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First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2000
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001
Published in Penguin Books (U.K.) 2001
Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 2002
Translation copyright © Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2000
All rights reserved
eISBN : 978-1-101-04247-2
1. Adultery — Russia — Fiction. 2. Russia — Social life and
customs — 1533-1917 — Fiction.
I. Pevear, Richard, 1943- II. Volokhonsky, Larissa. III. Title.
PG3366.A6 2001
891.73’3 — dc21 00-043356
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Introduction
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
- W. B. Yeats
I
‘I am writing a novel,’ Tolstoy informed his friend the critic Nikolai Strakhov on 11 May 1873, referring to the book that was to become Anna Karenina. ‘I’ve been at it for more than a month now and the main lines are traced out. This novel is truly a novel, the first in my life ...’
Tolstoy was then forty-five. He had been writing and publishing for over twenty years. Along with some remarkable shorter pieces - ‘The Snowstorm’, ‘Two Hussars’,‘Three Deaths’, ‘The Wood Felling’, ‘Sebas topol Stories’,‘Family Happiness’ - he had produced longer works which he himself referred to as novels. For instance, it was as ‘the first part of a novel’ that Tolstoy sent the manuscript of Childhood, the opening section of the trilogy Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, to Nikolai Nekrasov, editor of The Contemporary, in 1852. Ten years later, apologizing to the editor Mikhail Katkov for his delay in producing the book he had promised him in return for a loan of a thousand roubles, he wrote: ‘I’ve only just settled down to the novel I sold you the rights to, I couldn’t get to it earlier.’ This was The Cossacks, begun in 1857, worked on intermittently, and finished ‘with sweat and blood’ in 1862. In 1864, again writing to Katkov, Tolstoy mentioned that he was ‘in the process of finishing the first part of [his] novel on the period of the wars of Alexander and Napoleon’, known then as The Year 1805 but soon to be renamed War and Peace. Why, then, did he call Anna Karenina his first novel?
It is true that the early trilogy and The Cossacks are semi-fictionalized autobiography and in retrospect Tolstoy may have decided they could not properly be considered novels. But what of War and Peace? Isn’t it the quintessential novel, the greatest of the species? Not according to its author. In a statement published after the appearance of the first three volumes, he declared enigmatically: ‘What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less is it a poem, and even less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.’ For Tolstoy, a ‘true novel’ was evidently something more specific than a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length.
In fact, none of the great Russian prose writers of the the nineteenth century, with the possible exception of Turgenev, was on easy terms with the novel as a genre. Gogol called Dead Souls, his only novel-length work, a poem. To define this unusual ‘poem’ he invented the notion of a hybrid genre, midway between epic and novel, to which he gave the name ‘minor epic’. He found the novel too static a form, confined to a conventional reality, involving a set of characters who all had to be introduced at the start and all had to have some relation to the hero’s fate, and whose possible interactions were too limited for his inventive gifts. It was the form for portraying ordinary domestic life, and Gogol had no interest in ordinary domestic life. Dostoevsky, who also referred to his work as ‘poetry’, transformed the novel into another sort of hybrid — the ‘novel-tragedy’ of some critics, the ‘polyphonic novel’ of others. Nikolai Leskov, an artist almost equal in stature to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, though less known outside Russia, made masterful use of the forms of the chronicle, the legend, the tale, the saint’s life, even the local anecdote and the newspaper article, but lost all his gifts when he turned to the novel. As for Chekhov, though he tried several times to write one, the novel was simply alien to his genius.
When Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first novel, he was conceiving the form in the same restricted sense that Gogol found so uncongenial. He was deliberately embracing the conventional limits of the genre. This was to be a novel in excelsis, portraying a small group of main characters (in the final version there are seven, all related by birth or marriage), set in the present and dealing with the personal side of upper-class family and social life. Indeed, Anna Karenina introduces us to the most ordinary Russian aristocrats of the 1870s, concerned with the most ordinary issues of the day, behaving in the most ordinary ways, experiencing the most ordinary joys and sorrows. The one character who might seem out of the ordinary - Konstantin Levin - is also most ordinary, as Dostoevsky pointed out in his Diary of a Writer (February 1877, II, a): ‘But of Levins there are a great many in Russia, almost as many as Oblonskys.‘ The author’s task was to manoeuvre us, for some seven or eight hundred pages, through and among these ordinary people and their doings. It was not that Tolstoy was so charmed by ordinary life. In 1883, six years after finishing Anna Karenina, he would begin the second chapter of a famous novella with the words: ‘Ivan Ilyich’s life was most ordinary, and therefore most terrible.’ As with the novella, so with the noveclass="underline" the polemic of Anna Karenina rests on the ordinariness of its characters.
Anna Karenina is polemical, first of all, in its genre. To publish such a book in the 1870s was an act of defiance, and Tolstoy meant it as one. By then the family novel was hopelessly out of fashion. The satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin noted at the time that the family, ‘that warm and cosy element ... which once gave the novel its content, has vanished from sight ... The novel of contemporary man finds its resolution in the street, on the public way, anywhere but in the home.’ The radical intelligentsia had been attacking the ‘institution’ of the family for more than a decade. Newspapers, pamphlets, ideological novel-tracts like N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, advocated sexual freedom, communal living and the communal raising of children. Questions of women’s education, women’s enfranchisement, the role of women in public life, were hotly debated in the press. On all these matters Tolstoy held rather conservative views. For him, marriage and childrearing were a woman’s essential tasks, and family happiness was the highest human ideal. As Nabokov observed in his lecture notes on Anna Karenina, ‘Tolstoy considers that two married people with children are tied together by divine law forever.’ An intentional anachronism, his novel was meant as a challenge, both artistic and ideological, to the ideas of the Russian nihilists.