Creating Anna Karenina

Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine

Bob Blaisdell

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781643134635
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The story behind the origins of Anna Karenina and the turbulent life and times of Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Remarkably, there has not yet been an examination of Leo Tolstoy specifically through the lens of this novel. Critic and professor Bob Blaisdell unravels Tolstoy's family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revised Anna Karenina. In the process, we see where Tolstoy's life and his art intersect in obvious and unobvious ways. Readers often assume that Tolstoy, a nobleman-turned-mystic would write himself into the principled Levin. But in truth, it is within Anna that the consciousness and energy flows with the same depth and complexities as Tolstoy. Her fateful suicide is the road that Tolstoy nearly traveled himself. At once a nuanced biography and portrait of the last decades of the Russian empire and artful literary examination, Creating Anna Karenina will enthrall the thousands of readers whose lives have become deeper and clearer after experiencing this hallmark of world literature.

1 Readying for “a new big labor”: September 1872–March 1873

It always seemed to me… that Leo Nikolaevich was not very fond of talking about literature, but was vitally interested in the personality of the author. The questions: “Do you know him? What is he like? Where was he born?” I often heard in his mouth. And nearly all his opinions would throw some curious light upon a man.

—Maxim Gorky^I

What was Tolstoy like? Where was he born? He was born at the family estate 120 miles south of Moscow in 1828, the fourth of four brothers, the lone sister being two years younger than he. He was a “count” by inheritance of his father’s title. His mother, whose estate, Yasnaya Polyana, he, as the youngest boy, inherited, died before he was two. A series of aunts helped raise him and his siblings, as their father died when Tolstoy was eight. Tolstoy spent many of his teenage years with an aunt in Kazan, a thousand miles east, and became a student at the university there, but the brilliant boy didn’t like being taught, and after switching fields of study, during which time he read voraciously on his own, he left the university at age eighteen and moved back to Yasnaya Polyana, where he indulged in gambling, women, and music. He also set up and ran a school for the peasant children but quickly abandoned it. His letters as a young man usually brim with resolution and confidence, but sometimes they’re full of regret over his moral failures. He longed for military action and joined his brother Nikolai, an officer in the Russian army in the Caucasus, as a volunteer. He became an officer and a writer. At twenty-four, he published Childhood, the first of three semiautobiographical novels (Boyhood and Youth followed), which woke up the Russian literary community, including the most famous of them, Ivan Turgenev. Who was this new dynamo?

Meanwhile he served in the army for the next few years and saw action and wrote detailed accounts of the war in Sebastopol, which accounts were also justly admired. He left the Caucasus in 1855, and tried to make a go of literary life while still in the service in St. Petersburg but came to despise the atmosphere of the Russian capital. He returned to Yasnaya Polyana in 1856 and resigned from the army. He dreamed of marrying, but wavered. His novella Family Happiness (1859) looked at courtship and marriage from the point of view of a young woman. Russia’s serfs were freed in 1861, and Tolstoy saw that a primary need for them was literacy. One of the most satisfying projects of his life was the school for peasant children that he set up and ran on his estate from 1859 to 1862. He publicized his and his co-teachers’ work in the school in a periodical, but he seems to have grown distracted by both his longing for marriage and for writing a new fictional work. A Moscow family he and his family had known for years, the head of which was a doctor in the Kremlin, kept attracting his attention, particularly the youngest daughter, eighteen-year-old Sofia Andreevna Bers. Within months, they were engaged and married. Tolstoy gave up the running of the schools that he had set up on the estate and in the region, and in 1863 began work on what became War and Peace. The “family happiness” he had desired became his and Sofia’s. Between 1863 and 1873 they had six children; rarely for the time, the children all survived infancy. War and Peace appeared in installments starting in 1865 and was published as a whole in 1869. Though his work had not yet appeared in translation in Europe, he was now the most famous and most well-regarded author in Russia.

But what was he like? He was good-humored and moody, kind and understanding, bullheaded, humble, and contrary. He had terrific energy and long periods of aimlessness. He regularly started projects that he could not sustain or finish. He continually looked for a key that would simplify the complications and confusions of everyday life. He had strong impulses for answers that his studies of science, philosophy, and religion inspired him with. He could never settle for good his own ever-critical analyses of his own and others’ ideas.

For much of 1872 Tolstoy was more literarily active and productive than he would ever be again. He turned forty-four in September. Now he was bustling about with his Azbuka, the “ABC” book (or primer) for teaching Russia’s children to read. He would eventually denigrate almost every work he ever wrote, but not the Azbuka, which he saw as a life raft for the uneducated. In 1870, about 85 percent of the Russian population was illiterate.^II In 1872 he started a school again in order to try out the methods he was advocating. His eldest daughter, Tanya, remembered:

Seryozha [that is, Sergei, the eldest sibling, born in 1863; she, Tanya, was a year younger] and I could already read and write quite passably. Ilya, then about six, could only just read and was very bad at writing; nevertheless he announced that he was going to teach the youngest class. Papa agreed, and the lessons began.

They lasted for slightly over two hours every day, beginning after our dinner, which was served between five and six, and continuing till it was time for us to go to bed. Papa took the boys’ class in his study. The girls were mamma’s responsibility, and she taught them in another room. We three children taught the absolute beginners their alphabet. Our classroom was the hall, and fat Ilya, a big pointer clutched in one hand, would try to teach the alphabet to rows of stolid little children much the same size as himself.^III

Ten years before, when Tolstoy had been teaching the peasant children, he realized to his dismay that there were no good primers: “To print good books for the masses! How simple and easy it looks, just like all great ideas. There is just one difficulty: there are no good books for the people, not only in our country, but even not in Europe. In order to print such books they must be written first, but not one of the benefactors will think of undertaking this task.”^IV

And so, several years later, having married and having completed War and Peace, he saw his own children begin to come of age as readers. He decided not to wait for some benefactor to undertake that Herculean task of writing “good books for the masses” and set about planning and composing his own primer; he adapted stories from world literature, folk literature, the Bible, local legends, science and nature studies, jokes, and, of special interest, he told or retold his own and friends’ “true stories” (a genre called byli in Russian). These stories are just what I would advise anyone wanting to learn Russian to read. The byli are full of voice and wit.^V They are the essence of simplicity and drama, told in the first and third person in the most conversational, plain, and direct style. “They present,” writes a Russian scholar, “perfect models of the language as actually spoken.”^VI For example, Tolstoy composed this story as told by a peasant boy:

HOW THE BOY TOLD ABOUT HOW HE STOPPED BEING SCARED OF BLIND BEGGARMEN

When I was a boy, blind beggarmen frightened me, and I was scared of them. One time I was walking home, and sitting on some porch-steps were two blind beggars. I didn’t know what they would do to me. I was scared to run away and I was scared to pass them. I thought they might grab me. Suddenly one of them (he had white eyes, like milk) got up, grabbed me by the hand, and said, “Little fellow! Are you kindly?” I tore loose from him and ran to my mother.

She sent me out with some half-kopecks and bread. The beggars rejoiced over the bread and crossed themselves and ate. Then the beggar with the white eyes said, “Your bread is good! God thanks you.” And he again took my hand, and he patted it. I felt sorry for him, and after that I stopped being afraid of blind beggarmen.^VII

The lack of initial success of the Azbuka when it was published in the late fall of 1872 would come to annoy Tolstoy; the criticism it would receive would also distract him from completing Anna Karenina in its early conception, which as it turns out, for the sake of literary history, was probably a good thing, as he recast Anna Karenina while he was vastly recasting the Azbuka into its second form, the New Azbuka.^VIII He often grew disgusted with his work on Anna Karenina, but he never tired of trying to get the Azbuka right. (He was so consumed with it that in the second to last part of Anna Karenina, completely out of the blue but not unbelievably, he realizes that Anna herself, living with Vronsky and lonely and ostracized in Moscow, has written a children’s novel.^IX)

In October of 1872, the Azbuka was at the printer’s, his research into the era of Peter the Great seemed to be complete, and Tolstoy was in good spirits, raring to write a new historical epic.

One of his longtime correspondents was his distant relative Aleksandra (Alexandrine) Andreevna Tolstaya, with whom he was confessional and deferential (she was eleven years older).^X In the early spring of 1872 Tolstoy expressed to her his amazement at his good fortune:

My life is just the same, i.e., I couldn’t wish for anything better. There are a few great and intellectual joys—just as many as I have the strength to experience—and a solid background of foolish joys, as for instance: teaching the peasant children to read and write, breaking in a young horse, admiring a large room newly built on to the house, calculating the future income from a newly purchased estate, a well done version of a fable by Aesop, rattling off a symphony for 4 hands with my niece, fine calves—all heifers—and so on. The great joys are a family which is terribly fortunate, children who are all fit and well, and, I’m almost certain, intelligent and unspoiled, and work. Last year it was the Greek language, this year it’s been the Primer so far, and now I’m beginning a big, new work [that is, about Peter the Great], in which there will be something of what I told you, although the whole thing is quite different, which is something I never expected. I feel altogether rested now from my previous work and entirely freed from the influence my writing had on me, and, most important, free of pride and praise. I’m starting work joyfully, timidly, and apprehensively, as I did the first time.^XI

That fall of 1872, in another happy mood (evidence of such moods in the coming years is rare), Tolstoy wrote Alexandrine one of his most winning letters:

[…] having finished my Primer I recently began to write the big story—I don’t like to call it a novel—which I’ve been dreaming about for so long.^XII

He didn’t want to jinx the Peter project by calling it a novel and he didn’t want to raise his own or anybody else’s expectations. He was excited, but he strove to cultivate a state of equilibrium:

And when this folly, as Pushkin so well called it, begins to take hold of you, you become particularly sensitive to the coarse things of life. Imagine a man in perfect stillness and darkness trying to hear the sounds of whispering and trying to see rays of light in the gloom, suddenly having stinking Bengal lights let off under his nose and having to listen to a march played on instruments that are out of tune. Very painful. Now once again I’m listening and watching in the stillness and darkness, and I only wish I could describe the hundredth part of what I see and hear. It gives me great pleasure. So much for my confession.

Despite there being, in the fall of 1872, six children between the ages of four months and nine years old at the Yasnaya Polyana house, the noise in the morning while Tolstoy was working at his writing was supposed to be at a minimum. Aylmer Maude describes Tolstoy’s morning routine at this time:

Before breakfast he would go for a walk with his brother in-law [one of Sofia’s brothers], or they would ride down to bathe in the river that flows by one side of the estate. At morning coffee the whole family assembled, and it was generally a very merry meal, Tolstoy being up to all sorts of jokes, till he rose with the words, “One must get to work,” and went off to his study, taking with him a tumbler full of tea. While at work in his room not even his wife was allowed to disturb him; though at one time his second child and eldest daughter, Tatyana, while still quite a little girl, was privileged to break this rule.^XIII

The Tolstoy family’s room arrangements varied, and Tolstoy didn’t always have the now more famous vaulted downstairs room for his writing. His private study in other periods was upstairs.

There are several drawings, paintings, and photos of Tolstoy, when he was older, composing at his desk. In a sketch by Ilya Repin from 1891, for example, Tolstoy leans closely over paper, not especially hunched but like someone who has just finished swimming laps and has raised one elbow on the edge of the pool. The bearded, balding man wears a peasant blouse. His right leg is bent under his left, his shoed right foot comfortably poking out behind him. He is sitting not on a sawn-off chair, a...