Blaisdell, B. Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of LIterature’s Most Enigmatic Heroine. New York : Pegasus Books, 2020. ISBN 9781643134628
I’ve been reading Bob Blaisdell’s lovingly detailed Creating Anna Karenina, which delves into how Leo Tolstoy wrote his brilliant and tragic novel. He thought he would knock it out as a novella in a couple of weeks… it took 53 months. That’s counting the 6- or 7-month stints when he didn’t touch it because it was summer, because he was sick, because he was depressed (or was he depressed because he wasn’t writing?), because his wife was pregnant (again – poor Sofia, pregnant 10 times before she was 30), but largely because he hated it, thought it was awful and terrible and had to be rewritten over and over and over….while his publisher begged and pleaded and showered him with letters. But two Tolstoyan tidbits struck me and I’m pondering them.
After finishing Anna K, Tolstoy told a friend that “a story makes an impression only when it’s impossible to sort out with whom the author sympathizes.” (p. 293). He had started out imagining Anna as a “high-society floozy” shamelessly cuckolding her husband, a rigid, cold bureaucrat. But as the story lengthened and deepened, his feelings changed. He empathized and recognized her suffering and raised her to tragedy. Anna’s brother, the feckless Stiva who philanders with every woman he comes near and drives his poor affectionate wife Dolly to distraction, is also charming and kindhearted. He actually loves his wife, and feels terrible that he has hurt her. The household servants feel sorry for Stiva when Dolly threatens to leave and take the kids. “That’s not fair,” says Blaisdell, “but Tolstoy has already got us noticing the difference between how we’re supposed to feel and what we actually feel.” (p. 38) Blaisdell admits it took him years to warm up to Anna’s husband (and he has read the book twenty times, including in Russian), but eventually came around to a sort of human understanding. The other writer who does this superbly is George Eliot. A young girl reading Middlemarch recoils from the grim, clueless Casaubon; a middle-aged reader begins to see his terrible loneliness. Even the dishonest banker Bulstrode, when his comeuppance arrives, becomes a sad, frightened man whose gallant wife comforts him, and we don’t think she’s a fool for doing so. When a writer can steadfastly look for the complex humanity in all her characters, her characters become richer, and more interesting. They become real and we care about them. Leo and George don’t take sides. They just tell us the truth.
On a slightly more technical note: Tolstoy had a fraught relationship with his contemporary Turgenev. He couldn’t finish Turgenev’s novel Virgin Soil because it was so boring. He admired Turgenev’s nature descriptions greatly, but acidly commented that “the descriptions of people are only descriptions of descriptions.” Blaisdell points out that this reflects a “characteristic we almost always see in [Tolstoy’s] fiction: description has to be as if seen and felt by a character. Tolstoy saw no use for fine writing that was divorced from immediate individual conscious perception.” (p. 314) Easier to do in first person or even third-person-limited point of view, but what about third person omniscient? But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Here’s the socialite Stiva describing Vronsky, Anna’s lover-to-be: “…one of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of Petersburg…. Fearfully rich, handsome, great connections, an aide-de-camp, and with all that a very nice, good-natured fellow. But he’s more than simply a good-natured fellow, as I’ve found out here—he’s a cultivated man, too, and very intelligent; he’s a man who’ll make his mark.” The mother of Kitty, to whom Vronsky has been paying attentions: “Very wealthy, clever, of aristocratic family, on the highroad to a brilliant career in the army and at court, and a fascinating man. Nothing better could be wished for.” And then Levin, Vronsky’s disadvantaged rival for Kitty’s affections: “…he had no difficulty in finding what was good and attractive in Vronsky. It was apparent at the first glance. Vronsky was a squarely built, dark man, not very tall, with a good-humored, handsome, and exceedingly calm and resolute face. Everything about his face and figure, from his short-cropped black hair and freshly shaven chin down to his loosely fitting, brand-new uniform, was simple and at the same time elegant.” And Kitty’s father? “I see a peacock, like this feather-head, who’s only amusing himself.” You can just picture Vronsky, can’t you? And you have also learned important things about the people who are seeing him: Stiva’s careless admiration for a pal who is handsome, rich, ambitious, and good fun, and Kitty’s mother, eager to marry off her daughter, who is of much the same opinion; Levin’s scrupulous fairness in acknowledging his rival’s advantages; and Kitty’s protective, distrustful father. Tolstoy has his characters describe each other (or a landscape, or a painting, or a dog), and we see both the object and the describer in vivid detail!
I for one am going to go through my latest manuscript in draft with these Tolstoyan tips in mind. Let my characters be who they are, tell their stories truthfully, without taking sides. And let them tell us what they see, and how it makes them feel. I need to be honest, observant, and get out of their way. It’s their story, after all.
9/7/2020 Update: This morning I impulsively emailed Bob Blaisdell, to tell him how much I enjoyed his book. I shared my own admiration for Anna K., and how a summer spent reading Dostoevsky impelled me to take several years of Russian in college. I asked why he had chosen the Garnett translation of Anna K. for his book’s source (there are those who champion and those who despise it). An hour or two later I had a lovely, enthusiastic response. He is one who feels Garnett is still a very good, readable translation (and he’s read them all!), and it’s online in full text, so anyone can dip into it anywhere on the spot. He shared his favorite learning-Russian experience: walking the streets of St Petersburg in January with his Russian tutor, reading aloud passages from Crime & Punishment on the sites where scenes in the novel took place, and how it brought it all so alive for him! The students at CUNY’s Brooklyn Kingsborough Community College are lucky to have a professor like Dr. Blaisdell. I wonder if I could hack into one of his online classes…