Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [4]
The earliest mention of the subject of Anna Karenina comes to us not from Tolstoy but from his wife, Sophia Andreevna, who noted in her journal on 23 February 1870 that her husband said he had ‘envisioned the type of a married woman of high society who ruins herself. He said his task was to portray this woman not as guilty but as only deserving of pity, and that once this type of woman appeared to him, all the characters and male types he had pictured earlier found their place and grouped themselves around her. “Now it’s all clear,” he told me.’ Tolstoy did not remain faithful to this first glimpse of the guiltless adultress when he began writing the novel three years later, but she re-emerged in the course of his work and finally overcame the severe moral judgement he tried to bring against her.
The fate of Tolstoy’s heroine was suggested to him by a real incident that occurred in January 1872, a few miles from his estate. A young woman, Anna Stepanovna Pirogov, the mistress of a neighbouring landowner and friend of the Tolstoys, threw herself under a goods train after her lover abandoned her. Tolstoy went to view the mangled body in the station house. It made an indelible impression on him.
Thus, well before inspiration struck him in the spring of 1873, Tolstoy had in mind the general ‘type’ of his Anna and her terrible end. When he did begin writing, however, despite his admiration for Pushkin’s artless immediacy (‘The guests arrived at the summer house’), he began with his ideas. And the main idea, the one he struggled with most bitterly and never could resolve, was that Anna’s suicide was the punishment for her adultery. It was from this struggle with himself that he made the poetry of his heroine.
In the first versions, Anna (variously called Tatiana, Anastasia, and Nana) is a rather fat and vulgar married woman, who shocks the guests at a party by her shameless conduct with a handsome young officer. She laughs and talks loudly, moves gracelessly, gestures improperly, is all but ugly - ‘a low forehead, small eyes, thick lips and a nose of a disgraceful shape ...’ Her husband (surnamed Stavrovich - from the Greek stavros, ‘cross’ - then Pushkin, and finally Karenin) is intelligent, gentle, humble, a true Christian, who will eventually surrender his wife to his rival, Gagin, the future Vronsky. In these sketches Tolstoy emphasized the rival’s handsomeness, youth and charm; at one point he even made him something of a poet. The focus of these primitive versions was entirely on the triangle of wife, husband and lover, the structure of the classic novel of adultery. Tolstoy planned until very late in his work to have the husband grant a divorce and the wife marry her lover. In the end, the renegades were to be rejected by society and find a welcome only among the nihilists. The whole other side of the novel, the story of Levin and Kitty, was absent from the early variants; there were no Shcherbatskys, the Oblonsky family barely appeared, and Levin, called Ordyntsev and then Lenin, was a minor character.
In the early versions, Tolstoy clearly sympathized with the saintly husband and despised the adulterous wife. As he worked on the novel, however, he gradually enlarged the figure of Anna morally and diminished the figure of the husband; the sinner grew in beauty and spontaneity, while the saint turned more and more hypocritical. The young officer also lost his youthful bloom and poetic sensibility, to become, in Nabokov’s description, ‘a blunt fellow with a mediocre mind’. But the most radical changes were the introduction of the Shcherbatskys - Kitty and her sister Dolly, married to Anna’s brother, Stiva Oblonsky - and the promotion of Levin to the role of co-protagonist. These additions enriched the thematic possibilities of the novel enormously, allowing for the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family