Lecture Notes Part 3 Anna Karenina

Lecture Notes Part Three Anna Karenina (AK)

It seems that Count Leo Tolstoy was not only a great writer, philosopher, psychologist, but a good businessmen as well. The painter Ivan Kramskoy describes in his letters to P.M. Tretyakov how the Tolstoys beat down his price of 1000 rubles per canvas to a mere 250 rubles to paint the family portrait, after he told them that he would paint the portrait of Tolstoy commissioned and paid for by the Tretyakov gallery. (Tretyakov was the founder of the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow, btw much controversy surrounds this gallery right now, which Tretyakov gave to the city of Moscow. Soviet Union used to receive all the proceeds from this gallery, but now, in present day Russia, the mayor of Moscow is demanding that the profits from the gallery be given to the city of Moscow as it was described in Tretyakov’s initial bequest). Kramskoy also was rather surprised that for a man in his mid-forties (this was at the time of writing of AK), Tolstoy did not have much gray hair or the solemnity Kramskoy expected (Wilson 277)
“Tolstoy enormously enjoyed having his portrait painted, and he could write to Fet (A.A. Fet (Shenshin) famous Russian lyric poet, highest number nightingales and roses in all or Russian poetry): “I sit and chat with him and try to convert him from his Petersburg faith to the Christian one” “. (Wilson 277)
Kramskoy served as a prototype for the painter Mikhaylov in AK. Here is a reminiscence of a conversation of Kramskoy and Tolstoy shared on their walk together cited verbatim from Tolstoy by A.N. Wilson, p.278:

Kramskoy (K): What do you respect?
Tolstoy (T): The Samara wilderness, with its farmers, the Bashkirs, about whom Herodotus could have written. Homer ought to have done it and I don’t know how. I’m studying. I’ve even learned Greek to read Homer. He sings and shouts and it’s all the truth. Peace comes in the steppe.
K: But how’s your novel, Lev Nikolayevich?
T: I don’t know. One thing’s certain. Anna is going to die – vengeance will be wreaked on her. She wanted to rethink life in her own way.
K: How should one think?
T: One must try to live by the faith which one has sucked in with one’s mother’s milk and without arrogance of the mind.
K: You mean, believe in the Church?
T: Look, the sky’s cleared. It is pale blue. One has to believe that the pale blue up there is solid vault. Otherwise one would believe in revolution…

This brings to my mind Fet’s poem about the firmament of the skies, “Na stoge sena noch’u uzhnoi” (On the haystack during a southern night). In this poem the poet lies on a haystack during a warm night and gazes at the stars while he feels as if he’s actually within the hand of God.

The ancients believed that the world stands on top of the turtle supported by elephants. In my opinion, AK is one of these literature powerhouses (elephants), much like Shakespeare’s “King Lear”. However, there was much criticism about this novel during Tolstoy’s lifetime (some of which we examined during the previous lecture) and the power of this novel is such that it strokes the fires of imagination of new researchers. Henry James (Great American author and critic who lived in England and wrote 20 novels and 12 plays, Portrait of a Lady, Wings of Dove (books)) referred to Tolstoy’s novels as “loose and baggy monsters”. Yes, AK does not have a “direct” start to finish plot of Madame Bovary, but in my opinion, its beauty lies in a mirror image of Tolstoy manifested in Anna and in Levin both. Tolstoy’s novels, like Pushkin’s mennipea (a genre weaving many historical/social/thematic timelines), Eugene Onegin, have the character of a very populated underwater reef for the reader’s immersion and gratification.

Turgenev, the great, world renown Russian novelist (an older contemporary of Tolstoy who wrote Fathers and Sons and A Nest of the Gentry) was known for his lyrical prose style. Of Anna Karenina he says, “I don’t like Anna Karenina, although there are some truly great pages in it (the races, the mowing, the hunting). But it’s all sour, it reeks of Moscow, incense, old maids, Slavophilism, the nobility etc…”. “The second part is trivial and boring”. Of course Turgenev, the writer of Huntsmen’s sketches (or Sportsmen’s sketches) which, when translated, gave Hemingway inspiration for his dialogues and writing about the common people, would have liked the hunting scenes. However, as pointed out in Wilson (279), “Among the legendary adulteries which formed part of Tolstoy’s mental word was a Bers family secret. In 1833 Turgenev’s mother gave birth to a natural daughter, almost certainly fathered by Dr. Bers, who was in turn to become Tolstoy’s father- in –law. Like Anna, Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva went abroad to hide the scandal. Life, often so much neater than art, allowed her to return the following year, because her husband has died.” Tolstoy did not stay long under Turgenev’s wing when he traveled in Europe, also he married Dr. Behrs’ daughter, and Tolstoy’s behavior in the salon literary circles of St. Petersburg was uppity and quarrelsome. I would disagree with our great American and Russian writer and lecturer, Nabokov (the author of Lolita and Pale Fire), that personal background, “personal dirt” should be kept out of the study of literature and literary criticism. In this instance, we can surmise that Turgenev realized what a powerhouse Tolstoy was as an in-depth psychological writer. That Turgenev’s study of Lisa in the Nest of the Gentry, was no match, for incredible unraveling, the character development that occurs in Anna Karenina. In my opinion, Turgenev was simply a bit jealous of this young master of the pen.

I would also disagree with many Russian critics that Tolstoy does not blatantly preach to us through his writing (Although jokingly Gustav Flaubert – the great French writer would say that “in each of us lives a Madame Bovary” (i.e. an adulteress or an adulterer), in his book Gustav Flaubert could not possibly have written (preached) a scarier moral lesson - The death by rat poison of Madame Bovary is described in every gory detail on several pages, the husband goes insane, the child is placed in an orphanage – the result of Emma’s adultery cannot possibly end any worse!!! ).

The scene of Princess Dolly Oblonsky with her children is almost a photographic portrayal of what Tolstoy thinks (preaches) a good woman of his day and age and society rank should be like. The perfect mother, good to her peasants, who forgives her husband for his trespasses. And yet, these scenes, although almost reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting or an old-fashioned bundt cake with a heavy coat of powdered sugar, make the reader almost wistful for this past that was reality for Tolstoy.

In part three, Tolstoy provides us with a Turgenev-like lyrical description of farm labor, perhaps an antidote for intellectual activity for Levin. It is interesting that the statesman Karenin tries to find an antidote, he reads “books about books”. He reads books about art, because they are the “in” books to read, because in the high society circles where he thrives, he needs to seen, much like you need to be seen on the resume when you put “gardening” or “tennis” as a hobby to be seen as a “complete” man/woman. There is a problem with him though. Levin (a sort of a Renaissance man) questions everything, although he’s repeatedly beaten by his professor brother Koznyshev in an intellectual debate, he even questions the beliefs his brother holds. “Levin strives to discover a “key to life” first through science than philosophy” (Sturman 33) (almost the green stick that Tolstoy believed in as a child). He feels piece and well being through labor, an exultant feeling of health trying to head for an anti-intellectual solution, a natural solution to life’s ultimate meaning. (Sturman 33) For Levin, a marriage would increase his sense of reality.

On a personal note, Tolstoy tried to make his serfs his partners in the late 1840s at Yasnaya Polyana (Clear Glade). (The emancipation of the serfs occurred in 1861). Just like Olenin in the Cossacks makes Lukashka wary by a gift of the horse, Tolstoy’s serfs and Levin’s serfs were very wary of this anti-serfdom that Tolstoy and Levin try to establish. Tolstoy was crestfallen when this attempt failed and went to live in Moscow in 1848-1850. After the advent of emancipation, Tolstoy gave freedom to his serfs that they did accept. (Feitlowitz 71)

Karenin does not ponder, he has no time to drink in the beauty, to smell a rose. He seems a living machine (a neat automaton the kind the great Russian writer Zamyatin would ridicule in “We”), a living computer or, maybe a train (like the train that Anna will throw herself under in the very end of the novel?). Instead he is engaged in what we call in Russian “razlozhit’ po polochkam” – to place things on their shelves. Even religion is a set of neat axioms to him, much like the axiom-laws in geometry. “He must compromise emotional problems and avoid their poignancy through the principle of expediency” (Sturman 37). He does not experience the “wonder”, while Levin has this inner, child-like quality of the soul to marvel at the cloud patterns (much like Turgenev’s protagonist in Nest of the Gentry), at the love the young farming couple have for each other.

It is also interesting to note how easily Karenin dismisses the duel, it does not fit his set of axioms. Also, in reality (and this, being a man who belonged to the highest circles of society) Vronsky should have realized, there would have been no duel. Karenin was too important to St. Petersburg’s society, he was the “vintik” (screw) (although quite impotent to get his wife to act according to his set of rules) without which the wheels of politics would cease to function. The duel would have been prevented and a “save face” solution would have been found. Vronsky, in his narrow military and honor bound look at things is not a flexible thinker. The fact that he does not run away with Anna and her son immediately gives time for the wheels of deliberation to set into place and for Karenin to resent Anna and to scheme. It is possible that Vronsky’s youth, love for Anna, and maybe some degree of deliberation (he needs money) causes this lapse in judgment and a stale mate, which would become status quo for awhile.


Sources:

Rogover, Russkaya Literatura Vtoroi Poloviny XIX veka, Saga, Moscow, 2005

Various web publications

Henri Troyat, Tolstoy, Doubleday and Co, Garden City NY, 1967



A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy, W.W. Norton and Co, NY, 1988

Marianne Sturman, Anna Karenina, Lincoln Nebraska, 1996

Marguerite Feitlowitz, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Barron’s Educational Series, 1985