by Brian Boyd
Though he admired Tolstoy above all other novelists, Nabokov was very different. He was quick to spot the logical flaws in the arguments of others and held that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (LRL ii). But he was highly impatient with analysis as a means of arriving anywhere: he thought that logic could lead you in a straight line all the way around the globe, only to bring you back to where you started, to mark out once more the closed circle of human thought. And given the odd conclusions Tolstoy could argue himself into by patient logic—that sex is immoral even within marriage, for instance, in the afterpiece to “The Kreutzer Sonata”—Nabokov has a point. Nabokov preferred the aside of consciousness, the knight move of mind, the sidestep of fancy, to the dogged step-by-step of analytical thought.
I chose the opening of Anna Karenina partly to take issue with Nabokov. In teaching Tolstoy, Nabokov stressed the visual detail. “What one would like to do,” he told his students, “would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under [Tolstoy’s] sandalled feet and then lock him up on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna’s white neck” (LRL 140). When he taught, he focused on detail and expected his students to “caress the details”; the most notorious of his notorious exam questions was: “Describe the wallpaper in the Karenins’ bedroom” (VNAY 358).
But if you look at the opening of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy incorporates far less visual detail than so-called classical realists are supposed to employ. There is nothing corresponding to the description of Verrières on the opening page of The Scarlet and the Black; or the description of the new schoolboy, Charbovari, at the start of Madame Bovary; nothing to match the view from Miss Pinkerton’s academy at the beginning of Vanity Fair; or the description of Dorothea as Middlemarch opens; or any of Dickens’s views of London—although if there were space to quote these, you would detect a cast of mind in each of these authors sufficiently distinct, even if they all happen to start with description, to make you suspect that a label like “classical realism” seems hardly a classification.
There is no physical detail at the beginning of Anna Karenina, and that seems appropriate. What distinguishes Tolstoy is not a concentration on the visual minutiae Nabokov savors but his concern to establish situations in all their complexity. Just as the objects in a painting by Vermeer are all perfectly related to one another in space and in the picture plane, and perfectly related to the overall tone of ambient light and the reflected light off surfaces nearby, so in Tolstoy people and predicaments are coordinated with an exactness and truth we don’t find matched in any other writer. By introducing Vermeer I don’t mean to suggest this is a visual phenomenon. We have no direct description here of the Oblonsky home: instead we find the perfect coordination of actions and reactions, of the effects of the discovery of infidelity on the household, on father, mother, children, governess, under-cook, in fact, on “all the members of the Oblonsky family and the household staff.”
In this description of the Oblonskys we perhaps begin to see what Tolstoy means by that uncharacteristic opening aphorism: it’s not so much that all happy families are alike, all Cosby Show clones, all happy Huxtables, and unhappy families interestingly different. It’s more that happy families are somehow united, in themselves and to other such families, and unhappy families divided in themselves—the mother in her room, the father out, the children running loose—and divided from other families: Tolstoy’s idea that all things are united in God and separated in evil.
I remember I used to have a sense of a Tolstoy novel unfolding before your eyes as if you were just watching a film. I happened to see the 1965 Bondarchuk War and Peace again recently, and that confirmed my growing suspicion that the film analogy was hopeless. What happens is much more immediate than film. In a film, we sit before an image. In Tolstoy, we are invited into the character.
On the third day after the quarrel Prince Stepan Arkadievich Oblon-sky—Stiva, as he was called in society—at his usual time, that is at eight A.M., woke up not in his wife’s bedroom but in his own study, on a morocco couch. He turned his full, well-tended body on the sofa springs, and as if wanting another long sleep, hugged the underside of his pillow and pressed his cheek into it; but he suddenly started, sat on the sofa, and opened his eyes.
“Yes, yes, how was it?” he thought, recalling his dream. “Yes, how was it? Yes! Alabin was giving a dinner in Darmstadt; no, not in Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but this Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, yes,—and the tables were singing Il mio tesoro, no, not Il mio tesoro but something better, and there were some little decanters, and they were women,” he remembered.
Tolstoy describes Stiva’s situation—sleeping, and not in his wife’s bedroom—just enough for us to understand; he describes his “full, well-looked-after body” just enough so we don’t imagine him lean or gaunt with worry. And then he invites us into Stiva by describing his last turn in bed, his last pressing of cheek to pillow, and his start awake: Tolstoy invites us to imagine Stiva not by projecting him before our eyes—not by Dickens’s fixing on a striking external characteristic—but by inviting us to project ourselves into Stiva, by inviting us to trust what is common in human experience, and there’s nothing more common than sleeping and waking with a dream on one’s mind.
Nabokov describes the way the dream defines Stiva’s character (LRL 151). Once we know just what he is like, we can indeed see that the dinner, the glass tables, the decanters that are somehow women, are appropriate to this bon vivant, who treats women as something he can pour out for his pleasure. But before we can see that significance, we register that Tolstoy has captured perfectly the process of attempting to recall a dream. There have been dreams in literature for millennia, but how often before Tolstoy has a writer refused to convert a dream to a lucid story and showed a character simply groping for dissolving fragments, as each of us does perhaps several times a week?
But if I am right about Tolstoy’s invitation to what is common in human experience, how do we account for the wonderful particularity, the unmistakable individuality of his characters? Tolstoy’s brilliant analytical mind allowed him to dissect the essential particularity of things, people, moments, events, but it is precisely because he had such an extraordinary sense of the difference between things, the apartness of things—and because his own analytical imagination made him aware of how the very act of analysis kept him apart from things—that he had such an overwhelming urge towards mystic unity, such a drive to seek out the secrets we all share, such a desire to invite us into one another, or at least into the characters he created.
In the dream, Tolstoy selects details that are perfectly illustrative of Stiva’s character, once we learn his character. But he doesn’t force Stiva’s idiosyncrasies on us at first: after all, almost anybody could have that sort of dream, and anybody at all will know that sense of groping for a dream.
Tolstoy’s ideal of art, as he explains in What Is Art?, is to infect the audience with an emotion the artist wants to convey. By inviting us into Stiva, he succeeds; we share Stiva’s sense of pleasure in the aftereffects of a pleasant dream and in the retrieval of bits of the dream and—a very Tolstoyan touch—in Stiva’s satisfaction at being able to put into thoughts the elusiveness and intangibility of dream sense.
Oblonsky’s eyes began to sparkle merrily, and he lapsed into thought, smiling. “Yes, it was good, very good. There was a lot there that was marvelous but I can’t say in words or even put into thoughts now I’m awake.” And, noticing a strip of light breaking through one of the cloth blinds from the side, he cheerfully lowered his feet to search for the slippers (last year’s birthday present) his wife had worked in gold morocco, and according to his long-standing, nine-year-old custom he stretched his arm, without getting up, to the place wh
ere his dressing-gown hung in the bedroom. And here he suddenly remembered how and why he was sleeping not in his wife’s bedroom, but in the study; the smile vanished from his face and he frowned.
“Ahh, ahh, ahh! Ooh! . . .” he groaned, remembering all that had happened. And his imagination replayed all the details of the quarrel with his wife, all the inescapability of his situation, and most tormenting of all the fact that it was his own fault.
“Yes! she won’t forgive me, she can’t forgive me. And worst of all is that it’s my fault, my fault, but I’m not to blame. That’s the whole tragedy,” he thought. “Ahh, ahh, ahh!” he added in despair as he remembered the most unbearable impressions in the quarrel.
We are inside Stiva as he sees the strip of light, as he gropes for his slippers—though Tolstoy darts in for our benefit that pointed description of the slippers fashioned by the wife who remembered his birthday but whom Stiva has momentarily forgotten—and we are inside him as he automatically reaches for the dressing gown that’s in fact hanging in another room. That shock of the failure of an automatic action after something has changed, or that other shock as the glow of a sweet dream or the chill of a grim one fades—these again appeal to common experience, to what we share with Stiva or one another, although we may not give voice to these things that link us.
Suddenly Stiva’s situation rushes back on him, and Tolstoy can introduce the exposition of the past—the moment Stiva knew he was caught out in his infidelity—as a memory in the mind of a character with whom we already involuntarily identify. And then comes Tolstoy’s strange unsparing truth of analysis: that most torturing of all for Stiva is that he is to blame, that he can’t escape into the luxury of anger at anyone else.
As Tolstoy describes the scene through Stiva’s memory, there is again no visual detail, just that one marvelous huge pear that Stiva has brought home for the theater, which seems somehow lush, plump, satisfied, as in Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar”:
The easy man
Who sits at his own door,—and, like the pear
That overhangs his head from the green wall,
Feeds in the sunshine.
A marvelous image of somebody lazily contented at his own home, growing fat like the pear, sucking up the goodness from the sun, turning ripe and juicy—very like Stiva. Stiva comes home with the pear for his wife, a mark of his spontaneous generosity, on the one hand, and a sop, on the other, to the woman who’s had to stay home while he’s out on the town, and the pear is something Nabokov would want you to imagine Stiva holding, incongruously, awkwardly, at this moment of high drama.
But if we picture the pear, we are not asked to picture Dolly: there is no physical description of her at all.
Most unpleasant of all was that first minute, when he returned from the theater, cheerful and content, with a huge pear for his wife in his hand, and didn’t find his wife in the drawing room; to his surprise, he didn’t find her in the study either, and at last, he caught sight of her in the bedroom with the unfortunate note that explained everything in her hand.
Dolly, always preoccupied, fussing, not too bright, as he thought her, sat motionless with the note in her hand and looked at him with an expression of horror, despair, and anger.
“What’s this? What is it?” she asked, pointing at the note.
Tolstoy again explains exactly what the situation needs: there she is with the tell-tale letter in her hand, “always preoccupied, fussing, none too bright, as he thought her.” That is the implicit evaluation of her that Stiva brings into the room and that is suddenly shattered by the image of her with the letter: again, Tolstoy describes this very particular scene not by multiplying details but by suddenly inviting us to recall the experience of seeing that we have typecast and dehumanized another person whose pain, whose live reality, suddenly shames us.
“And, as so often happens, what tormented Oblonsky most about this memory was not so much the event itself as the way he had answered his wife.” The implicit tendency to psychological generalization now becomes explicit. This “as often happens” points to our liability to reproach ourselves not for what deserves reproach but for the way we have come off less well than we would have liked: Tolstoy’s analytical scalpel slices away at our egotism at the same time as he pays a compliment to our shared humanity.
Here Tolstoy’s gift for “infecting” us reaches its peak. He evokes in us a state of mind he has experienced, and he makes his character alive not so much by any particularizing device as by our sense of fundamental human kinship with him, through our sharing what Tolstoy calls “the secrets that are common to us all.”7 Our sense of embarrassment at having someone know us so well is more than balanced by our sense of pleasure in the “Ah ha!” of recognition, and by our realizing, “It’s not only me,” and by our sense of relief that, after all, no one has actually caught us out.
Then comes that fatal, instinctive response, the smile, and even before we reach it, another Tolstoyan complexity: Stiva’s self-satisfaction, as he pins a technical term on the reaction that he now remembers with such vivid, immediate embarrassment, and then easily back to the smile that outpaces what the mind can tell the body to do, that alertness to the body that made Dmitri Merezhkovsky call Tolstoy “the seer of the flesh”:
At that minute there happened to him what happens to people when they are unexpectedly caught out in something disgraceful. He didn’t have time to prepare his face for the situation he found himself in before his wife now that she had discovered his guilt. Instead of taking offence, denying it, offering excuses, asking forgiveness, even staying indifferent—anything would have been better than what he did!—his face quite involuntarily (“reflexes of the brain,” thought Oblonsky, who loved physiology), quite involuntarily smiled suddenly his usual kind and therefore silly smile.
That smile has an instant effect on Dolly:
He couldn’t forgive himself for this silly smile. Seeing this smile, Dolly shuddered, as if from a physical pain, and breaking out with all her usual vehemence into a torrent of harsh words, she ran out of the room. Since then she had not wanted to see her husband.
“It’s all the fault of that silly smile,” thought Oblonsky.
“But what’s to be done? What’s to be done?” he asked himself despairingly and found no answer.
Dolly shudders; she cries out bitterly as she rushes from the room. And this would be my fourth principle of Tolstoyan style; after the analytic mind, the integrity of situation, and the invitation to perceive the common humanity one shares with a character, comes this minute attention to interactions. The reading and frequent misreading of other people’s responses, especially their involuntary ones, the reactions that can move faster than our conscious thoughts direct us, are familiar to anyone who has ever lived with anyone else, but the experience is so familiar that it usually precedes or outstrips language. It has never been described better than in this book—and it has never been more painful than in the series of ghastly misreadings of each other that Vronsky and Anna make as Anna slips toward her death.
For me these are the things that makes Tolstoy’s style so unique, not his visual details. When he lectured on Anna Karenin, Nabokov would spend some time drawing for his students a model of the first-class cars on the St. Petersburg–Moscow night express trains. Useful to know, but what matters much more is the situation that Tolstoy so carefully prepares: Anna on the train all night listening to Vronsky’s mother talk proudly of her son, Anna stepping off the train in Moscow, seeing Vronsky waiting for his mother, trying to suppress her sense of amused recognition because she has seen him before and sees he doesn’t recognize her and yet unknown to him he has been a main subject of conversation all night long. And there is something about that discreet look of interest and suppressed amusement from Anna that beguiles Vronsky—who evidently hasn’t particularly noticed her before—to the point where he immediately makes the first move in his long campaign to win her.
I began dissecting
the start of Anna Karenina with a look at insistent repetitions of word and phrase. I explained them as evidence of Tolstoy’s exceptional predilection for analysis. Nabokov describes the mark of the “groping purist” in Tolstoy: “what we might call creative repetitions, a compact series of repetitive statements, coming one immediately after the other, each more expressive, each closer to Tolstoy’s meaning. He gropes, he unwraps the verbal parcel for its inner sense, he peels the apple of the phrase, he tries to say it one way, then a better way, he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words” (LRL 238). There Nabokov parodies Tolstoy, he plays with Tolstoy, he strikes images off Tolstoy—and in doing so he deliberately undermines his own parody because Tolstoy does not play.
That leads to another reason for those insistent repetitions. Tolstoy the moralist has misgivings about Tolstoy the artist, let alone about other artists or about art that involves parody, play, imagination, invention. Nabokov writes of the “rejection of false elegancies” in Tolstoy’s style “and its readiness to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense” (LRL 228). Rather than succumb to the false elegancies of conventional art, Tolstoy preferred to be uncompromising to the point of gracelessness.
If we turn now to Lolita we find in its author someone who revels in art, in artifice, in pattern. There’s a wonderful television documentary of Nabokov being asked to read the start of the Russian Lolita.8 He agrees to do so, but turns to the camera, peers over his glasses, and as he reaches for the English text of Lolita declares: “Incrrredible as it may seem, not everybody remembers the opening of Lolita in English”—and he begins to read: