“Hello, Elif,” he said pleasantly.
Such mystifications can have a very strong effect on young people, and this one was compounded by the circumstance that I had just read Eugene Onegin, and had been particularly moved by Tatyana’s dream: the famous sequence in which Pushkin’s heroine finds herself crossing a snowy plain, “surrounded by sad murk,” and pursued by a bear. The bear scoops her up and Tatyana loses consciousness, waking up as the bear deposits her at the end of a hallway where she hears cries and the clink of glasses, “as if at some big funeral.” Through a crack in the door she sees a long table surrounded by reveling monsters—a dancing windmill, a half crane, a half cat—presided over, as she realizes with inexplicable horror, by none other than Eugene Onegin.
Tatyana’s dream is fulfilled in waking life at her name-day party: an ill-fated event during which Onegin, motivated apparently by nothing but boredom, breaks Tatyana’s heart and fatally quarrels with his young friend Lensky. (By the time Onegin falls in love with Tatyana, years later in Moscow, it’s too late. She still loves him but is married to an old general.) I read Onegin in Nabokov’s English edition, and was greatly struck by his note that the language of the dream not only contains “echoes of rhythms and terms” from Tatyana’s experiences earlier in the book, but also foreshadows the future: “a certain dreamlike quality is carried on to the name-day party and later to the duel.” The guests at Tatyana’s party and at the balls in Moscow, Nabokov writes, “are benightmared and foreshadowed by the fairy-tale ghouls and hybrid monsters in her dream.”
To me it seemed that the violin jury had also been benightmared and foreshadowed by Tatyana’s dream, and that some hidden portent was borne by Maxim’s apparition at their head.
If this incident didn’t immediately send me looking to Maxim’s national literature for answers, it was nonetheless at the back of my mind that summer when I discovered a 1970s Penguin edition of Anna Karenina in my grandmother’s apartment in Ankara. I had run out of English books, and was especially happy to find one that was so long. Think of the time it must have taken for Tolstoy to write it! He hadn’t been ashamed to spend his time that way, rather than relaxing by playing Frisbee or attending a barbecue. Nobody in Anna Karenina was oppressed, as I was, by the tyranny of leisure. The leisure activities in Tolstoy’s novel—ice skating, balls, horse races—were beautiful, dignified, and meaningful in terms of plot.
I spent the next two weeks flopped on my grandmother’s super-bourgeois rose-colored velvet sofa, consuming massive quantities of grapes, reading obsessively. Anna Karenina seemed to pick up exactly where Onegin left off, in the same world, as if the people in the opera house were also benightmared by Tatyana’s dream, whose atmosphere had already seeped into Anna’s experiences at the horse races and on the snowbound train. It was the same world, the same air, only everything was bigger—as if a minutely detailed dollhouse had been transformed into a real house with long hallways, shining fixtures, a rambling garden. Elements from Onegin reappeared: a snowy dream, a fatal ball, a revolver, a bear. It was as if all of Onegin had been dreamed by Anna, who in her own life fulfilled Tatyana’s unresolved fate.*
Anna Karenina was a perfect book, with an otherworldly perfection: unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a supercharged gray zone between nature and culture. How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small—so serious and so light—so strange and so natural? The heroine didn’t turn up until chapter 18, and the book went on for nineteen more chapters after her death, and Anna’s lover and her husband had the same first name (Alexei). Anna’s maid and daughter were both called Anna, and Anna’s son and Levin’s half brother were both Sergei. The repetition of names struck me as remarkable, surprising, and true to life.
My mother was happy to see me reading what turned out to be her old copy of Anna Karenina. “Now you can tell me what it really means!” she said. My mother often asked me to tell her what things really meant: books, movies, things people said to her at work. (She worked at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where people seemed to make particularly inscrutable remarks.) The pretext for these questions was that I am a native English speaker and she isn’t. Actually, my mother studied from early childhood at an American school in Ankara and speaks beautiful English, and I remember only one time that her question was to any extent resolved by my telling her the literal meaning of an English phrase. (The phrase was “Knock yourself out.”) In all other instances—and, in fact, also in that instance—“What does that really mean?” itself really meant something like: “What underlying attitude toward me, or toward people like me, is represented by these words?” My mother believed that people harbored essential stances of like or dislike toward others, and betrayed these stances in their words and actions. If you came out looking terrible in a photograph, it was a sign that the person who took it didn’t really like you.
“So what did it all mean?” my mother asked, when I had finished Anna Karenina. “What was Tolstoy trying to say? Did Vronsky just not really love Anna?”
We were in the kitchen in Ankara, a city with an anagrammatic relationship to Anna Karenina, drinking what Turkish people call “Turkish tea”: very strong, sugary Lipton, served in little tulip-shaped glasses.
I said that I thought Vronsky had really loved Anna.
“He couldn’t have loved her enough, or she wouldn’t have killed herself. It just wouldn’t have happened.” My mother’s theory was that the double plot in Anna Karenina represents the two kinds of men in the world: those who really like women, and those who don’t. Vronsky, a man who really liked women, overwhelmed Anna and was overwhelmed by her—but some part of him was never committed to her in the way that Levin, a man who essentially did not like women, was committed to Kitty.
“That kind of makes sense,” I admitted.
“Is Tolstoy saying that it’s better for women to be with men like Levin? Kitty made the right choice, and Anna made the wrong choice, right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t know. Looking back, by that point I had already acquired certain ideas about literature. I believed that it “really meant” something, and that this meaning was dependent on linguistic competence, on the Chomskians’ iron law: “The intuitions of a native speaker.” (“You really speak English,” my mother would say admiringly, in our conversations about books.) That’s probably why I decided to study linguistics when I got to college; it didn’t even occur to me to study literature. I remember believing firmly that the best novels drew their material and inspiration exclusively from life, and not from other novels, and that, as an aspiring novelist, I should therefore try not to read too many novels.
I was also uninterested by what I knew of literary theory and history. It was a received idea in those days that “theory” was bad for writers, infecting them with a hostility toward language and making them turn out postmodern; and what did it have to offer, anyway, besides the reduction of a novel to a set of unpleasant facts about power structures, or the superficial thrill of juxtaposing Pride and Prejudice with the uncertainty principle? As for history, it struck me as pedantic, unambitious. Why all that trouble to prove things that nobody would ever dispute in the first place, like that an earlier author had influenced a later author?