"ANNA KARENIN"
_Anna Karenin,_ with _War and Peace,_[1] marks the climax of this
period of maturity. _Anna Karenin_ is the more perfect work; the
work of a mind more certain of its artistic creation, richer too in
experience; a mind for which the world of the heart holds no more
secrets. But it lacks the fire of youth, the freshness of enthusiasm,
the mighty pinions of _War and Peace_. Already Tolstoy has lost
something of the joy of creation. The temporary peace of the first
months of marriage has flown. Into the enchanted circle of love and
art which Countess Tolstoy had drawn about him moral scruples begin to
intrude.
Even in the early chapters of _War and Peace,_ written one year
after marriage, the confidences of Prince Andrei to Pierre upon the
subject of marriage denote the disenchantment of the man who sees in
the beloved woman the stranger, the innocent enemy, the involuntary
obstacle to his moral development. Some letters of 1865 announce the
coming return of religious troubles. As yet they are only passing
threats, blotting out the joy of life. But during the months of 1869,
when Tolstoy was finishing _War and Peace,_ there fell a more serious
blow.
He had left his home for a few days to visit a distant estate. One
night he was lying in bed; it had just struck two:
"I was dreadfully tired; I was sleepy, and felt comfortable enough. All
of a sudden I was seized by such anguish, such terror as I had never
felt in all my life. I will tell you about it in detail; it was truly
frightful. I leapt from the bed and told them to get the horses ready.
While they were putting them in I fell asleep, and when I woke again I
was completely recovered. Yesterday the same thing happened, but in a
much less degree."
The palace of illusion, so laboriously raised by the love of the wife,
was tottering. In the spiritual blank which followed the achievement of
_War and Peace_ the artist was recaptured by his philosophical[2] and
educational preoccupations; he wished to write a spelling-book for the
people; he worked at it feverishly for four years; he was prouder of
it than of _War and Peace_, and when it was finished (1872) he wrote a
second (1875). Then he conceived a passion for Greek; he studied Latin
from morning to night; he abandoned all other work; he discovered "the
delightful Xenophon," and Homer, the real Homer; not the Homer of the
translators, "all these Joukhovskys and Vosses who sing with any sort
of voice they can manage to produce, guttural, peevish, mawkish," but
"this other devil, who sings at the top of his voice, without it ever
entering his head that any one may be listening."[3]
"Without a knowledge of Greek, no education! I am convinced that until
now I knew nothing of all that is truly beautiful and of a simple
beauty in human speech."
This is folly, and he admits as much. He goes to school again with such
passionate enthusiasm that he falls ill. In 1871 he was forced to go
to Samara to undergo the _koumiss_ cure, staying with the Bachkirs.
Nothing pleased him but his Greek. At the end of a lawsuit, in 1872,
he spoke seriously of selling all that he possessed in Russia and of
settling in England. Countess Tolstoy was in despair:
"If you are always absorbed in your Greeks you will never get well. It
is they who have caused this suffering and this indifference concerning
your present life. It is not in vain that we call Greek a dead
language; it produces a condition of death in the spirit."[4]
Finally, to the great joy of the Countess, after many plans abandoned
before they were fairly commenced, on March 19, 1873, he began to write
_Anna Karenin.[5]_ While he worked at it his life I was saddened by
domestic sorrow;[6] his wife was ill. "Happiness does not reign in the
house,"[7] he writes to Fet in 1876.
To some extent the work bears traces of these depressing experiences,
and of passions disillusioned.[8] Save in the charming passages
dealing with the betrothal of Levine, love is no longer presented
with the spirit of youth and poetry which places certain pages of
_War and Peace_ on a level with the most beautiful lyric poetry of
all times. It has assumed a different character: bitter, sensual,
imperious. The fatality which broods over the romance is no longer,
as in _War and Peace_, a kind of Krishna, murderous and serene, the
Destiny of empires, but the madness of love, "Venus herself." She it
is, in the wonderful ball scene, when passion seizes upon Anna and
Vronsky unawares, who endows the innocent beauty of Anna, crowned with
forget-me-not and clothed in black velvet, with "an almost infernal
seductiveness." She it is who, when Vronsky has just declared his
love, throws a light upon Anna's face; but a light "not of joy; it was
the terrible glare of an incendiary fire upon a gloomy night." She it
is who, in the veins of this loyal and reasonable woman, this young,
affectionate mother, pours a voluptuous stream as of irresistible
ichor, and installs herself in her heart, never to leave it until
she has destroyed it. No one can approach Anna without feeling the
attraction and the terror of this hidden dæmon. Kitty is the first to
discover it, with a shock of bewilderment. A mysterious fear mingles
with the delight of Vronsky when he goes to see Anna. Levine, in her
presence, loses all his will. Anna herself is perfectly well aware that
she is no longer her own mistress. As the story develops the implacable
passion consumes, little by little, the whole moral structure of this
proud woman. All that is best in her, her sincere, courageous mind,
crumbles and falls; she has no longer the strength to sacrifice her
worldly vanity; her life has no other object than to please her lover;
she refuses, with shame and terror, to bear children; jealousy tortures
her; the sensual passion which enslaves her obliges her to lie with her
gestures, her voice, her eyes; she falls to the level of those women
who no longer seek anything but the power of making every man turn to
look after them; she uses morphia to dull her sufferings, until the
intolerable torments which consume her overcome her with the bitter
sense of her moral downfall, and cast her beneath the wheels of the
railway-carriage. "And the little moujik with the untidy beard"--the
sinister vision which has haunted her dreams and Vronsky's--"leaned
over the track from the platform of the carriage"; and, as the
prophetic dream foretold, "he was bent double over a sack, in which
he was hiding the remains of something which had known life, with its
torments, its betrayals, and its sorrow."
"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."[9]
Around this tragedy of a soul consumed by love and crushed by the law
of God--a painting in a single shade, and of terrible gloom--Tolstoy
has woven, as in _War and Peace,_ the romances of other lives.
Unfortunately these parallel stories alternate in a somewhat stiff and
artificial manner, without achieving the organic unity of the symphony
of _War and Peace_. It may also be said that the perfect realism of
certain of the pictures--the aristocratic circles of St. Petersburg and
their idle discourse--is now and again superfluous and unnecessary.
Finally, and more openly than in _War and Peace_, Tolstoy has presented
his own moral character and his philosophic ideas side by side with
the spectacle of life. None the less, the work is of a marvellous
richness. There is the same profusion of types as in _War and Peace,_
and all are of a striking justness. The portraits of the men seem to me
even superior. Tolstoy has depicted with evident delight the amiable
egoist, Stepan Arcadievitch, whom no one can look at without responding
to his affectionate smile, and Karenin, the perfect type of the high
official, the distinguished and commonplace states-man, with his mania
for concealing his real opinions and feelings under a mask of perpetual
irony: a mixture of dignity and cowardice, of Phariseeism and Christian
feeling: a strange product of an artificial world, from which he can
never completely free himself in spite of his intelligence and his true
generosity; a man afraid to listen to his I own heart, and rightly so
afraid, since when he does surrender to it, he ends by falling into a
state of nonsensical mysticism.
But the principal interest of the romance, besides the tragedy of Anna
and the varied pictures of Russian society towards 1860--of salons,
officers' clubs, balls, theatres, races--lies in its autobiographical
character. More than any other personage of Tolstoy's books,
Constantine Levine is the incarnation of the writer himself. Not only
has Tolstoy attributed to him his own ideas--at one and the same
time conservative and democratic--and the anti-Liberalism of the
provincial aristocrat who despises "intellectuals;[10] but he has
made him the gift of part of his own life. The love of Levine and
Kitty and their first years of marriage are a transposition of his
own domestic memories, just as the death of Levine's brother is a
melancholy evocation of the death of Tolstoy's brother, Dmitri. The
latter portion, useless to the romance, gives us an insight into the
troubles which were then oppressing the author. While the epilogue of
_War and Peace_ was an artistic transition to another projected work,
the epilogue to _Anna Karenin_ is an autobiographical transition to the
moral revolution which, two years later, was to find expression in the
_Confessions._ Already, in the course of _Anna Karenin,_ he returns
again and again to a violent or ironical criticism of contemporary
society, which he never ceased to attack in his subsequent works.
War is declared upon deceit: war upon lies; upon virtuous as well as
vicious lies; upon liberal chatter, fashionable charity, drawing-room
religion, and philanthropy. War against the world, which distorts all
truthful feelings, and inevitably crushes the generous enthusiasm of
the mind! Death throws an unexpected light upon the social conventions.
Before Anna dying, the stilted Karenin is softened. Into this lifeless
soul, in which everything is artificial, shines a ray of love and
of Christian forgiveness. All three--the husband, the wife, and the
lover--are momentarily transformed. All three become simple and loyal.
But as Anna recovers, all three are sensible, "facing the almost holy
moral strength which was guiding them from within, the existence of
another force, brutal but all-powerful, which was directing their lives
despite themselves, and which would not leave them in peace." And they
knew from the beginning that they would be powerless in the coming
struggle, in which they would be obliged to do the evil that the world
would consider necessary."[11]
If Levine, like Tolstoy, whose incarnation he is, also became purified
in the epilogue to the book, it was because he too was touched by
mortality. Previously, "incapable of believing, he was equally
incapable of absolute doubt."[12] After he beheld his brother die
the terror of his ignorance possessed him. For a time this misery
was stifled by his marriage; but it re-awakened at the birth of his
firstborn. He passed alternately through crises of prayer and negation.
He read the philosophers in vain. He began, in his distracted state,
to fear the temptation of suicide. Physical work was a solace; it
presented no doubts; all was clear. Levine conversed with the peasants;
one of them spoke of the men "who live not for self, but for God."
This was to him an illumination. He saw the antagonism between the
reason and the heart. Reason preached the ferocious struggle for life;
there is nothing reasonable in loving one's neighbour:
"Reason has taught me nothing; all that I know has been given to me,
revealed to me by the heart."[13]
From this time peace returned. The word of the humble peasant, whose
heart was his only guide, had led him back to God.... To what God? He
did not seek to know. His attitude toward the Church at this moment, as
was Tolstoy's for a long period, was humble, and in no wise defiant of
her dogmas.
"There is a truth even in the illusion of the celestial vault and in
the apparent movement of the stars."[14]
[1] It is regrettable that the beauty of the poetical conception of the
work is often tarnished by the philosophical chatter with which Tolstoy
has loaded his work, especially in the later portions. He is determined
to make an exposition of his theory of the fatality of history. The
pity is that he returns to the point incessantly, and obstinately
repeats himself. Flaubert, who "gave vent to cries of admiration" while
reading the first two volumes, which he declared "sublime" and "full
of Shakespearean things," threw the third volume aside in boredom: "He
goes off horribly. He repeats himself, and he philosophises. We see the
aristocrat, the author, and the Russian, while hitherto we have seen
nothing but Nature and Humanity." (Letter to Tourgenev, January, 1880.)
[2] While he was finishing _War and Peace_, in the summer of 1869,
he discovered Schopenhauer, and was filled with enthusiasm. "I am
convinced that Schopenhauer is the most genial of men. Here is the
whole universe reflected with an extraordinary clearness and beauty."
(Letter to Fet, August 30, 1869.)
[3] "Between Homer and his translators," he says again, "there is the
difference between boiled and distilled water and the spring-water
broken on the rocks, which may carry the sand along with it as it
flows, but becomes more pure and fresh on that account."
[4] Papers of Countess Tolstoy (_Vie et Oeuvre)._
[5] It was completed in 1877. It appeared--minus the epilogue--in the
_Rousski Viestniki._
[6] The death of three children (November 18, 1873, February, 1875,
November, 1875); of his Aunt Tatiana, his adopted mother (June, 1874),
and of his Aunt Pelagia (December, 1875).
[7] Letter to Fet, March, 1876.
[8] "Woman is the stumbling-block of a man's career. It is difficult to
love a woman and to do nothing of any profit; and the only way of not
being reduced to inaction by love is to marry." (_Anna Karenin._)
[9] The motto at the commencement of the book.
[10] Notice also, in the epilogue, the hostility towards warfare,
nationalism, and Pan-Slavism.
[11] "Evil is that which is reasonable to the world. Sacrifice and love
are insanity."
[12] (_Anna Karenin,_ vol. ii.)
[13] _Anna Karenin,_ vol. ii.
[14] _Ibid._