The chronological and cultural gap between a contemporary reader and Russian high society in Tolstoy’s time obscures the historical dislocation in the foundation of the plot. Anna’s stigma is grossly exaggerated; by social standards of the time, her behaviour was, of course, scandalous, but hardly unprecedented or exceptional. Russian high society was rife with stories of adultery and civil marriage. Emperor Alexander II lived and fathered children with his mistress, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya. This caused consternation among conservatives, who consolidated their opposition around the empress (one of whose ladies-in-waiting was Alexandra Tolstoy) and the heir to the throne. Such an aristocratic Fronde had little chance of bucking the trend set by a modernizing autocrat. Victorian bourgeois morality did not take root in a country where the bourgeoisie was relatively weak and uninfluential.
Tolstoy’s own married sister Maria had a daughter with her civil partner, the Swedish viscount Hector de Kleen. Maria’s history was different from Anna’s – she had left her husband because she was not willing to ‘serve as a senior wife in his harem’.10 She was soon abandoned by the viscount and felt deeply repentant of her sins, but she never became a pariah. Likewise, Sofia’s sister Liza, who failed to charm Tolstoy in 1862, divorced her impotent husband and remarried after eight years of unconsummated family life at exactly the time when her brother-in-law was writing Anna Karenina.
In a scene symbolically set in a theatre, the murmur of gossip is transformed into a roar of public damnation by Anna’s inner voice. Her inner demons define her predicament, driving her towards near madness and ultimately to tragedy. In the epigraph to the novel, ‘Vengeance is mine and I’ll repay,’ Tolstoy quotes Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, but it remains unclear whether the actual revenge in question is performed by the just God of the New Testament or the ‘terrible and cynical deity’ of sexuality. Following Rousseau, Tolstoy condemned the hypocrisy of those who practised the vices for which they blame Anna, but ‘society’ was guilty not of ruining her love, but of corrupting her soul. Vronsky’s seduction of a married woman meets with universal approval. Vronsky’s mother also initially welcomes this liaison; Tolstoy was obviously thinking of his dear aunt Toinette, who wished for him to have an affair with a well-born married woman, a badge of honour for a young noble male.
‘Emma Bovary – c’est moi,’ Flaubert famously said. Tolstoy could hardly have made the same claim for Anna, though he endowed her with a flame of carnal desire all too familiar to him. There is no doubt, however, that Tolstoy could have said this about Konstantin Levin, the most autobiographical character he ever produced. Levin’s surname is derived from the author’s first name: Lev. Tolstoy endowed Levin with his own biographical details, traits of character, ways of estate management, everyday habits and preferences, social views and a sense of an anxious spiritual quest – nearly everything apart from literary talent. He did not have much left for Vronsky, the ideal image of a man comme il faut.
Nevertheless, ‘despite a marked difference between Vronsky and Levin’ (AK, p. 637), Anna is able to discern in them ‘that common trait, which caused Kitty to fall in love with them both’. This ‘common trait’ was that of Tolstoy, who divided himself between the two characters. In War and Peace the main female character is first enchanted by an impeccable officer, but then understands her true feelings. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy goes further. In an episode that serves the same role as the decisive meeting between Pierre and Natasha in War and Peace, Levin falls in love with Anna. When he returns home, Kitty’s hysterical outburst seems to be excessive, if taken at face value; nothing has actually happened that could threaten their marriage. Still, both Levin and the author know that Kitty is right.
The interrelationship between Levin and Anna’s family stories is often seen through the prism of the first, proverbial sentence of the noveclass="underline" ‘All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (AK, p. 1). The structure of the novel, however, as well as the meaning of the opening maxim, cannot be reduced to such a shallow contrast. ‘It is well known that happy marriages are rare,’ wrote Schopenhauer.11 Tolstoy described two happy families, if entirely different ones, in the epilogue to War and Peace and after that lost all interest in this subject.
In one of the drafts of Anna Karenina he wrote: ‘We like to imagine misfortune as something concentrated, as a fact that happened, while misfortune is never an event in life, it is life itself, the long life which is unhappy, life which preserves the attributes of happiness, when happiness and the meaning of life are lost’ (CW, XX, p. 370). It is this existential despair that drives Levin, a ‘happy and healthy family man’ (CW, XX, p. 562), so close to suicide that he has to hide the rope and the gun from sight so as not to hang or shoot himself. Mutual devotion and numerous children protect Levin and Kitty from the utter destitution of Karenin and Anna, or semi-destitution of Oblonsky and Dolly, but they are ‘unhappy in their own way’. Levin’s final religious revelation has nothing to do with his family; and on the last page, he even decides not to tell Kitty about it.
Tolstoy never needed reminders that death was near and omnipresent, but the 1870s provided him with many particular occasions to reflect on this. The year 1873, when Tolstoy started the novel, brought news of the death of Dasha Kuzminskaya, Tanya’s elder daughter and the darling of both families. This was followed several months later by the sudden death of Tolstoy’s fourth son Peter at the age of seventeen months. Next year Tolstoy’s beloved aunt Toinette, Tatiana Yergolskaya, passed away after a prolonged illness. Another aunt, Pelageya Yushkova, who took care of him in Kazan and who had lived at Yasnaya Polyana as a widow for several years, died in 1875. That year also witnessed the deaths of two more of Tolstoy’s babies, Nikolai and Varvara: the former did not survive until his first birthday, the latter passed away shortly after she was born. Death encircled Tolstoy’s novel from the railway accident at the beginning that serves as a portent for Anna’s suicide at the end.
In his first major novel, specially devoted to war and with infinitely more characters, Tolstoy showed death much more often than in the second. In War and Peace death is a necessary part of life’s eternal cycle. The deaths of old Prince Bolkonsky, Prince Andrei and Hélène allow for the marriages of both Nikolai and Maria and Pierre and Natasha, leading to the births of their numerous offspring. In the world of Anna Karenina death begets new deaths: Anna’s suicide induces Vronsky to go to war hoping to end his life there, and the death of Levin’s brother drives Levin to near suicidal despair, from which he is mysteriously saved only by the help of a religious peasant.
In February 1873 Tolstoy wrote to his cousin Alexandra that he had reread War and Peace for the new edition with a feeling of ‘repentance and shame . . . not unlike what a man experiences when he sees the remains of an orgy in which he has taken part’. Still, he was ‘consoled’ by the fact that he ‘was carried by this orgy heart and soul, and thought that nothing else mattered beside it’ (Ls, I, p. 257). He also told Alexandra that he was ‘on the point of writing something again’, but the ‘orgy’ did not repeat itself. In August 1875, midway through his work on the novel, Tolstoy complained to Strakhov that he had to ‘set down again . . . at dull, commonplace Anna Karenina and prayed to God [for] strength to get it off [his] hands as quickly as possible in order to clear a space’ (Ls, I, p. 280). Two months later he told Fet that ‘in order to work, it is necessary for scaffolding to be erected under your feet,’ that for a long time he was idly ‘sitting and waiting’ (Ls, I, p. 281) for the scaffolding, but now he felt they are in place and could resume his work. He was struggling to believe in the importance of his enterprise.