Lacking Russian, I rely upon Pevear and Volokhonsky for the irony and charm of this amiable passage, in which we might be hearing the young Tolstoy of Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, and The Cossacks. Knowing all the turmoil and destructiveness to come makes it pardonable for the rereader to share Stepan Arkadyich’s bliss:
“…But what a governess!” (He vividly recalled Mlle Roland’s dark, roguish eyes and her smile.)
Tolstoy, wondrously to the end of his long life, was on fire with lust for women, doubtless engendering his misogyny. At eighty-eight, long beyond the pragmatics of unruly behavior, I marvel at his almost Shakespearean powers of representing women, though he could not cease resenting their sexual potential. Martin Price, interested primarily in a kind of Wittgensteinian conviction that meaning in novels, as in life, is made possible only by “forms of life,” relies upon what I find almost mystical in the Austrian Jewish sage:
It is what human beings say that is false and true; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.
(Philosophical Investigations)
The results in my late friend Price’s insights are both positive and, to me, negative. I think he gets Tolstoy absolutely right on the delayed meeting between Levin and Anna:
When Levin finally meets Anna in Moscow, he is altogether charmed by her seriousness, her beauty, and her intelligence. After a day of largely senseless talk, he is moved by her naturalness and lack of self-consciousness. Levin is moved to make a witticism about French art, which has had so far to go in its return to realism: “They saw poetry in the very fact that they did not lie.” Anna’s face lights up with pleasure. What gives the episode its sadness is not Kitty’s jealousy afterwards, but the disclosure that Anna has “done all she could…to arouse in Levin a feeling of love.” Seductiveness is perhaps the only behavior she allows herself any more with Vronsky, and with other men as a matter of course.
The truth of that saddens me, but I have to yield to it. I rebel when Price gives us what I suppose might be called a Wittgensteinian vision of Anna’s suicide:
At the end we see Anna surrendering to powers of destruction, in her savage torture of herself and Vronsky, in her sad effort to stir the pitying Kitty to jealousy. Her world fills with hatred and disgust; everyone she sees is vicious or filthy. The breakdown of mind creates a stream of consciousness, and the rage of her last hours is the form her vitality takes. Unlike her husband, who finds consolation in fashionable superstition, she finds herself outside all forms of life.
It does not seem to me that Anna’s vitality forms at the end only into rage. I want to return to the scene of Anna’s attempt to seduce Levin, but under the guidance of the Russian Jewish critic Lydia Ginzburg, who, in her 1991 book, On Psychological Prose, breaks her discussion into two columns, the right-hand side leaning to analysis:
“It is exceptionally good, is it not?” Stepan Arkad’evich said, upon noticing that Levin was looking at the portrait.
The excerpt begins with a phrase elicited by an external impression—of the portrait and of Levin looking at it. There is also hidden exultation in Oblonskii’s question. He wants Anna to conquer Levin (Levin’s family principles secretly irritate the wicked Stepan Arkad’evich).
“I have never seen a better portrait.”
Levin answers Oblonskii’s question.
“It is an exceptional likeness, is it not?” said Vorkuev.
Vorkuev interferes in the conversation in order to say something pleasant to his hostess.
Levin glanced from the portrait to the original. A special brilliance lit up Anna’s face when she felt his gaze upon her; Levin blushed, and in order to hide his confusion was about to ask her if it was a long time since she had seen Dar’ia Aleksandrovna, but Anna started talking just as he did:
Levin, confused by the impression Anna has made on him, looks for another topic in order to change the subject. Dolly surfaces logically, both because he is reminded of her by the presence of her husband, and because she is closely related to him and to Anna.
“Ivan Petrovich and I were just now talking about Vashchenkov’s latest pictures. Have you seen them?”
Anna continues a conversational line associatively linked to her portrait.
“Yes, I have,” replied Levin.
An answer to her remark.
“But excuse me, I interrupted you. You were going to say…”
A phrase prompted by the requirements of courtesy.
Levin asked her if she had seen Dolly lately.
Now that the discussion no longer concerns Anna’s portrait but Vashchenkov’s pictures, Levin no longer needs Dolly as a topic, but he is forced to return to her anyway.
“She visited me yesterday. She is very angry with the gymnasium because of Grisha. The Latin master has apparently been unfair to him.”
“Yes I have seen the pictures. I did not really care for them,” Levin said, returning to the subject she had started.
Anna picks up the topic suggested by Levin.
Levin prefers the topic of Vashchenkov with its ensuing discussion of the “new direction in art” to that of Dolly and her children, and he prefers it because he now wants to say “intelligent things” so that Anna will hear them. “This time Levin did not speak in anything like the mechanical way he had spoken that morning. Every word of his conversation with her took on a special meaning.”
What Lydia Ginzburg captures, however tenuously, is that Levin rather inexplicably wants to be seduced, though only visually and verbally. The suggestion is that Levin and Anna are both Tolstoy, divided between two identifications that cannot endure any longer. Let us look closely at Anna’s final moment:
“There!” she said to herself, staring into the shadow of the carriage at the sand mixed with coal poured between the sleepers, “there, right in the middle, and I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself.”
She wanted to fall under the first carriage, the midpoint of which had drawn even with her. But the red bag, which she started taking off her arm, delayed her, and it was too late: the midpoint went by. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling seized her, similar to what she experienced when preparing to go into the water for a swim, and she crossed herself. The habitual gesture of making the sign of the cross called up in her soul a whole series of memories from childhood and girlhood, and suddenly the darkness that covered everything for her broke and life rose up before her momentarily with all its bright past joys. Yet she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the approaching second carriage. And just at the moment when the midpoint between the two wheels came even with her, she threw the red bag aside and, drawing her head down between her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and with a light movement, as if preparing to get up again at once, sank to her knees. And in that same instant she was horrified at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wanted to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and implacable pushed at her head and dragged her over. ‘Lord, forgive me for everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of any struggle. A little muzhik, muttering to himself, was working over some iron. And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.
“I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself”: him is in the first place Vronsky, in the second Karenin, but the third m
ost deserving of punishment is Tolstoy himself. Doubtless he went to his final railway station thinking, “I’ll punish her”—Sophia Behrs Tolstoy—“and be rid of everybody”—eight of my nine surviving children‚ “and of everything in myself that is not peasant, prophet, godlike.”
Hugh McLean, in his 2008 book In Quest of Tolstoy, has an admirably succinct paragraph on the suicide:
Tolstoy begins with the horrendous image of the terrible, inexorable crushing wheels of the train, advancing and colliding with Anna’s body. She has time for one last prayer and then surrenders to the inevitable. The next sentence is ambiguous: there may be a real workman whose presence Anna dimly perceives, linking him with an ominous figure that has appeared in her life several times before, both in reality and in dreams, going back to the workman crushed by a train at the very beginning of the novel (and the beginning of her acquaintance with Vronsky); or this may be only a fantasy, a creature of Anna’s soon-to-be-extinguished brain. Finally, Tolstoy invokes an entirely metaphorical candle by whose light Anna can now read, in her last moments of consciousness, the entire “book” of her life, before the candle goes out forever.
Janet Malcolm in 2015 pungently intimated that Tolstoy was the culprit:
Anna is the special case of poetical sexual awakening turning into terrifying erotomania that reflects Tolstoy’s own famous craziness about sex, which in some sense is what the novel is “about.” The transformation of the wonderful Anna we first meet at the railway station—“the suppressed eagerness which played over her face…as though her nature was so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile”—into the psychotic who throws herself in front of a train is chronicled over the book’s length, and doesn’t add up.
Standard readings of the novel attribute Anna’s descent into madness to the loss of her son and to her ostracism by society. But in fact, as Tolstoy unambiguously tells us, the situation is of her own making. She did not lose her son—she abandoned him when she left for Italy with Vronsky after her recovery from the puerperal fever that propelled Karenin into his “blissful spirituality.” Under its influence, he was willing to give up his son and give Anna a divorce that would permit her to marry Vronsky and rejoin respectable society as, even in those days, divorced women were able to do. But as the novel goes on and Anna’s life unravels, it is as if this opportunity had never arisen. We experience the novel, as we experience our dreams, undisturbed by its illogic. We accept Anna’s disintegration without questioning it. Only later, when we analyze the work, does its illogic become apparent. But by then it is too late to reverse Tolstoy’s spell.
As Malcolm notes, the transformation of the vitalizing Anna from a brimming fount of life to a psychotic “doesn’t add up.” Nor does the breaking apart of her unitive place in aristocratic society make historical sense. We have only Tolstoy to blame and to praise. Does he sacrifice Anna so cruelly to give more life to fresh images that he might hope to beget by breaking her? He lived on for another third of a century. Near the close, he finished but did not publish the heroic Hadji Murat. Considering his gifts, too much of his final decades were thrown away on moralistic nonsense.
And yet he was a great wink of eternity. He fled death, desired literal immortality, at the very end seemed to repudiate everything he had given deep readers who sought power over a figurative universe of death.
CHAPTER 24
Hadji Murat (1896–1904; published posthumously, 1912)
LEO TOLSTOY
TOLSTOY RETURNED to his full splendor in the novella Hadji Murat, which he worked on for some eight years, and chose not to publish.
I have written about Hadji Murat at some length once before in my book The Western Canon (1994). Probably I read it first, in the Maude translation, in about 1953. I have been thinking about it for almost two-thirds of a century, and it still seems to me the best story in the world. Fortunately, I have just reread it in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2009), and, against all expectation, it seems even better than I remember.
The historical Hadji Murat was born just before the turn into the nineteenth century and died in battle in April 1852, making a desperate last stand with just four devoted followers against a large group of Cossack horsemen augmented by Tartar militiamen paid by the Russians. In his celebrated yet now faded novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Ernest Hemingway clearly founds his descriptions of battle on War and Peace. I do not know whether or not Hemingway had read Hadji Murat, but he echoes it in the only episode of For Whom the Bell Tolls that stays in my mind: El Sordo’s last stand. The heroic partisan El Sordo with only four men holds off a large and heavily armed Fascist contingent until he and his followers are destroyed by airplanes.
I admire Hemingway’s short stories, but all his novels are failures. In dismissing For Whom the Bell Tolls as a period piece, I am at variance with the judgments of such distinguished personages as former president Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, and the late Fidel Castro. McCain seems to me particularly admirable in expressing admiration for the communist hero Robert Jordan; Obama ranks Hemingway and Toni Morrison with William Shakespeare.
I voted twice for Obama and wish he were still presiding over us, but I am happy I don’t have to grade him as a literary critic. Instead, I turn to Tolstoy’s beautiful rendition of Hadji Murat’s last stand:
The shaggy Hanefi, his sleeves rolled up, performed the duties of a servant here, too. He loaded the guns that Hadji Murat and Kurban passed to him, taking bullets wrapped in oiled rags and carefully ramming them home with an iron ramrod, and pouring dry powder into the pans from a flask. Khan Mahoma did not sit in the ditch like the others, but kept running between the ditch and the horses, driving them to a safer place, and constantly shrieked and fired freehand without a prop. He was the first to be wounded. A bullet hit him in the neck, and he sat down, spitting blood and cursing. Then Hadji Murat was wounded. A bullet pierced his shoulder. Hadji Murat pulled some cotton wool from his beshmet, stopped the wound with it, and went on firing.
“Let’s rush them with our sabers,” Eldar said for the third time.
He thrust himself up from behind the mound, ready to rush at his enemies, but just then a bullet hit him, and he reeled and fell backwards onto Hadji Murat’s leg. Hadji Murat glanced at him. The beautiful sheep’s eyes looked at Hadji Murat intently and gravely. The mouth, its upper lip pouting like a child’s, twitched without opening. Hadji Murat freed his leg from under him and went on aiming. Hanefi bent over the slain Eldar and quickly began taking the unused cartridges from his cherkeska. Kurban, singing all the while, slowly loaded and took aim.
The enemy, running from bush to bush with whoops and shrieks, was moving closer and closer. Another bullet hit Hadji Murat in the left side. He lay back in the ditch and, tearing another wad of cotton wool from his beshmet, stopped the wound. This wound in the side was fatal, and he felt that he was dying. Memories and images replaced one another with extraordinary swiftness in his imagination. Now he saw before him the mighty Abununtsal Khan, holding in place his severed, hanging cheek as he rushed at the enemy with a dagger in his hand; now he saw the weak, bloodless old Vorontsov, with his sly, white face, and heard his soft voice; now he saw his son Yusuf, now his wife Sofiat, now the pale face, red beard, and narrowed eyes of his enemy Shamil.
And all these memories ran through his imagination without calling up any feeling in him: no pity, no anger, no desire of any sort. It all seemed so insignificant compared with what was beginning and had already begun for him. But meanwhile his strong body went on doing what had been started. He gathered his last strength, rose up from behind the mound, and fired his pistol at a man running towards him and hit him. The man fell. Then he got out of the hole altogether and, limping badly, walked straight ahead with his dagger to meet his enemies. Several shots rang out, he
staggered and fell. Several militiamen, with a triumphant shriek, rushed to the fallen body. But what had seemed to them a dead body suddenly stirred. First the bloodied, shaven head, without a papakha, rose, then the body rose, and then, catching hold of a tree, he rose up entirely. He looked so terrible that the men running at him stopped. But he suddenly shuddered, staggered away from the tree, and, like a mowed-down thistle, fell full length on his face and no longer moved.
He no longer moved, but he still felt. When Ghadji Aga, who was the first to run up to him, struck him on the head with his big dagger, it seemed to him that he had been hit with a hammer, and he could not understand who was doing it and why. That was his last conscious connection with his body. After that he no longer felt anything, and his enemies trampled and hacked at what no longer had anything in common with him. Ghadji Aga, placing his foot on the back of the body, cut the head off with two strokes, and carefully, so as not to stain his chuviaki with blood, rolled it aside with his foot. Bright red blood gushed from the neck arteries and black blood from the head, flowing over the grass.
Karganov, and Ghadji Aga, and Akhmet Khan, and all the militiamen, like hunters over a slain animal, gathered over the bodies of Hadji Murat and his men (Hanefi, Kurban, and Gamzalo had been bound) and, standing there in the bushes amid the powder smoke, talked merrily, exulting in their victory.
The nightingales, who had fallen silent during the shooting, again started trilling, first one close by and then others further off.
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 26