Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  This is what is happening in Anna Karenina itself. If we read how the book was written, we might assume that Tolstoy began with his original conception of the story, tired of it, and filled it up with a lot of his own ‘thoughts’ and passages from his own life. But this is not actually what happened. He was pouring himself into the book, writing it with his own sweat and blood. In order to work himself up into a sufficient level of interest and frenzy to write his historical fiction, whether the wholly fructiferous War and Peace or the abortive The Decembrists and Peter the Great, Tolstoy was in the habit of reading hundreds and hundreds of books, so as to have material on which his imagination could feast. Here, it is all different. He provides himself as the stuff of the story, as in the earlier much shorter pieces, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and The Cossacks. In The Cossacks, he had given himself ten years to absorb and transform his experience. In Anna Karenina, as in his diaries, he was writing up the experience almost before he had had it. The result was to be more emotionally draining than he could possibly have realised. He was in effect scouring himself for material, pouring his own feelings into the guilty Stiva, the striving Levin, the hopeless Anna. There is a crude sort of shape to the book, of course. It begins with an amoral man disillusioned with marriage, it ends with a moral man in a remarkably similar state of mind. Between this there are two railroad deaths, and an impossible attempt to live by romance. But the greatness of the book is not in its shape but its scenes, ‘blessed moments’, where the mower is so full of life that his movements have an existence of their own.

  The great message of Anna Karenina, proclaimed more in the bits where the author is not proclaiming, just mowing, is this belief in life. Anna, who spontaneously wants to be, to live, not to view life through the lens of art or satire, is utterly unlike Karenin. She is a natural person, as is Kitty in the sickroom of her brother-in-law.

  ‘Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes,’ thought Levin, while talking with his wife that night. Levin thought of the Gospel text not because he considered himself wise. He did not consider himself wise but he could not but know that he was cleverer than his wife and than Agafya Mikhaylovna, he could not but know that when he thought about death, he thought with all the powers of his soul. He knew also that many great and manly minds, whose thoughts on that subject he had read, had pondered it, but did not know the hundredth part of what his wife and Agafya Mikhaylovna knew.41

  Tolstoy’s daemon knew that outside the blessed moments, when the scythe moved automatically, he had nothing in him but ratiocination. He could rarely intuit. It is remarkable, for instance, that in this great love story, not one line is devoted to describing the actual development of the affaire. From the moment in the train returning from Moscow to St. Petersburg, we do not see Anna and Vronsky together until they are in Italy, when the thing is a fait accompli. He can describe their disillusionment with each other with the most chilling plausibility. But we never see them happy in their intimacy. Never having experienced such an affaire, he could not begin to describe it. The thing is as simple as that. The virginal Henry James gives us far more of the conspiratorial and guilty relationship between Kate Croy and Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove than Tolstoy does, with all his knowledge of ‘life’, of the love between Anna and Vronsky.

  When scenes of intimacy are successful, they are often slotted into moments where the plot creaks with implausibility. One thinks of the set-piece when Anna returns in secret to see Seryozha. ‘During the time they had been separated and under the influence of that gush of love which she had lately felt for him, she had always imagined him as a little fellow of four, the age when she loved him best. . . .’42 And she is amazed to discover that he is actually nine. She, in fact, is not at this point consulted. It is Tolstoy who is working out how old the little boy is while Anna waits on the set and perfects her lines. Then he nods, and the camera begins to roll. The point of the scene is that, while the reader has been spared any blush-making intimacies with Vronsky, he is allowed the fullest possible view of her besotted love for her son. We are like the old servant Vasily Lukich, bursting in on the scene. ‘He shook his head and sighed and closed the door again. “I will wait another ten minutes,” he said to himself, coughing and wiping away his tears.’43 The scene is deliberately ‘touching’, like a Victorian parlour song, or the slushier bits of Dickens. It is so well done that it has us in tears; but when we have recovered we can see what Tolstoy has been up to. It is stage-managed, and entirely different, as a rendering of intimacy, from, say, the spontaneity of the marital conversation in which Kitty and Levin are wondering whether Koznyshev will marry Mlle. Varenka.

  ‘Well,’ asked her husband when they were going home again.

  ‘It doesn’t work,’ said Kitty with a smile and a manner of speaking reminiscent of her father, which Levin often observed in her with pleasure.

  ‘How do you mean, doesn’t work?’

  ‘Like this,’ she said, taking her husband’s hand, raising it to her mouth and slightly touching it with her closed lips. ‘It’s like kissing the hand of a bishop.’

  ‘But which of them doesn’t it work for?’ he said, laughing.

  ‘For neither of them. It should have been like this.’

  ‘There are some peasants coming.’

  ‘No, they didn’t see. . . .’44

  There is never such a moment of erotic conspiracy between Vronsky and Anna. Anna’s articulated wish to get out of the pages of a novel and into real life can’t be realised by her creator, any more than his life with Sofya Andreyevna, of which we receive so many snapshots in this book, will quite consent to be wedged into fiction. Or rather Sofya Andreyevna and Lev Nikolayevich were making their own kind of fiction, a different, more lugubrious novel with an equally dramatic railroad ending. When describing moments which he had not lived Tolstoy could only – who has ever done it better? – analyse, penetrate, describe. But living, in this spontaneous sense, became more difficult.

  The underlying tragedy, or logic, of Anna Karenina is amoral in a way that Tolstoy would later think of as ‘Hindu’. The forces of life are irreconcilable and irresistible. ‘Vengeance is mine’ is an artistic tag, not a religious statement in this book. It is his own way of asserting control, while, with the other part of himself liking to quote Pushkin – ‘my Tatyana has gone and got married, I should not have thought it of her’ – a coy way of observing how the characters in a work of fiction get out of control and lead their own lives. The book prepares us for what is going to happen in Tolstoy’s own life. It is on him that the vengeance falls; vengeance for using life, not living it, for observing, not being. What he instinctively reveres is naturalness: Levin’s ‘real’ experience of the country rather than his liberal half-brother’s theorising about it; or Kitty with her children. The counterbalance these scenes provide with those of Anna and Vronsky does not make us feel how virtuous family life is in the country compared with adultery in the city, or still worse, abroad. (This was the whiff that Turgenev caught when he thought of it as sour, reeking of incense.) On the contrary, all that matters is something much simpler than morality. It is that Anna is alive; alive to an almost vulgar degree. For most of the book, Vronsky, who is so unerringly well-observed, only exists as a piece of sex. We see him as he is, but we feel only what Anna feels.

  This reverence for what is, in Tolstoy, is nothing like a Wordsworthian Romantic’s feeling for nature. It is much simpler than that. It is being able to look at the sky as if it were a solid vault, and not to question. Tolstoy in this book is full of himself, of people, of places, of things, of grass, of sky – all just being themselves. The fact that we are alive is for Tolstoy the most interesting thing about us. And the most awe-inspiring thing is that this being – this awareness of rain on sweaty shoulders, or the agony of sexual guilt, or the excitement of love, or the warmth of a mother suckling her baby – can be snuffed out instantly, and made nothing. It is the passionate impulse
to recapture life from this nothingness which impels his art.

  That is why Levin and the many passages of the novel which appear extraneous to the central story of Anna and Vronsky are in the end so important not just to Tolstoy, but to us. These distinctions, of the kind made by lesser mortals – between art and life, between what should and should not go into a novel – no longer mean anything to Tolstoy. He is gasping for breath, panting to get out of his novel. And yet, though this is what (he assures us) it felt like from the inside, yet from the outside, it has the effect of magisterial grandeur. Tolstoy’s famously blasé question – ‘What’s so difficult about writing a story of how an army officer gets entangled with a married woman?’45 – would sound like some attempt at humility if it were a mere denigration of what, by any standards, must be one of the greatest novels in the history of literature. But what Tolstoy was saying was something that was not in the least humble. He was saying, ‘So – O.K., I have written the greatest novel in the history of the world. But who’s interested in novels? My task is bigger than that.’ One sees the same process at work in the later novels of Turgenev where the private concerns of the characters are almost swamped – in Smoke, for instance – by reflections on the contemporary scene.

  As Tolstoy had observed when the coroner and the police bothered him over the death of his herdsman, Russia is not a place where you can be left alone. Being left alone is all that an artist wants, but countries which make this impossible inevitably and automatically create a class of articulate dissidents. ‘It is unbearable to live in Russia.’ It is this simple fact which lies behind and explains many of Tolstoy’s more incomprehensible actions over the next thirty years. He had wanted to bury himself in Samara. He found only famine and incompetence which compelled him to become involved. And then, towards the close of 1876, the Russians began to behave in a morally indefensible fashion in Bulgaria, or so it seemed to Tolstoy. During the period when he was writing Anna Karenina a fever of pan-Slavism had gripped Russia. This was the idea that all Slavs, in whatever sovereign state they happened to reside, should look to Russia to protect them, their ethnic and above all their religious tradition. Dostoyevsky and other keen pan-Slavists (or, as we should call them, Russian expansionists) spoke fervently of an Orthodox revival, and of the ancient city of Tsargorod, or Constantinople, being ‘restored’ to the Russian Church and people by an invasion of Turkey. Tolstoy did not view the conversion of the world to Russian Orthodoxy with any particular enthusiasm. ‘The God of Sabaoth and his son, the God of the priests, is just as little and ugly and impossible a God – indeed far more impossible – than a God of the flies would be for the priests, if the flies imagined him to be a huge fly only concerned with the well-being and improvement of the flies.’46

  Throughout the summer of 1876, the Serbs and the Montenegrins were engaged in rebellions against their Imperial masters, the Ottoman Turks. The Russians supported them, with the enthusiastic prayers of the Metropolitan of Moscow, with money and with volunteers. But in this first round, in spite of the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that they were both Slavs, the Serbs and the Russians failed to cooperate and they were easily defeated by the Turks.

  The European powers, and in particular the British (Disraeli was again Prime Minister) were anxious, once an armistice was signed, that Serbia should be protected from Turkish reprisals, but more anxious about the intentions of the Russians. It was not in the interests of any of the western powers, and least of all Great Britain, for the Russians to invade Constantinople; and it was this which they were pining to do. In November 1876, Alexander II referred to ‘our volunteers who have paid with blood for the cause of Slavdom’, and began to threaten that if ‘Russia’s just demands’ were not fulfilled by the Turks, ‘I firmly intend to act independently’.

  The usual nonsense was gone through. Ambassadors were summoned to Constantinople. By March 31, 1877, Lord Derby, the Foreign Secretary, had found a ‘peace formula’, as we should now call it, which protected the interests of both the Turks and the Russians. A month later, on April 24, 1877, Russia declared war on Turkey. The war lasted about a year, and failed to result in a Russian Constantinople. The following year the Turks got a guarantee from Disraeli that the British would protect any invasion of Asiatic Turkey by the Russians. The main results of the war, which the Russians in the end won, were the creation of modern Bulgaria, and the beginning of British rule in Cyprus. So much for the aims of pan-Slavism.

  Since, by now, Anna Karenina had become so much more than Tolstoy’s novel – it was his equivalent of Dostoyevsky’s The Diary of a Writer in which he could air his views to the huge public who bought Russkii Vestnik – it was inevitable that Tolstoy should devote his thoughts to the Turkish War. The outbreak of hostilities provided Tolstoy with a perfect way of rounding off his story. John Bayley notices even the very minor character Veslovsky, who has just got married, going off to the wars. ‘Unobtrusive as it is, there is nothing naïf or pious about this touch. . . . So Veslovsky married recently, and now he is off to volunteer for the wars – well, well!’47 Everything points the same way, and every touch is directed with deadly effect. John Bayley is right to draw attention to the cynicism with which the novel ends. The young men who go to volunteer to help the Serbs are all, like Vronsky, people who have something to get away from. We do not need to have it spelt out to us. Veslovsky, like everyone else in the Tolstoy œuvre, has found out soon enough that marriage is hell. That is his reason for taking the Tsar’s shilling. Similarly, in the devastating conversation between Levin and Koznyshev about the war, the same point is made. ‘In a nation of eighty millions there can always be found not hundreds, as is now the case, but tens of thousands of men who have lost their social position, happy-go-lucky people who are always ready to go. . . .’48

  What now stands as Part VIII of the novel was on Katkov’s desk by the time Part VII had gone to press. Anna had thrown herself under the train, followed by the words ‘To be concluded’. But the novel never was concluded in Russkii Vestnik. Katkov tried to persuade Tolstoy to eliminate from Part VIII those passages which expressed cynicism or unbelief in the war effort against Turkey. Tolstoy refused to alter a word. From this time dated Tolstoy’s view that the novel had an architecture, a link which was more than its characters or story could show. Russkii Vestnik, in its May issue, contained the following short note:

  In the previous issue, the words ‘To be concluded’ were inserted at the foot of the novel Anna Karenina. But with the death of the heroine the novel proper finished. According to the author’s plan a short epilogue of a couple of printer’s sheets was to follow, from which readers learnt that Vronsky, in grief and bewilderment after Anna’s death, left for Serbia as a volunteer, and that all the others were alive and well, but that Levin remained in the country and was angry with the Slavonic committees and the volunteers. The author will perhaps develop these chapters for a special edition of his novel.49

  *

  The whole episode is really quite funny. It is impossible not to feel that, simply as an editor, Katkov was right. With serial fiction, the audience wants to know what happens next. If one episode ends with a train running over the heroine’s head, it is hard to see where the necessary element of suspense comes in to make readers buy the next instalment. Who, buying Russkii Vestnik to see ‘what happens next’ in Tolstoy’s novel, is going to be interested in the inner life of Levin? And what reader of that arch-conservative periodical was going to want tirades against the war? Katkov obviously made the right decision, from his own narrow point of view. Tolstoy was furious, and wrote off to the editor of another periodical, Novoye Vremya (New Time), to explain what had happened. ‘The masterly exposition of the last unpublished part of Anna Karenina makes one regret the fact that for three years the editor of Russkii Vestnik gave up so much space in his journal to this novel. With the same gracefulness and laconicism he could have recounted the whole novel in no more than ten lines.’50

  This is v
ery amusingly said, and it is a pity that we do not have more to and fro in this argument between Katkov and Tolstoy. Obviously, though Katkov was right as the editor of a periodical to turn down Part VIII, he was also right to hope that it would be printed when the novel reached book form. It is an essential part of the book, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Tolstoy himself. With an arbitrariness which does not seem to matter much (Shakespeare would have done the same, and probably did) Tolstoy gives to each of the characters in Part VIII his own thoughts, feelings and experiences, as though he were dealing out a small deck of cards. So, Vronsky remembers Anna’s corpse, ‘warm with recent life’ and mangled as Pirogova’s corpse had been when Tolstoy saw it in 1872; and all the characters in the end, except Kitty, are caught up in the inner drama which preoccupies Levin. Life is unanswerably trivial and pointless – Why am I here? What am I? An inability to answer these questions makes him want to commit suicide, but even in these very desperate moods, he felt in his soul ‘the presence of an infallible judge deciding which of two possible actions was the better and which was the worst’.51

  So in the 1870s we see the public and the private questions – Why am I here? What is Russia up to now? – converging on Tolstoy to produce a profound personal crisis. He was close to despair about himself, but he was a very long way from despair about Russia as a whole, and a long way from despairing about art. We must not leap ahead and imagine that Tolstoy aged forty-eight or forty-nine held the developed ‘Tolstoyan’ views with which he liked, aged seventy, to annoy his wife and friends.