by A. N. Wilson
So, in the very image of the train with which he begins and ends the developed story of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy is not able to escape the contemporary issues which he had originally felt were inimical to artistic creation. The railroad comes to him ready-made with foreboding.
The intense importance to Tolstoy of distance, space, virgin territory unvisited and untrammelled, is shown in the fact that the year before this suicide, he had bought that sixty-seven thousand acre estate in Samara. His love of the people there, the Bashkirs and the Molokans, heralded a new sense of inspiration, of alienation, in Tolstoy. He had always preferred Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow. He had always preferred country neighbours to the ‘literary set’ of St. Petersburg. He had always preferred to be monarch of all he surveyed rather than a man in a clique or a crowd. But the move to Samara provided a chance of yet further isolation from the mainstream. He was feeling precisely the sense of alienation from life which made Anna Karenina’s intensely-felt existence ultimately intolerable.
As we know, Tolstoy’s method of ‘limbering up’ before writing fiction of his own was to read an English novel. When he wrote to Alexandrine asking her for letters of introduction to the best English families, and expatiating upon the freedoms of English society, he was almost certainly deep in some favourite Trollope. He is known to have read The Prime Minister with fascination, and to have been inspired by the ghastly railroad suicide of Lopez in that novel. The power of English fiction to absorb the imagination shapes an important moment in Anna Karenina when the heroine, who has not yet quite admitted to herself that she has fallen in love with Vronsky, settles down in the Moscow to St. Petersburg train with an English novel – surely a Trollope – on her lap.
Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was not pleasant for her to read, that is to follow the reflection of the lives of other people.21
Reading is an image of life in this novel. Hundreds of pages later, when the whole tragedy of her love affair with Vronsky has unfolded and she decides, so arbitrarily, to throw herself under a train, her life itself is described as a book. ‘And the candle, by whose light she had been reading a book filled with alarms, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up with a light brighter than ever before, illumined for her everything which formerly had been dark, guttered, grew dim, and went out forever.’22 Yet Anna’s distaste for the very process of reading, when we are first introduced to it, appears to be a simple Platonic distrust of art – the characters in the novel are only the reflections of nature. But her objection, as the next sentence shows, is the reverse of Platonic. It is not because she wishes to see into the life of things that the novel wearies her. It is because the life of the characters in fiction somehow or another threatens her own life. She is at one and the same time too exuberant for this world, and envious of these ‘reflections’. It is an extraordinary series of thoughts to place into the mind of a woman sitting in a train, trying not to think about being in love with another man. And although Tolstoy tries to make the scene relevant to the Vronsky–Anna liaison (so that the guilt of the adulterous milord becomes her guilt) he appears to be describing, with great vividness, a sensation which has no particular place in the book. ‘ “I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,” said Mrs. Gradgrind, “but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.”’23 There are many such moments of dislocation in Anna Karenina. ‘She herself too much wanted to live. When she read how the heroine of the novel looked after a sick man, she herself wanted to move about the sickroom with-noiseless footsteps; when she read how a member of Parliament had made a speech, she wanted to have made the speech herself; when she read how Lady Mary rode to hounds, or teased her sister-in-law, or amazed everyone by her bravery, she wanted to do it herself. But there was nothing to do, and while her little hands played with the smooth paper-knife, she continued to read. . . .’24
It is almost an enactment of Hallam’s advice to Tennyson: ‘You cannot live in art.’ Tolstoy knew you couldn’t, but he could not live anywhere else either – least of all in Russia, which was, quite simply, unbearable.
The longing to act, to do, to be a man of action rather than a man of letters was much in evidence in the period of gestation, and of early drafts for Anna Karenina. Eighteen seventy-two had been dominated by writing and publishing his ABC and simple stories for children, by concern for the education of the children at Yasnaya Polyana. In 1873, he spent the whole summer in Samara, and witnessed the failure of the crops there. It was the first time in his life that he was to become involved in famine relief. On this occasion, the casualties were comparatively minor. Through relations in Moscow and St. Petersburg he was able to alert the richer classes to what was needed, and two million roubles were raised for the relief of the hungry. Tolstoy liked this sort of work. For all his inability to be, either within himself or domestically, a good man, he was in love with goodness and yearned to do good deeds. He was also, as a laird and a soldier manqué, very good at organising things when he gave his mind to them. Distressing as it was to contemplate the plight of the poor, it provided him with the most urgent excuse to stop working on Anna Karenina.
The tortuous progress of the novel, after its first, fine, careless rapture, more than explains its ultimate shape. Since no one has ever put a satisfactory date on all the variants, it is hard to know how much Tolstoy was kidding himself when he announced to Fet (in September 1873) that ‘I am completing a novel that I had already begun’.25 We are told by his wife that by then the novel was ‘all sketched out’ but that he had not written anything all summer.26 Strakhov read a version of the manuscript in July 1874. His comment reveals that it was still entirely the story of Anna and her suicide. ‘The internal story of passion is the main thing and it explains everything. Anna kills herself with an egoistic aim, still serving that same passion; it is the inevitable result . . . of the direction that was taken from the very beginning. . . .’27 But at about the same time, Tolstoy was writing to Alexandrine that he was going to stop the novel (which he was having printed) ‘so much do I dislike it; but I am busy with practical matters, namely pedagogy; I am organising a school. . . .’28 Strakhov larded Tolstoy with praise, for ‘the amazing freshness, the absolute originality’ of the book, and this ‘almost got me interested again. But . . . it is terribly disgusting and nasty.’29 By October 1874, he announced that he had definitely decided to abandon the novel.
Then, quite suddenly, he wrote to Fet, ‘An indispensable purchase of land in Nikolskoye has come up for which I must borrow ten thousand for a year on the security of the land. It may be perhaps, that you have money that you have to invest.’30 Fet refused to lend the money – perhaps he did not have it to lend – and it was then that Tolstoy once again entered into negotiations with Mikhail Katkov, the editor of Russkii Vestnik.
One must not think of Katkov merely as a figure of Grub Street. He had direct political power – his power over Dmitry Tolstoy or Konstantin Pobedonostsev was of a kind which would have been less easily exercised had his earlier dreams of a representative form of government been realised. There is no reason to suppose that Katkov was corrupt, or that he was anything but sincere in his belief that a combination of Russian military strength and Russian religion would save the world. Dostoyevsky – another friend – was peddling the same idea week after week in The Diary of a Writer.
If one thinks of Lev Tolstoy as an essentially subversive figure in political terms, his association with Katkov might seem a little surprising. But money is money. He knew that he would be happier publishing the book with the left-wing Nekrasov, to whom he wrote, asking if Nekrasov could match Katkov’s offer of five hundred roubles per sheet. It was a forty-sheet novel. The twenty thousand roubles which were on offer would pay for his land in Nikolskoye and leave him its value in cash all over again. Strakhov, watching these negotiations aghast, said, surely accurately, that it was an ‘as yet unheard of price for a novel’.31
But signing the contract with Katkov did not make it any easier to get
on with the work. Between January 1875, when Tolstoy got his first payment, and summer 1877 he was writing the book, but there were very long interruptions. In the summer of 1875, for example, he was able to say ‘For two months I have not stained my hands with ink or my heart with thoughts. Now, however, I am taking up the tedious, banal Karenina with the sole desire of making some space for myself more quickly – leisure for other pursuits, not only pedagogical, which I love, but wish to drop.’32
This highly attractive indolence and cynicism is recorded for us by the painter Ivan Kramskoy in his Letters to P. M. Tretyakov. Kramskoy initially visited the Tolstoys at Yasnaya and tried to persuade Tolstoy to sit for his portrait. He was surprised by how young Tolstoy seemed – only a man in his mid-forties. He had expected more grey hair, more solemnity. But there were lots of laughs. Kramskoy had been commissioned to do the picture for the Tretyakov Gallery. His normal rate was one thousand roubles per canvas. Before he could even start work, the Tolstoys (their twenty thousand for the new novel guaranteed) had beaten him down to an agreement that he would paint a group portrait of the family for two hundred and fifty roubles. Then work could begin. After this initial loss of his virginity as a subject for painters, Tolstoy always enormously enjoyed having his portrait painted, and he could write to Fet: ‘I sit and chat with him and try to convert him from his Petersburg faith to the Christian one.’33
As has been well observed, ‘Kramskoy did not dream that while he was painting the portrait of the author of War and Peace Tolstoy was doing as much for him and that he would reappear in Anna Karenina as the painter Mikhaylov.’
As well as a good eye for a face, Kramskoy had a good ear for dialogue. Here is a snatch from a walk they took together.
Kramskoy: What do you respect?
Tolstoy: The Samara wilderness, with its farmers, the Bashkirs, about whom Herodotus could have written. Homer ought to have done it and I don’t know how. I’m studying. I’ve even learned Greek to read Homer. He sings and shouts and it’s all the truth. Peace comes in the steppe.
K: But how’s your novel, Lev Nikolayevich?
T: I don’t know. One thing’s certain. Anna’s going to die – vengeance will be wreaked on her. She wanted to rethink life in her own way.
K: How should one think?
T: One must try to live by the faith which one has sucked in with one’s mother’s milk and without arrogance of the mind.
K: You mean, believe in the Church?
T: Look, the sky’s cleared. It is pale blue. One has to believe that the pale blue up there is solid vault. Otherwise one would believe in revolution. . . .34
Tolstoy only had half an interest in the novel by this stage. Left hand and right hand were both trying to write at once, with peculiar results. The first four issues of Russkii Vestnik in 1875 contained Parts I, II and the first ten chapters of Part III. There was then complete silence until 1876, when the public were allowed to read of Levin mowing the fields, and Karenin discovering his wife’s unfaithfulness. The book was not complete until 1877.
It was in the summer of 1874, that is, about a year after the novel’s original inception, that Tolstoy introduced the character of Levin, and the vast subplot which was to balance, or overwhelm, the story of Anna herself. Thereafter, the simplicity of the book, its self-contained shape, was to be exploded into something altogether grander and more diffuse. ‘It is Levin,’ John Bayley remarks in his telling phrase, ‘who liberates the novel from itself.’35
No one can fail to see that Levin is an autobiographical figure, and the extent to which this novel is a mere substitute for the journals which Tolstoy was not at the time keeping is aesthetically astonishing. The maid in Levin’s house, Agafya Mikhaylovna, has exactly the same name as one of Tolstoy’s maids at Yasnaya Polyana. Levin’s wastrel brother is in every minute particular a portrait of Tolstoy’s brother Dmitry, and the death of Nikolay in the novel bears strong resemblance to the death of Dmitry in Tolstoy’s reminiscences. Levin’s proposal to Kitty is exactly the same as the way in which Tolstoy proposed to Sofya Andreyevna. So is the painfully intimate scene in which he insists on showing his young bride his diaries, and makes her weep. Levin’s increasing preoccupations with the duties of a landlord and with educating and liberating the peasants are all simple transcriptions of things which existed in the surface of Tolstoy’s mind when he was writing the book. No ingestion has taken place at all. There have been gallant attempts to defend what Tolstoy himself called the ‘architecture’ of the novel, but by the time we are into the second half of the book it is hard to avoid agreeing with the view that it ‘cannot even be called a novel, that it is a collection of photographs collected completely at random, without any general idea or plan.’36 Turgenev, it will be remembered, said, ‘I don’t like Anna Karenina, although there are some truly great pages in it (the races, the mowing, the hunting). But it’s all sour, it reeks of Moscow, incense, old maids, Slavophilism, the nobility etc. . . .’ And again, ‘The second part is trivial and boring.’37
Turgenev, however, very likely had private reasons for disliking the book. Among the legendary adulteries which formed part of Tolstoy’s mental world was a Bers family secret. In 1833 Turgenev’s mother gave birth to a natural daughter, almost certainly fathered by Doctor Bers, who was in turn to become Tolstoy’s father-in-law. Like Anna, Varvara Petrovna went abroad to hide the scandal. Life, often so much neater than art, allowed her to return the following year, because her husband died.
Be that as it may, it is hard not to see what Turgenev meant. Even if one excepts the novel’s second half from his censure – ‘trivial and boring’ – the extended Levin passages are not obviously justifiable in aesthetic terms. Part VI ends with Anna and Vronsky going to Moscow to establish themselves like a married couple. We wait another eight chapters before we meet Anna again, and meanwhile we have to read about Levin reading his book on rural economy to Professor Katavasov, or the death of such hitherto unheard of (‘real’) characters as the Countess Apraxina. There is nothing artistic, nothing planned about these interludes. We know that instead of ‘getting on with his novel’ he is doodling, palming us off with his own ideas and concerns.
And yet Professor Bayley is right. The book would be diminished without these extraordinarily open-ended structures. It is rather like wandering into what appears to be a new house. On our left the dining room, finished and complete, with its furniture, pictures, characters and conversation. On our right, however, we fling open the door of the ballroom and find ourselves in an open field, with the architect and builders still looking at the plans. One can make too much of this, and take too seriously Henry James’s fastidious dismissal of Tolstoy’s ‘loose, baggy monsters’.38 There is more ‘structure’ in Anna Karenina than in the novels of Dickens and Trollope. The Jamesian perception of the unities in fiction formed no part of the syllabus in the chaos where Tolstoy went to school. And one has to recognise, moreover, that in many of the diary passages in Anna Karenina – extensions of his diary mode is all they are really – there are scenes of unrivalled vividness and realism. One thinks of Kitty’s accouchement which stays in the mind not only because of its photographic accuracy, but also because of the transparent – rather devastating – honesty with which feeling is transmuted. Levin attends – as Tolstoy did three times in the course of this novel’s composition – his wife’s accouchement and then looks down at his new-born child. ‘What he felt towards this little being was absolutely not what he had expected. There was nothing gay or joyful in this feeling; on the contrary, it was a new, excruciating dread. It was the consciousness of a new area of vulnerability. And this consciousness was at first so excruciating, the fear was so powerful, that this helpless being might suffer, that he hardly noticed the strange feeling of senseless joy, and even of pride which he felt when the child sneezed.’39
Tolstoy’s unrepentant lack of reasonableness in the face of childbirth is one of the great givennesses of the book. It is surely the earliest e
xample in fiction of the specific discussion of birth control. Here, as throughout the book, he specifically flouts his own doctrine that novels should not be about issues of the day, and gives us an up-to-the-minute discussion, veiled in dotted lines between Anna and Dolly. ‘ “N’est-ce pas immoral?” she said after a pause.’ It is one of the best bits of the book and is a good example of the way the story is no longer a finite contrivance at which the novelist is working (in a manner which would have pleased Henry James) to contain his material, but a great, open thing in which almost any modern preoccupation might find its relevance. Strangely enough, in the very year that Tolstoy finished Anna Karenina, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were fighting a court battle to allow back into print Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy or The Private Companion of Adult People, a simple work of 1832 which recommended ‘syringing the vagina soon after the male emission into it with some liquid’. The English judges were at one with Tolstoy and Dolly over the matter, and did not allow it to be reprinted.
How are we to explain the fact that although we recognise these divergencies and digressions for what they are, the book does have something which feels, at least the first couple of times we read it, like cohesion? The answer is of extreme relevance to Tolstoy’s biographer, for it lies in the pure, unwatered egoism of the author. It has been rightly observed that Levin is not the only ‘autobiographical’ figure in the book, and that we can just as easily recognise Tolstoy in the figure of Anna herself. Self-preoccupation was the beginning and the end of Tolstoy’s character, and it is out of the self, purely and not tirelessly, that the novel was born. ‘The longer Levin went on mowing, the oftener he felt moments of oblivion, in which his arms did not seem to move the scythe, but the scythe itself, his whole body, so conscious of itself, so full of life, and as if by magic, regularly and definitely without a thought being given to it, the work did itself of its own accord. These were the most blessed moments.’40