These angry words about Tolstoy’s novel being used as a political banner for the conservatives explain the liberal outrage over Anna Karenina. As contemporaries recalled, Alexander II “hated learned women,” seeing them as both potential and actual revolutionaries.13 His high officials were in complete agreement on this. The liberal press and public opinion pushed for women’s access to higher education. The wary government did not give in.
In 1873 a special commission, which included the minister of public education, the minister of internal affairs, and also the chief of gendarmes, sent Alexander II a report on women’s education and the “women’s issue,” which the commission felt was being used by enemies of autocracy to push through demands of “a utopian, almost revolutionary character: to make a woman’s rights equal to that of men, to allow her to participate in politics, and even give the right to free love, which destroys the family and turns extreme licentiousness into a principle.”14
For the authors of the report and Alexander II, who approved it, women’s radicalism in both sex and politics was equally frightening and repulsive. A noted conservative journalist, Prince Vladimir Meshchersky (a known homosexual in St. Petersburg) maintained that female students were “the most fanatical, and one must truthfully say, the ugliest maidens, shorn, in blue spectacles and men’s jackets,”15 for whom education was just a smokescreen for sexual and political anarchy.
That is why the conservative camp hailed Anna Karenina, a love story in high circles, in which the heroine, seeking sexual independence, is punished by society and consequently throws herself under a train.
Reading Anna Karenina, explained a right-wing critic, “you are freed from mediocrity and filth, you stop breathing the fetid air of taverns, hospitals, and prisons, where most of contemporary belles-lettres are gasping.” At last one could enjoy fine descriptions of the life of aristocratic salons, ladies’ boudoirs, fashionable restaurants, and the races.
The left fumed over why Tolstoy did not write about the simple folk or, for example, students: “What a shame that Tolstoy has no ideals! … He cares more about a she-buffalo than an advanced woman.” The ultra-conservative poet Fet reported those liberal opinions to Tolstoy in a letter and added a response to them: “Because a she-buffalo is perfection in its species, while your advanced woman is God knows what.”16
Tolstoy chose the epigraph to Anna Karenina from the Bible: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.” The full quote is this: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith The Lord.” A lively polemic over the epigraph began immediately, and it continues to this day. Is the unfaithful Anna a criminal and God punishes her justly? Or is she innocent, and it is not the business of people to judge her?
In other words, does Tolstoy have sympathy for Anna, or did the “rubbishy old man” (as protofeminist Anna Akhmatova angrily called him) truly believe, as Akhmatova maintained, that “if a woman leaves her rightful husband and joins another man, she inevitably becomes a prostitute”?17
Tolstoy avoided a straightforward comment on the novel. “If I wanted to summarize what I wanted to express in the novel, then I would have to write exactly the same novel that I have written, from the beginning.”
We can assume that the epigraph from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans was chosen by Tolstoy after reading Schopenhauer’s philosophical treatise The World as Will and Representation, where this passage is interpreted. At the same time, Tolstoy was responding to the misogynistic pamphlet by Alexandre Dumas fils, “L’homme—femme,” which posed the question: What should be done with an unfaithful woman—forgive her, throw her out, kill her?
The highly moral Dumas strongly suggested killing unfaithful wives, but Tolstoy, generally very sympathetic to antifeminist ideas (“Women’s only purpose is to give birth and bring up children”), in this case was arguably mercifully inclined to leave the act of punishment to God.
. . .
Tolstoy’s views obviously evolved over time: in his most sensational work on relations between the sexes, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), the hero kills his wife, whom he suspects of having an affair with the violinist with whom she plays Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, “a terrible thing,” and the court finds him not guilty.
In his feverish monologue, the protagonist explains his crime by the fact that women have acquired “a terrible power over people” in modern society: “Women, like empresses, hold 90 percent of the human race in slavery and hard labor. And all because they have been humiliated, deprived of equal rights with men. And so they get their revenge by acting on our sensuality, ensnaring us in their nets.”
According to Tolstoy, that shameful and immoral “slavery of sensuality” can be avoided only by total abstinence. Akhmatova commented on the late Tolstoy’s idée fixe skeptically: the old writer, settled in his famous estate, Yasnaya Polyana, stopped lusting after the village girls and therefore decided to forbid the rest of the world to have sex too.18
In this case Akhmatova was wrong, if only because Tolstoy was still in his fifties when he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and he had no problems with his sexual drive, judging by his diaries. The philosophy of the story is, of course, more complex, expressing the quasi-Buddhist idea that “if passions are destroyed including the last, most powerful one—physical love, then the prophecy will come to pass, people will be united into one, the goal of humanity will be reached, and there will be no reason for it to live.”
The diaries also suggest that while one of the impulses for writing the story was, in fact, autobiographical, it was rather opposite to the reason Akhmatova attributed to Tolstoy.
Tolstoy had been waging a fierce psychological war with his wife, Sophia, a strong woman who tried to hold on to her position in the family vis-à-vis the dictator and tyrant her husband was.
When they married in 1862, he was thirty-four and she was eighteen, and in the subsequent thirty years of marriage, she bore him thirteen children; as one of their sons calculated, she was pregnant for almost ten years and breast-fed children for more than thirteen years, and also “managed to run the complex household of a large family and copied War and Peace and Anna Karenina and other works by hand eight, ten, and sometimes twenty times each.”19
Sophia resisted her husband’s intentions to turn her into a mere machine for producing and feeding children (with additional functions as housekeeper, secretary, clerk, and literary agent). There were endless arguments and quarrels, accompanied by Sophia’s hysterics and nervous collapses. Time and again, Tolstoy would angrily write in his diary that the break with his wife was “complete.” Things never reached divorce, even though each threatened to leave, and Sophia often mentioned suicide, a terrible sin for a Christian.
Tolstoy, the more powerful figure, always won. But there was one sphere—sex—where Sophia could get her revenge. In his youth, Tolstoy caroused and debauched, as did everyone in his milieu. Toward the end of his life, he admitted to Maxim Gorky, “I was an insatiable … ‘—’ using a salty word at the end.”20