Pierre went back, but not to the campfire, to his comrades, but to an unhitched cart, where there was no one. Crossing his legs and lowering his head, he sat on the cold ground by the wheel of the cart and stayed there motionless for a long time, thinking. More than an hour went by. No one disturbed Pierre. Suddenly he burst into his fat, good-natured laugh, so loudly that people from different sides turned in astonishment towards this strange, evidently solitary laughter.
“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: “The soldier wouldn’t let me go. They caught me, they locked me up. They’re holding me prisoner. Who, me? Me—my immortal soul! Ha, ha, ha!…Ha, ha, ha!…” he laughed, with tears brimming in his eyes.
Some man got up and came to see what the strange, big man was laughing about by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, went further away from the curious fellow, and looked around.
The enormous, endless bivouac, noisy earlier with the crackling of campfires and the talking of men, was growing still; the red flames of the campfires were dying out and turning pale. The full moon stood high in the bright sky. Forests and fields, invisible earlier beyond the territory of the camp, now opened out in the distance. And further beyond these forests and fields could be seen the bright, wavering endless distance calling one to itself. Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!” thought Pierre. “And all this they’ve caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!” He smiled and went to his comrades to lie down and sleep.
By any reckoning this is marvelous. Did Tolstoy, somewhere in the abyss of himself, recall Hamlet confronting his treacherous schoolmates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and telling them that Denmark is a prison?
HAMLET: Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too narrow for your mind.
HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
(Act 2, Scene 2, lines 244–48)
The nutshell has become a boarded-up shed; a king of infinite space becomes “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!” Pierre Bezukhov doubtless doubles for the inward Tolstoy, and yet his Hamlet aspect prevails until he comes to know Platon Karataev and absorbs an earthly wisdom.
* * *
—
War and Peace is infinite. As an aesthetic artifact it rivals the masterworks of what once we regarded as literary culture: Tanakh, Iliad, Athenian tragedy, Plato, Pindar, Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Milton, Molière, Racine, Swift, Pope, Goethe, Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, Pushkin, Leopardi, Dickens, Melville, Walt Whitman, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Chekhov, Ibsen, Yeats, Proust, and Joyce.
Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible, which the old Tolstoy taught himself to read in the original; Homer; Dante; Chaucer; Cervantes; above all Shakespeare: these stand with War and Peace. I myself would add Milton, Goethe, Moby-Dick, Whitman. After that it is a question of individual taste and judgment.
To have written War and Peace, the profoundly troubling Anna Karenina, and the perfect story Hadji Murat is to have given such vitalism to readers that, whatever his moralizings, my primary reactions to Tolstoy are awe and gratitude.
CHAPTER 23
Anna Karenina (1877)
LEO TOLSTOY
I CANNOT REREAD Anna Karenina, particularly in the eloquent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, without becoming unnerved. It is upsetting because Tolstoy’s vitalism drives me to ask questions I cannot answer. Anna Karenina can be called the novel of the drives, since no other narrative centers so fully upon its protagonist’s being so swept away by her will to live that almost nothing else matters to her. Anna’s love for Vronsky has its rivals in Western literature, but I can recall no similar representation of erotic passion quite so intense. Tolstoy explains nothing about Anna’s object-choice to us, whether in idealizing or in reductive terms. What he does show us, with overwhelming persuasiveness, is that there is no choice involved. Anna, vital and attractive in every way, is someone with whom most male readers of the novel fall in love, and Tolstoy clearly loves her almost obsessively. He would not have said that he was Anna, but she resembles something in him, a pulsation more intimate than Levin, his ostensible surrogate, can share.
Why does Anna kill herself? Would we find it as plausible if a contemporary Anna emulated her? Could there be a contemporary Anna? The questions may reduce to: Why did Tolstoy kill her? Did he mean to punish her? I think not. Anna’s suicide saddens us, but it also relieves us from shared suffering. Doubtless it relieved Tolstoy also, who was suffering with her. Other legitimate questions would be: How would Schopenhauer have received Anna’s death? Is it a heroic release, or a failure in endurance?
Tolstoy read Schopenhauer in the interval between War and Peace and Anna Karenina, an uneasy interregnum in which he was defeated by his attempt to write a novel about the era of Peter the Great. His enthusiasm for Schopenhauer was essentially a reaffirmation of his own darkest convictions, since he had always been both an apocalyptic vitalist and a dark moralist appalled by some of the consequences of his own vitalism. Schopenhauer’s Will to Live, with its metaphysical status as the true thing-in-itself, is simply the Tolstoyan natural ethos turned into pathos. The Will to Live is unitary, active, rapacious, indifferent, universal desire, one of the most extraordinary of nineteenth-century hyperboles:
Let us now add the consideration of the human race. The matter indeed becomes more complicated, and assumes a certain seriousness of aspect; but the fundamental character remains unaltered. Here also life presents itself by no means as a gift for enjoyment, but as a task, a drudgery to be performed; and in accordance with this we see, in great and small, universal need, ceaseless cares, constant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme exertion of all the powers of body and mind. Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual on account of his own; but many thousands fall as a sacrifice for it. Now senseless delusions, now intriguing politics, incite them to wars with each other; then the sweat and the blood of the great multitude must flow, to carry out the ideas of individuals, or to expiate their faults. In peace industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all ends of the world, the waves engulf thousands. All strive, some planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving. In this evident disproportion between the trouble and the reward, the will to live appears to us from this point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool, or subjectively, as a delusion, seized by which everything living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that is of no value. But when we consider it more closely, we shall find here also that it is rather a blind pressure, a tendency entirely without ground or motive.
If this is the characterization of the Will to Live, then the metaphysics of the love of the sexes will reduce to a kind of treason:
In between, however, in the midst of the tumult, we see the glances of two lovers meet longingly: yet why so secretly, fearfully, and stealthily? Because these lovers are the traitors who seek to perpetuate the whole want and drudgery, which would otherwise speedily reach an end; this they wish to frustrate, as others like them have frustrated it before.
Schopenhauer presumably would have found this exemplified as much by Levin and Kitty as by Vronsky and Anna, but there he and Tols
toy part, as even Tolstoy is a touch saner upon the metaphysics of sexual love. What matters most about Anna, at least to the reader, is her intensity, her will to live (I deliberately remove the Schopenhauerian capitalization). Anna’s aura renders her first meeting with Vronsky unforgettable for us:
Vronsky followed the conductor to the carriage and at the door to the compartment stopped to allow a lady to leave. With the habitual flair of a worldly man, Vronsky determined from one glance at this lady’s appearance that she belonged to high society. He excused himself and was about to enter the carriage, but felt a need to glance at her once more—not because she was very beautiful, not because of the elegance and modest grace that could be seen in her whole figure, but because there was something especially gentle and tender in the expression of her sweet-looking face as she stepped past him. As he looked back, she also turned her head. Her shining grey eyes, which seemed dark because of their thick lashes, rested amiably and attentively on his face, as if she recognized him, and at once wandered over the approaching crowd as though looking for someone. In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile. She deliberately extinguished the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in a barely noticeable smile.
A benign vitality, however excessive, is what Tolstoy recognized in himself. What he teaches himself in this novel is that a vitality so exuberant transcends benignity as it does every other quality. The brief but overwhelming Chapter XI of Part Two is not only the novel in embryo, and the essence of Anna, but it is also, to me, the most revelatory scene that Tolstoy ever wrote:
That which for almost a year had constituted the one exclusive desire of Vronsky’s life, replacing all former desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, horrible, but all the more enchanting dream of happiness—this desire had been satisfied. Pale, his lower jaw trembling, he stood over her and pleaded with her to be calm, himself not knowing why or how.
‘Anna! Anna!’ he kept saying in a trembling voice. ‘Anna, for God’s sake!…’
But the louder he spoke, the lower she bent her once proud, gay, but now shame-stricken head, and she became all limp, falling from the divan where she had been sitting to the floor at his feet; she would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.
‘My God! Forgive me!’ she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to her breast.
She felt herself so criminal and guilty that the only thing left for her was to humble herself and beg forgiveness; but as she had no one else in her life now except him, it was also to him that she addressed her plea for forgiveness. Looking at him, she physically felt her humiliation and could say nothing more. And he felt what a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has deprived of life. This body deprived of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something horrible and loathsome in his recollections of what had been paid for with this terrible price of shame. Shame at her spiritual nakedness weighed on her and communicated itself to him. But, despite all the murderer’s horror before the murdered body, he had to cut this body into pieces and hide it, he had to make use of what the murderer had gained by his murder.
And as the murderer falls upon this body with animosity, as if with passion, drags it off and cuts it up, so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses. She held his hand and did not move. Yes, these kisses were what had been bought by this shame. Yes, and this one hand, which will always be mine, is the hand of my accomplice. She raised this hand and kissed it. He knelt down and tried to look at her face; but she hid it and said nothing. Finally, as if forcing herself, she sat up and pushed him away. Her face was still as beautiful, but the more pitiful for that.
‘Everything is finished,’ she said. ‘I have nothing but you. Remember that.’
‘How can I not remember what is my very life? For one minute of this happiness…’
‘What happiness?’ she said with loathing and horror, and her horror involuntarily communicated itself to him. ‘For God’s sake, not a word, not a word more.’
She quickly stood up and moved away from him.
‘Not a word more,’ she repeated, and with an expression of cold despair on her face, which he found strange, she left him. She felt that at that moment she could not put into words her feeling of shame, joy, and horror before this entry into a new life, and she did not want to speak of it, to trivialize this feeling with imprecise words. But later, too, the next day and the day after that, she not only found no words in which she could express all the complexity of these feelings, but was unable even to find thoughts in which she could reflect with herself on all that was in her soul.
She kept telling herself: ‘No, I can’t think about it now; later, when I’m more calm.’ But this calm for reflection never came; each time the thought occurred to her of what she had done, of what would become of her and what she ought to do, horror came over her, and she drove these thoughts away.
‘Later, later,’ she kept saying, ‘when I’m more calm.’
But in sleep, when she had no power over her thoughts, her situation presented itself to her in all its ugly nakedness. One dream visited her almost every night. She dreamed that they were both her husbands, that they both lavished their caresses on her. Alexei Alexandrovich wept, kissing her hands and saying: ‘It’s so good now!’ And Alexei Vronsky was right there, and he, too, was her husband. And, marvelling that it had once seemed impossible to her, she laughingly explained to them that this was much simpler and that now they were both content and happy. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she would wake up in horror.
Abruptly, without even an overt hint of the nature of the consummation, Tolstoy places us after the event. Anna’s tragedy, and in some sense Tolstoy’s own, is implicit in this majestic scene. Poor Vronsky, at once victim and executioner, is hopelessly inadequate to Anna’s intensity. There is of course nothing he can say and nothing he can do, because he is the wrong man, and always will be. But who could have been the right man? Levin? Perhaps, but Tolstoy and life (the two are one) would not have it so. The serenity, necessary for reflection, might have come to Anna with Levin, yet that is highly doubtful. Tolstoy himself, her double and brother, her psychic twin, would have been inadequate to Anna, and she to him. Anna’s dream, with both Alexeis happy as her joint husbands, is a peculiar horror to her, because it so horrified Tolstoy. The outrage expressed by D. H. Lawrence at what he judged to be Tolstoy’s murder of Anna might have been mitigated had Lawrence allowed himself to remember that Tolstoy, nearly thirty-five years after Anna, also died in a railroad station.
“Characters like Anna are tragic figures because, for reasons that are admirable, they cannot live divided lives or survive through repression.” That sentence of Martin Price’s is the best I have read about Anna, but I wonder if Anna can be called a tragic figure, any more than she can be what Schopenhauer grimly would have called her, a traitor. Tragedy depends upon division and repression, and Anna is betrayed by nature itself, which does not create men as vital as herself, or, if it does, creates them as savage moralists, like Tolstoy. Anna is too integral for tragedy, and too imbued with reality to survive in any social malforming of reality whatsoever. She dies because Tolstoy could not sustain the suffering it would have cost him to imagine a life she could have borne to go on living.
With a sinuous gesture, Tolstoy centers the opening of Anna Karenina on Anna’s brother, who has been exposed having an affair with the family governess, to the rightful fury of his wife, Dolly:
Stepan Arkadyich was a truthful man concerning his own self. He could not deceive himself into believing that he repented of his behaviour. He could
not now be repentant that he, a thirty-four-year-old, handsome, amorous man, did not feel amorous with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, who was only a year younger than he. He repented only that he had not managed to conceal things better from her. But he felt all the gravity of his situation, and pitied his wife, his children and himself. Perhaps he would have managed to hide his sins better from his wife had he anticipated that the news would have such an effect on her. He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything, simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to be quite the opposite.
‘Ah, terrible! Ay, ay, ay! terrible!’ Stepan Arkadyich repeated to himself and could come up with nothing. ‘And how nice it all was before that, what a nice life we had! She was content, happy with the children, I didn’t hinder her in anything, left her to fuss over them and the household however she liked. True, it’s not nice that she used to be a governess in our house. Not nice! There’s something trivial, banal, in courting one’s own governess. But what a governess!’ (He vividly recalled Mlle Roland’s dark, roguish eyes and her smile.) ‘But while she was in our house, I never allowed myself anything. And the worst of it is that she’s already…It all had to happen at once! Ay, ay, ay! But what to do, what to do?’
There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-women; and so one had to become oblivious in the dream of life.
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 25