Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [5]
III
‘Levin is you, Lyova, minus the talent,’ Sophia Andreevna said to her husband after reading the first part of Anna Karenina. (And she added, ‘Levin is an impossible man!’) Indeed, though Tolstoy often lent features of his own character to his protagonists, Levin is his most complete self-portrait. He has the same social position as his creator, the same ‘wild’ nature, the same ideas and opinions, the same passion for hunting, the same almost physical love of the Russian peasant. He shares Tolstoy’s favourite method of criticism by feigned incomprehension, applied here to such matters as government bureaucracy, the provincial elections, and the latest fashions in music (the fullest development of this method is found in Tolstoy’s What Is Art?, published in 1898, particularly in his deadpan treatment of Wagner’s operas). Levin’s estate reproduces Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana, and his marriage to Kitty duplicates Tolstoy’s marriage to Sophia Andreevna in the minutest details - his unusual way of proposing, his turning over of his diaries, his compunction about confessing before the ceremony, his visit to the Shcherbatskys on the day of the wedding, even the forgotten shirt. The death of Levin’s brother Nikolai is drawn from the death of Tolstoy’s own brother Nikolai, also from consumption. In fact, most of the major characters in the novel and many of the minor ones, including the servants, had their counterparts in Tolstoy’s life. The only notable exceptions, interestingly enough, are Anna and Vronsky.
Levin also goes through the same religious crisis that Tolstoy went through while he was writing the novel, and reaches the same precarious conversion at the end. The following passages suggest how closely Tolstoy modelled Levin’s spiritual struggle on his own. The first is from Part Eight of Anna Karenina:
‘Without knowing what I am and why I’m here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live,’ Levin would say to himself ...
It was necessary to be delivered from this power. And deliverance was within everyone’s reach. It was necessary to stop this dependence on evil. And there was one means - death.
And, happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.
The second is from his Confession, begun in 1879, just a year after the definitive version of Anna Karenina was published. In it Tolstoy gives a forthright account of his own agonized search for some meaning in life:
Though happy and in good health, I became persuaded that it was impossible for me to live much longer ... And, though happy, I kept away from the least bit of rope, so as not to hang myself from the beam between the wardrobes in my bedroom, where I found myself alone each day while I dressed, and I stopped going hunting with my rifle, so as not to yield to this too-easy way of delivering myself from existence.
Anna Karenina was written at the most important turning-point in Tolstoy’s life. Up to then the artist in him had balanced the moralist; after Anna the moralist dominated the artist.
How difficult it was for Tolstoy to keep that balance we can see from his work on the portrayal of Anna. The enigma of Anna is at the heart of the novel. In the earlier drafts she was quite fully explained. Tolstoy described her past, how she came to marry, at the age of eighteen, a man who was twelve years