The Anna Karenina Fix

by Viv Groskop

  But he couldn’t stop himself from being Dostoevsky. He had to drink two cups of coffee before anyone could speak to him in the morning. (This was one of his least objectionable habits, admittedly.) His second wife felt that she was forced to dress ‘like a woman twice her age’ because Dostoevsky got jealous that other men were looking at her. There were constant financial problems, partly because Dostoevsky was supporting other family members and partly because he gambled all the time. Husband and wife argued over the fact that his overcoat was often at the pawn shop, even in winter. They travelled to Europe to avoid Dostoevsky’s creditors (and so that he could argue with Turgenev). The accounts from their time abroad of the scale of Dostoevsky’s self-defeating behaviour are truly jaw-dropping. He ends up having to pawn the legendary lilac dress at one point, along with his wife’s jewellery: ‘brooches, earrings, wedding ring, fur coat, shawl’. He declared that their time spent in Europe was, for him, ‘worse than Siberia’.

  Even Dostoevsky experienced some joy on these trips, though. When he won at gambling, he would buy his wife flowers and fruit and once returned with all her favourite foods: ‘caviar, bilberries, French mustard and even the edible fungi known as ryzhiki [saffron milk caps]; a Russian delicacy which, she claimed, no other husband in the world would have unearthed in this benighted German spa’.

  His time in Europe was overshadowed by a terrible event which happened in Geneva: the death of their baby, Sonya. She died of pneumonia at the age of three months, a year after their wedding. Dostoevsky was inconsolable: ‘People try to comfort me by saying I’ll have other children. But where is Sonya? Where is the tiny creature? To restore her to life I’d accept the torments of crucifixion.’ They went on to have three more children, although their son Alexey suffered from epilepsy like his father and died at the age of three after a two-hour seizure. Nonetheless, family life seemed to bring Dostoevsky some small comfort: he loved buying presents for his children and nursed them when they were ill.

  There is a lot of theorizing about Dostoevsky’s relationship with women, with some arguing that he harboured an intense hatred for them and subconsciously blamed them for all his ills. He certainly loved his second wife, when he was not pawning her favourite dress, that is. He once wrote in a letter to her when he was taking the waters in Germany that he had had a dream about her ‘in a seductive form’ which caused ‘nocturnal consequences’. If anything, I wonder if Dostoevsky’s problem was that he did not let himself enjoy life very much at all and possibly did not experience as many nocturnal consequences as perhaps he could have done. We all need nocturnal consequences in order to manage our internal conflicts, if nothing else.

  He adored his mother. He carried a miniature which had been hers, an angel with wings which had the inscription J’ai le cœur tout plein d’amour/Quand l’aurez-vous à votre tour? (‘I have a heart full of love/When will you feel the same?’) As a child, he had had some happy moments. The family had once seen a show with a trapeze artist impersonating ‘a Brazilian ape’. (I don’t know how they knew the ape was Brazilian. Maybe it was drinking a caipirinha.) Little Fedya came home and ‘was an ape for weeks’. (I would have paid a lot to see this.) Certainly, his father was a cruel man, but he found some solace in his mother.

  However, Dostoevsky’s attitude to women is obvious not so much because of the facts of his biography but because of the female characters in his books. He writes very differently about them compared to Tolstoy. Where Tolstoy sees women as having an internal world and feelings and thoughts similar to those of men, Dostoevsky’s female characters only really exist in relation to the men – and all his tormented protagonists are men. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s problems are largely caused by women: he wants to save his mother and sister from shame. He is ‘saved’ by a woman, his confessor, Sonia Marmeladova. She offers him comfort, even though she knew one of his victims (Lizaveta, the half-sister of the moneylender). Sonia has been described as a character who only really exists in the role of a ‘therapist’ for Raskolnikov, giving him a chance to tell his story and express his remorse. Dostoevsky is not great at offering remedies in his work, but this is one he comes up with time and time again: speaking to a confessor figure (often a woman) is one way to ease your inner torment. If only he had lived in the age of ‘Dear Deirdre’, he might have been happier.

  While Tolstoy is interested in using the individual as a way of expressing universal experience, Dostoevsky is far more self-absorbed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s helpful to look at both approaches to life: epic sweep versus extreme introspection. There’s an idea that you are either a Tolstoy person or a Dostoevsky person. I once met the Russian novelist Boris Akunin, who writes Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries about a nineteenth-century Russian detective. The first question he asked me was this: ‘Are you Tolstoy party or Dostoevsky party?’ I wasn’t sure how to answer this, as I love both, for different reasons, but I was worried this would make me look like an indecisive person. I said, ‘Dostoevsky party’, adding rather lamely, ‘Although I’m up for any party, really.’ He was Tolstoy party.

  Isaiah Berlin posed a version of this question in his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox. It became a question everyone wanted to pose about themselves, ‘Am I a hedgehog or a fox?’ Berlin did not mean it to be taken so seriously. But people love classifications and wanted to work out which group they belonged to. Dostoevsky is a hedgehog, a person who defines the world through a single idea or has one, big message. (No one, including Berlin, has quite seemed able to define exactly what that message is for Dostoevsky, but I suspect it is something like ‘Believe in God (and Russia) or you will die, heathen.’) ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,’ wrote Berlin, quoting the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. The fox, however, accepts that life has many confusing aspects and many pluralities. There can’t be a unifying principle; life is too diverse. Berlin concludes, fascinatingly, that Tolstoy was tormented towards the end of his life because he desperately wanted to be a hedgehog but he was at heart a fox. His religious convictions said ‘hedgehog’; his instinct said ‘fox’. He killed off the fox because it went against his religious convictions. Poor fox. I’m going to start weeping now. (I don’t know what the clown-who-wasn’t-a-clown would have made of all this, by the way. I suspect he would have been Team Hedgehog all the way, regardless of the philosophical implications.)

  What does all this mean? I think it’s about how comfortable you are with accepting contradictions in yourself and in the world. It’s about whether you can see beyond your own internal conflicts to a world outside yourself. If you can accept, or at least examine, those things, you are a fox. If you can’t accept them and you want to believe in that one big thing (‘We must serve God,’ for example), you are a hedgehog. According to Berlin’s analysis, hedgehogs are doomed to suffer more than foxes because they want everything (and everyone) to fit into a pattern. This tallies with Dostoevsky’s obsession with the idea that Russia must follow a particular path, and it’s the path he has decided upon. Tolstoy looks at the path Russia is following and examines it in detail. In the final analysis, I think it’s the difference between being judgemental and being open-minded. It’s the difference between being able to live with some measure of inner conflict and being unable to tolerate any inner conflict and instead gambling and twitching loads and ending up pawning your wife’s favourite lilac dress.

  This seems like an easy choice. Obviously, being open-minded is going to make you a happier person than being a judgemental one is. But it’s not as straightforward as it seems. Believing in one unifying principle (hedgehog) instead of living with the possibility of uncertainty and contradiction (fox) is very attractive. Tolstoy tried to be like Dostoevsky and be a hedgehog. He tried to judge everything, including himself, to improve constantly and conform to a unifying system (and a judgemental God). But it didn’t make him happy because he was at heart a pluralist who believed – as he showed in Anna Karenina and War an
d Peace – that it takes many people with different ideas to make up a world. The fox is (strangely for a real-life fox) empathetic and aware that other people have thoughts and feelings, too. The hedgehog thinks, ‘Why doesn’t everyone think like me?’

  Crime and Punishment is feverishly dark and entertaining, but there is also something profoundly sad about it. It’s perhaps because, as Berlin suggests, a hedgehog like Dostoevsky can never quite convince us that things are as simple as he’d like to make out. Raskolnikov is not pure evil. Possibly, he’s not evil at all, he’s just demented. We sympathize with him. We are not supposed to identify with Raskolnikov, and yet we do: ‘You come to a certain limit and if you do not overstep it, you will be unhappy, but if you do overstep it, perhaps you will be even more unhappy.’ This is true of Raskolnikov’s crime. He feels he must do it in order to be complete, even if he knows he will be damned. And if he doesn’t do it, he will not be saved either because he will still be unhappy. Many things in life feel like this, not just a decision as to whether to murder an old lady moneylender. We love Raskolnikov even though he is a murderer because we identity with his suffering.

  There’s a quote from a letter Dostoevsky wrote in 1879 that sums up the sadness of this vision: ‘Life is such a ridiculous business – sublime only in its inner significance.’ Yes, on occasion that’s true. But life only really has meaning when we turn away from ‘inner significance’ and look at ourselves in the context of other people. While Dostoevsky has profound, sometimes disturbing, insight into the human mind, Tolstoy has empathy for the human condition. The trick for us as readers is to combine the two, something neither writer, both tortured in different ways, managed to do in his lifetime.

  When I was immersed in my own little Russian world, I was too self-absorbed to see that I was getting just as lost as Raskolnikov. Acute, hedgehog-style self-absorption is not pretty, and it’s not healthy for anyone. During that year in St Petersburg, I had convinced myself that my destiny was to be Russian, to marry my Ukrainian boyfriend and to embrace the destiny that my name suggested. Over the course of that year, I went native. On the plus side, my Russian was great. On the negative side, I had become a different person. There were times when I barely recognized myself. I was weighed down by inner conflict. Not that I could see that at the time.

  On one occasion, I was taking the tram home from a lesson where I had been teaching English. Usually, I didn’t take the tram, because the wait was too long and I got impatient and I preferred to walk. On this day, I was tired, so had decided to accept the wait. When the tram eventually arrived, I sat opposite a middle-aged woman who looked pale and sickly. She seemed agitated. The tram was fairly empty, but there were at least another dozen people seated near us, and I monitored their faces to see if they had noticed the woman. They had. But no one did anything. We all waited to see what would happen. When we were waiting at a red light, she began convulsing uncontrollably and foaming at the mouth. Time stopped. I had been told not to make it obvious to anyone that I was a foreigner; otherwise, I would cause trouble for myself or for them. This was a time when there were still fairly few foreigners about and you did your best to go around unnoticed. It was too big a test of my Russian for me to risk doing anything. And, in any case, what could I do to help this woman? She kept on shaking and dribbling. Her eyes fell backwards in her head, the whites of them raised up. All this lasted a matter of seconds, but it seemed like hours. The lights changed and the tram lunged forward. Two men got up to help her, alerted the driver and dragged her off the tram. I had sat there, having said and done nothing. I’m pretty sure she died. I got off at the next stop and forgot all about it.

  I had gone native. No, I was worse than native. I had become so preoccupied with my internal conflict about appearing to be Russian at all times and in all places that I no longer knew who I was at all. I had lost my identity and I had lost my humanity. I wasn’t just a hedgehog with one big idea. Or a clown pretending to be something other than a clown. I had gone full-on porcupine. And I was stuck inside the tunnel.

  7. How to Live with the Feeling That the Grass is Always Greener: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov

  (Or: Don’t keep going on about Moscow)

  ‘Oh my God, I dream of Moscow every night. I’m just like a lunatic.’

  I have often felt that what I suffer most from in life is the sense that the grass is always greener on the other side. This is a combination of two things: first, the feeling that everyone else has got it better than me (yes, I know, boo hoo, let me get out the world’s tiniest violin), and, second, the idea that if only I were somewhere else, everything would be fine (yes, I know this is foolish, but I’m just being honest). The danger of this way of thinking is summed up by two cautionary Russian proverbs: ‘If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one’ and ‘As long as the sun shines, one does not ask for the moon.’ Or as my grandmother said the time I wanted a third jam tart (there were three flavours and I hadn’t tried lemon curd yet), ‘Don’t be greedy.’

  We all know the feeling that everyone else is having a better time than us. It’s ‘if only’ syndrome. If only you were somewhere else instead of being where you are. If only you had got that job instead of it being given to that woman you hate. If only you could be in two places at once. We even think this way when we’re happy. ‘Things are good but … wouldn’t it be nice to be on the balcony of a flat in Paris with a view of the Sacré-Cœur?’ Or, as they say in Russian, ‘Life is better there where we are not.’ This, said in an extremely categorical and depressing voice, is probably the best Russian saying of all time. Is there any more fatalistic thought in human existence?

  The problem is, no matter how good we have it, the grass genuinely does seem greener elsewhere. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, where all the three sisters really want in life is to get back to Moscow, scene of their childhood. Moscow represents a reaction against their present life – which they don’t want – and a promise of something better. They want Moscow, Moscow, Moscow. They say it enough times. But what they also want, crucially, is to be somewhere else other than where they are right now. Sound familiar?

  It’s human nature to think this way and it has no doubt always been thus. But it’s perhaps legitimate to argue that, in the modern era, this feeling can become so acute it’s almost unbearable. After all, up until about a hundred years ago, we all had fairly predetermined roles in life. Your fortunes might wax and wane, but you were more or less confined to the circumstances you were born in, whether you liked it or not. You could pine for some other kind of life but you had no real chance of achieving it. Also, back then, you were not constantly assailed by images and information about other people’s lives elsewhere. In today’s world, the three sisters could have indulged themselves by following any one of 26 million hashtags on Instagram extolling the joys of Muscovite life in glorious Technicolor, and regularly updated. Who knows, maybe this would have scratched the itch and made them want to go to Moscow less. Or maybe it would have made them all the more mad for Moscow.

  Chekhov’s brilliance lies in capturing something important about a life change that was happening at the time he was writing: people were starting to be able to affect their own lives, change their class, break out of the confines of their gender. I like to think it’s significant that it’s Three Sisters and not ‘Three Brothers’. If it were ‘Three Brothers’, the brothers could just go and live in Moscow and it would be a very short play, set largely in Moscow. (Even by Chekhov’s time, men still had far more ability to change their life circumstances than women.) Nowadays, we have different feelings about wanting to be somewhere we’re not. Of course, envy and regret are natural emotions, after all, and there has never been a historical era where everyone can have everything they want. But in modern times, we also think this way because we know the truth: our own life decisions played at least some role in bringing us to where we are. We have a choice. If we want to be in Moscow an
d we’re not – well, we have only ourselves to blame.

  This wasn’t true of the sisters in Chekhov’s play. They did not have so much agency over their lives. But they had more agency than women of a previous generation, and perhaps that responsibility weighed heavily on them. In Three Sisters, Irina, Masha and Olga want nothing more than to go to Moscow. Or, at least, to be fair, Irina (the youngest) and Olga (the eldest) both express a wish to go to Moscow. Olga wants to recapture past glories. Irina wants to seize a new future. Masha doesn’t care as much about Moscow. She just wants to get away from her nightmare Latin-quoting husband and to have a fling with Vershinin, the army officer married to a suicidal and temperamental wife.

  It’s never clear in the play precisely where they are geographically. We know they must be somewhere in a provincial town not that far from Moscow. Chekhov doesn’t need to make it clear exactly where they are because it’s obvious enough that it’s ‘the provinces’. But I also wonder if it’s intentional. It doesn’t matter where they are. It matters where they aren’t. The answer to where they are is: ‘Not Moscow. Which is where we want to be. Not Moscow. And if we’re not there, who cares where we are?’ Chekhov knows that we are better at defining ourselves by what we lack than by what we have. There’s a rather pathetic passive aggression to this. But Chekhov takes it seriously and sympathizes with it, while also realizing how ridiculous it makes us. We will never get to Moscow. And we will never see the good around us in the place where we are.