thesis, not to go to discoteks. This is MGU, the Moscow State University. Students all over would kill for the chance you have to work in this faculty.’
I straightened my back and gripped my cup of tea. ‘You are absolutely right, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. I do need to focus a bit more. But, you know, at this stage of my research I’m trying to learn more about real people.’
‘In what sense?’
‘Before writing about literary characters, I feel I need to learn about the real Russian mentality. You know, about the intricacies of the Mysterious Russian Soul.’
I’d learned by now that Russians loved to hear the expression Mysterious Russian Soul. It made them feel special, unique. The Russians I met often referred to the Mysterious Russian Soul to describe deep feelings that, I was told, a foreigner like me would never be able to comprehend.
‘Martin, you have been in Moscow for more than a year. The Russian soul has no more mysteries for you. It’s about time you started to put what you’ve learned down on paper. You need to write your thesis. Otherwise you might end up losing your scholarship.’
There was no point arguing with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. In her long academic life, she’d surely seen too many students trying to bullshit their way out of work. I was not going to win her over with my revolutionary methodology of using dyevs as primary sources.
Then, out of nowhere, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna launched into a lecture about the lishniy chelovek, the superfluous man, a type of male character common in nineteenth-century Russian literature. ‘Superfluous men,’ Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was saying, ‘are typically born into wealth and p
rivilege. They are sensitive men, like you, Martin. They are also very cynical. You know, they disregard social values.’ She took her glasses off and wiped them.
‘Why superfluous?’ I asked.
‘They don’t contribute anything positive to society. They suffer existential boredom. Often, they end up challenging other men to useless duels.’
‘Existential boredom,’ I said.
She put her glasses back on, now smiling. ‘Of course the father of all superfluous men, the model to follow, is Evgeny Onegin himself.’
I glanced around the cramped office, at the piles of books on the floor, at the book-lined walls, at the small window, partly obscured by books. I remembered how puzzled I was when, during one of our first meetings, I’d spotted the brown adhesive tape around the window frame. By now, at the start of my second winter in Moscow, I’d learned that the tape was a necessity in old buildings, to avoid a freezing draught seeping in during the cold months.
Looking back at Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s smile, I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me, or truly accusing me of being superfluous.
‘There are other examples,’ she said, ‘of course. I presume you’ve read Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man.’
‘Not yet.’
‘You could also say that our dear Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time is one of them. And, of course, our good old friend Oblomov.’
‘Oblomov,’ I said. ‘I’ve read that.’ Goncharov’s Oblomov was the story of this guy who’s so bored and uninterested in the world that he spends a large part of the book trying to get out of bed.
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was now pointing her finger at me. ‘Martin, tell me, are you a superfluous man?’
‘I’m not into duels, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I’m serious,’ she said.
‘I don’t know, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. I admit that my contribution to society is rather limited. But existential boredom, I don’t know.’
‘Think about it,’ she said.
In the end, I agreed to bring an entire outline of thesis chapters to our next meeting. We then talked about the impossible traffic in Moscow and she gave me a speech – a version of which I’d heard often from other Muscovites – about the city having the most efficient and beautiful metro system in the world.
Before leaving her office, I placed two theatre tickets on her desk – Chekhov’s Three Sisters at Taganskaya.
‘This is for you,’ I said. I’d been told that MGU professors expected little presents every now and then from their students. She stood up and thanked me for the tickets, said she would take her daughter to the theatre with her.
As I left Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s office I was wondering who, among men, is not superfluous.
30
I HAD SOME SPARE TIME after seeing Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, so I decided to visit the university’s second-hand bookshops. Browsing through the Russian literature section I found an edition of War and Peace in two volumes, printed in 1944, with cardboard covers and a beautiful old-paper smell. I bought the two volumes for a hundred and forty rubles, about the price of a vodka shot in Propaganda.
I had arranged to meet Ira for lunch at the main stolovaya. I found her standing outside the entrance, reading a book in English. We said hello and I showed her my purchase. She seemed unimpressed.
‘Sergey’s mum has so many of these old books,’ she said. ‘We store them at the dacha.’ She dropped her book into a plastic bag. ‘Let’s eat. I’m starving.’
We stood at the end of the food queue. Ira looked thinner, her watery eyes brighter. When we reached the front, a sour-faced babushka with a paper kitchen hat loaded our trays with borsch, chicken, buckwheat. To drink we each took a glass of syrupy kompot. At the cashier’s desk I pointed at both our trays, but Ira insisted on paying for her own food.
‘It’s nice to be back at the university,’ I said, as we sat at one of the big tables by the window. I could see the courtyard covered in fresh snow. ‘I hardly come down these days.’
‘How’s the research going?’
‘I’m reading stuff,’ I said. ‘Thinking, meeting people. Just not writing that much. What about you, how are things?’
‘Not that good.’
I had learned by now that, whenever confronted by a ‘how are you’ or ‘how are things’, Russians rarely answered with a simple ‘fine, thanks’. They saw the question not as a polite greeting formula, but as a welcome chance to enumerate the many problems life had recently dumped on them.
‘What’s wrong?’ I was dissecting the chicken with my knife and fork, trying to extract some meat from the skinny thigh.
‘Sergey.’ Ira slurped a spoonful of soup. ‘He does nothing all day, just drinks beer, watches TV.’
‘What about the photography?’
‘Not even that any more. Not inspired, he says.’
‘What can you do,’ I said, smiling. ‘Sergey’s an artist.’
‘He’s my boyfriend,’ Ira said, gesturing at me with a piece of black bread, ‘and I love him with all my heart, but I’m tired of his laziness.’
‘Give him a break. He’s probably just going through a difficult phase.’
She held up the piece of black bread, which seemed to stand for Sergey in our conversation. ‘I don’t care if he wants to do photography or painting or whatever he wants, but he could have finished his degree and got a real job as well. In the end all he does is talk and talk and no action. I don’t know, sometimes I question the whole thing between us.’
I realised what looked different about Ira. She was wearing make-up. Eyeliner, shadow, powder – you could hardly see the dark circles around her eyes.
‘All talk and no action,’ I said. ‘Sergey’s a dreamer, a classic Russian idealist.’
Ira bit into her black bread. ‘A what?’
‘A Russian idealist. You know, a typical character in Chekhov’s works. Nabokov writes about this in his Lectures on Russian Literature.’ I took my red notebook out of my backpack and started to flip through the pages.
‘You and your Chekhov. The world is not a book, Martin. There is literature and there is reality.’
‘Here it is,’ I said, pointing at my own handwriting. ‘The Russian idealist, Nabokov says, is an intellectual who combines lofty dreams and human decency with an inability to put his ideals into action. Just like Sergey.’
I smiled.
Ira didn’t. She stared down at my notebook, lost in thought. ‘Sergey’s a drunk,’ she said. ‘He has no lofty dreams, he just wants to drink all day and maybe, one day, if he feels like it, take his stupid black and white photographs that nobody needs.’
A group of young students sat on the other side of our table.
‘Lucky you can support him.’
‘I don’t earn that much,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘They exploit the Russian staff in our firm. American colleagues doing the same job as me get three or four times my salary. It’s so unfair. In the end, after sending money to my family and paying the bills, I can’t really save much. And, you know, I would like to rent my own apartment one day. Sergey’s mother is very nice, but the place is too small for the three of us.’
‘This chicken is all bone,’ I said. ‘There’s no flesh.’
‘Welcome to Russia,’ Ira said, in English.
Through the large window, I saw five or six students having a snowball fight. They seemed to be having fun, running after each other. I thought it would be nice to join them. There was something about fresh snow, a promise of renewal and peace.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘Lena left me.’
‘Again?’
I nodded. ‘Yesterday. I think this time it’s for real.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You must have done something.’
‘I didn’t do anything. She found a hair in my bed.’
‘Another girl’s hair?’ Ira asked.
‘I guess. Long and black.’
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br /> ‘You’re such an asshole.’
‘I told Lena it was probably an old hair caught in the blanket, but she didn’t want to listen. She just started to cry.’
‘And she left? Just like that?’
‘First she asked me if I loved her,’ I said.
‘What did you say?’
‘What was I supposed to say? Anyway, she was all emotional, not listening.’
‘Western men, you’re all pussies.’
‘Then it occurred to me that the hair could be from my cleaning lady.’
‘Is that possible?’ Ira asked.
‘Maybe, who knows.’
‘You don’t know what your cleaning lady looks like?’
‘Perhaps it was her hair. Anyway, I told Lena I thought the hair belonged to the cleaning lady, but it was too late. She was too pissed off.’
‘Of course,’ Ira said, ‘she didn’t believe your bullshit.’
‘It’s not that she didn’t believe me. She chose not to believe me.’
Ira put her empty soup plate aside. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, she preferred the drama of finding another lover’s hair over the triviality of finding a hair from my cleaning lady.’
‘I see.’ Ira shook her head. ‘And, I presume, that’s because she’s a woman?’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘That’s because she’s Russian.’
31
WHEN THE INTERCOM RANG I was lying on the couch, reading a book. I glanced at my watch – almost midnight. I placed the book on the coffee table, face down so as not to lose the page, walked over to the entrance, picked up the receiver.
‘Martin, it’s Sergey. Are you alone?’
‘Sergey? Come up.’
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