A Karenina Companion

Index

Preface

I was first introduced to Anna Karenina by my headmaster, Warren Derry, who recommended it in superlative terms. So many years have passed since then that it would be more than hazardous to try to recall his actual words; but, at least in the case of one of his pupils, his remarks succeeded in stimulating a first reading of the novel in translation and with no idea that I should ever read it in the original Russian. It is a novel to which one returns, and over the years I have returned to it not only many times but also with several different purposes in view. From the first it did not appear foreign (Frank Leavis called it "the European novel): Levin’s quest for how to live—whether to marry or not, how to face up to the prospect of death, what is the good"—was germane to my adolescent concerns. But it was in fact foreign to me in its geographical setting, and to all of us—increasingly—it is foreign in its temporal and cultural setting.

The present book had its genesis in the desire to mitigate this foreignness, to make the novel more readily accessible to English-speakers who encounter it and find themselves seriously engaged by it. That is to say that Chapter 6, which gathers explanatory and supplementary information for a reading of the novel, was the starting-point to which a series of other chapters have attached themselves. Chapter 1 is a biographical introduction. Chapter 2 examines the way in which the novel was composed. Chapter 3 brings together Tolstoi’s own substantial comments on his work. Chapter 4 adduces the main differences between the latest edition of the text and what has been the standard edition for over fifty years. Chapter 5 outlines what Tolstoi was reading as he was writing the novel. And a final chapter provides a survey of significant secondary literature, with English-language works listed in appendices. But the aim remains to facilitate the reading and understanding of Anna Karenina by English-speakers and to facilitate also the writing of informed and reliable critical appreciations in English. My work is introductory in the sense that it is not for the most part a work of literary criticism but aims to provide the materials for literary appreciation and criticism. It is partly a collection of matter that is already available but scattered, it is partly a rendering in English of what is available in Russian, it is partly an attempt to adduce materials that have not hitherto been available at all, and it is partly, I fear, a failure to find satisfactory answers to problems that remain. As Judith Armstrong, the most recent critic of Anna Karenina in English, concludes, there is always more to be said about it.

Quite clearly, I owe a great debt not only to the many critics of Anna Karenina but especially to the editors of many kinds of more documentary materials, whether their labours were expended on deciphering Tolstoi’s notoriously difficult handwriting or on seeking out the source of what may or may not be a quotation. I am indebted, too, to my colleague, Michael Futrell, for sage counsel and to the anonymous readers of a late draft whose advice has obviated numerous errors. I am grateful to Irina Florov for typing with gracious good humour and to the University of British Columbia for defraying some research expenses and not hampering my research at that time. Most of all I am grateful to my wife, Priscilla, whose patience I continue to try and against whose sensibilities, stylistic and sartorial, I continue to offend.

To some extent this work has been overtaken by events in the former Soviet Union: onomastic changes that have come to my notice are incorporated; but it is possible that further changes are taking place even as I write. The bibliography given in Appendix 2 extends into 1991, but account is not taken of its latest items in the body of my text.

With the exception of some names (Behrs, Stahl, Tchaikovsky), I have used the modified Library of Congress system of transliteration.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Vancouver, British Columbia                                                C.J.G.T.

Easter 1992

CHAPTER 1

Tolstoi’s Life between the Completion of War and Peace and the Completion of Anna Karenina

1869

When Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi finished War and Peace in 1869 he was 41 years old. He had been married since 1862 to Sof’ia Andreevna (Sonia) née Behrs, and in May of 1869 his fourth child was born. While his title meant less than would its English equivalent, since in Russia all the children inherited their father’s title, he was reasonably well off, a landowner living at Iasnaia Poliana, the estate that had come from his mother’s family, where most of his childhood had been spent and that had become his when the family property was divided in 1847. Two of his brothers had already died, but he was in close contact with his remaining brother, Sergei, and with their sister Mar’ia (Masha), the youngest of the family.

It is natural that after completing his great epic Tolstoi should fall into something of a mental trough: on 21 October he was writing to his friend and fellow-landowner, the poet A.A. Fet, that he had sent off the last part of War and Peace to the publisher and now is the deadest time for me: I am not thinking and not writing and I feel myself pleasantly stupid.¹ Few journals or newspapers came to Iasnaia Poliana (not a single Russian periodical was subscribed to) and, in any case, Tolstoi tended to react strongly against topical issues. But he was a restless soul whose intellectual and spiritual quest, at this period of his life, took several directions successively or, sometimes, simultaneously. Even before War and Peace was completed he had begun to draw up plans for a textbook for elementary education; much of the summer of 1869 was spent in an avid reading of the philosopher Schopenhauer, who caused him to reconsider also Kant and Hegel; and he had confronted death not only in relatives and friends but also in a nightmare-experience in the town of Arzamas at the beginning of September that formed the basis for his Notes of a Madman. In late 1869 he was devouring Old Russian fairy-tales and epic poems (byliny) and talking of writing a modern novel based on the characters that he found there. By early 1870 this had been succeeded by a study of drama, including Shakespeare, Moliére and Goethe, although Sonia did not take very seriously his thoughts of writing a comedy at this stage. And it was with a drama in mind that, by the end of January 1870, he began researching the theme of Peter the Great, although he swiftly returned to narrative prose for this topic, which remained on the drawing-board for much of the time before and even after the composition of Anna Karenina.

1870

The year 1870 began, as had the preceding year, with a minor motif that was to be fitted into the jigsaw of Anna Karenina: by the end of January 1869 all his children were being nursed through scarlet fever; in January-February 1870 he was having a lot of fun skating. In addition, by the summer he was working in the garden and the fields, deriving not pleasure, but happiness from mowing with the peasants for days on end. Indeed, besides Tolstoi’s personal concerns with regard to his wife and children, relatives and friends, one can see a growing urge to put pen to paper on the more fundamental themes of Anna Karenina. One of the byliny that struck him as offering material for dramatic treatment was that of Danila Lovchanin, in which Prince Vladimir sets out to marry Danila’s wife. On 23 February 1870 he told his wife that he had imagined a type of married woman from the highest society, but who had lost herself. He said that his problem was to make this woman only pitiful and not guilty. This is usually taken as the first specific reference to the germination of Anna Karenina; but, for the present, it was swiftly dropped in favour of a return to work on Peter the Great. In March Tolstoi wrote (but did not send) a lengthy and paradoxical letter to N.N. Strakhov commenting on his article apropos of J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women. Strakhov was a journalist and critic specializing in the natural sciences and philosophy; his fulsome praise of War and Peace in the journal The Dawn (which was sent to Tolstoi free of charge) led to their correspondence later in this year and their subsequent co-operation and friendship. And a story that was only begun apparently late in this same year begins with a landowner’s killing his unfaithful wife.

1871

By December 1870 Tolstoi was up to his ears in another flood of enthusiasm: in February, in connection with his study of drama and especially comedy, he had read (presumably in translation) Aristophanes’ Ploutos; now he had conceived the idea of mastering classical Greek and was soon boasting of his swift progress, reading first Xenophon (whose Anabasis he later said made a very great impression on him) and then Homer. This burst of enthusiasm lasted until the middle of the year. His appreciation of the simple beauty of the ancients led him to swear off such verbose rubbish as War and Peace and to study also Russian hagiography in March.

His health, however, at this time was poor. He complains of fever, rheumatic pains and toothache, beginning in December and reaching a climax in the second half of January. Sonia, too, was very ill for about a month after giving birth to their second daughter, Mar’ia (Masha), in February. Her inclination to follow medical advice and have no more children hurt Tolstoi; and there are some hints that the rift between them began at that time. In June, complaining by now of physical and mental depression, he travelled, in the company of Sonia’s 16-year-old brother Stepan (Stepa) and a servant, via Moscow and Samara to the Bashkir village of Karalyk, where he had been in 1862, to treat himself by drinking kumys (fermented mare’s milk) and living on the fringes of civilization. Sonia and his friends were urging him to give the Greeks a rest, but he revelled in comparing his Scythian life with what he read in Herodotus. All accounts confirm that he did enjoy himself and that he did recover his health and spirits; indeed he swiftly decided to buy land there, completing the purchase in September. His letters to his wife show him as not merely a dutiful but a loving husband, who detests being away from home.

By early August he was back at Iasnaia Poliana. In the same month he was well impressed by meeting personally first the poet F.I. Tiutchev on a rail-journey and then Strakhov, who was paying his first visit to Tolstoi. In September he took up work on his Primer, the textbook for elementary education that he had projected in 1868, poring over collections of proverbs and employing the devoted Sonia once again as a scribe; by December he was able to take Part I to the printer. He also found time to join a wolf-hunt at the beginning of September and to have his house extended in the last two months of the year.

1872

In early January of 1872 Anna Pirogova, the mistress of a neighbour, A.N. Bibikov, who was about to marry another woman, committed suicide by throwing herself under a train, having written him a note that he did not receive. Tolstoi was sufficiently interested to have seen her mangled corpse. Insofar as this incident is strongly suggestive of the story of Anna Karenina (even their first names coincide), it also predetermines the outcome of that story.

Intermittent work on Peter the Great, in particular background reading, continued through 1872, especially late in the year because the main focus of Tolstoi’s interest remained his Primer, to which he attached very great importance, hoping that it would form the educational foundation for two generations of Russians of all classes from the palace down. A natural concomitant to this was his re-opening at the beginning of the year of a school for peasant children who were instructed by Tolstoi, his wife and even his older children (the oldest of whom was not yet nine years old). Long sections of his notebooks testify to his study of the natural sciences in the early months of 1872, as he sought not only to understand what was taught by Sir Humphry Davy or John Tyndall but also how to answer the kind of questions that would naturally arise in the minds of peasant children. The literary-historical section of the Primer involved the selection and editing, often the translation and sometimes the composition of a wide variety of pieces. Both the kind of sources that Tolstoi was reading and the purpose of the exercise were causing him to practise a simplified style of writing that is apparent also in the two original stories that were included in the Primer but also published in adult journals: God Sees the Truth, but Waits and The Prisoner of the Caucasus.

But Tolstoi was very dissatisfied with the slow progress made by his Moscow printer, and in May he decided to transfer the work to St. Petersburg, simultaneously persuading Strakhov to undertake many of the editorial and publishing functions: a whole series of letters passed between them with advice, instruction and corrections until November, when Strakhov again visited Iasnaia Poliana and the Primer appeared in print. Usually Tolstoi allowed other interests to displace writing in the summer, but this year he was unable to give up work on his Primer when other events came along. More building work and painting went on at Iasnaia Poliana in May-June. In June his fourth son, Petr (Petia), was born. In July he went to his newly purchased estate, partly for the change but also in order to set it up, and was disappointed that lack of rain was making it an economically less attractive proposition. Writing from there to his wife he complained that he had spent a whole day on the river-steamer wrestling with arithmetic instead of admiring the scenery.

August saw the dispatch of the last part of the Primer to the printer and also the arrival of the first set of proofs. But then Tolstoi’s attention was diverted as the result of an incident that had taken place while he was away: a herdsman on the Iasnaia Poliana estate had been fatally gored by a bull. Tolstoi was now legally bound not to leave home while the matter was investigated; ironically, he was at the same time summoned for jury service. He found the whole affair infuriating and threatened to emigrate with his whole family to England! The incident, but without the legal bother, was oddly repeated in May of the following year. In November-December he read a volume of Strakhov’s essays that the latter had left with him, skated with his family, and tried to make some progress with Peter the Great.

1873

Tolstoi always valued his Primer, early in 1873 he wrote that, I have put more work and love into it than into anything else that I have done, and I know that this is the one important work of my life. He made various attempts to promote it, including reissuing it as twelve booklets in November 1873, but was forced to admit that its general reception was a fiasco. Perhaps partly in compensation for his feelings of frustration and failure, the early weeks of 1873 were a time of intense but ultimately abortive work on Peter the Great.

Suddenly, on 18 March, he began to write something very different, something that was to become his first real novel, Anna Karenina. A week later he was writing an account to Strakhov of how this came about: he had picked up a volume of Annenkov’s edition of Pushkin that had been left around, and was particularly struck by the fragment beginning "The guests were gathering at the dacha" (a kind of suburban summer residence or cottage).

Involuntarily, unexpectedly, without knowing myself why or what would come of it, I thought up characters and events, began to continue it, then, of course, altered it, and suddenly it came together so neatly and nicely that there emerged a novel, which I have today finished in rough, a very lively, ardent and finished novel, with which I am very pleased and which will be ready, if God grants me health, in two weeks.

It seems to have been this excessively optimistic timetable that caused Tolstoi not to send this letter. Peter the Great was laid aside; but by May Tolstoi was writing to Strakhov for his help in revising War and Peace for a Collected Edition that came out in November (including also selections made by Strakhov from the Primer}. For this edition Tolstoi decided to divide the novel into four volumes instead of six, to substitute Russian for nearly all of the French, and to cut out or transfer to separate articles all the authorial philosophizing.

This year he took his whole family with him to his property near Samara. While he regarded this as excellent for their health, he soon found that drought was not only ruining any hope of deriving income from this property but was swiftly reducing nine-tenths of the local population to destitution. He investigated the situation with typical thoroughness so that, when he came to write to a Moscow newspaper to initiate a successful appeal for aid, he was able to support his argument with some solid data.

Soon after his return in the second half of August Tolstoi was waylaid by the artist Ivan Kramskoi. In 1869 Tolstoi had refused to allow a portrait to be painted for the gallery of P.M. Tret’iakov. But now, approached by the artist himself (whom he found interesting) and granted generous concessions (including a portrait for his wife as well), Tolstoi agreed to sittings in September during which they had earnest discussions of topics such as art and religion. This must have put back to some extent the work that he had resumed on Anna Karenina; but at this time he still had hopes of completing it around December. Later he thought of taking what was ready to the printer while he sorted out the rest.

On 9 November his youngest child, Petia, died of croup, the first death in eleven years (of marriage), as he called it in two letters, although he had attended the funeral of an infant nephew early in the same year and in May had written condolences to his sister-in-law on the death