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 happiness played out among Stiva and Dolly, Anna and Karenin, Kitty and Vronsky, Anna and Vronsky, Kitty and Levin. The seven main characters create a dynamic imbalance, with one character always on the outside, moving between couples, uniting or dividing them, and shifting the scene of the action as they move - from Petersburg to Moscow, from Russia to Germany, from the capitals to the provinces. At some point each of the seven plays this role of shuttle. The novel they weave together goes far beyond the tale of adultery that Tolstoy began writing in the spring of 1873.
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 her senior, mistaking her wish to shine in society for love, how she discovered her full femininity only at the age of thirty. He stated explicitly that ‘the devil had taken possession of her soul’, that she had known these ‘diabolical impulses’ before, and so on. Of this abundance of commentary only a few traces remain in the final portrait of Anna. As Tolstoy worked, he removed virtually all the details of her past, all explanations, all discussion of her motives, replacing them by hints, suggestions, half-tones, blurred outlines. There is a glimpse of Anna’s dark side at the ball in Part One, where she takes Vronsky away from Kitty, but it seems to surprise Anna as much as anyone. There are moments when she does seem ‘possessed’ by some alien power, but they are only touched on in passing. Tolstoy became more and more reluctant to analyse his heroine, with the result that, in the final version, her inner changes seem to come without preparation and often leave us wondering. The final portrait of Anna has about it a ‘vivid insubstan tiality’, in John Bayley’s fine phrase, which we do not find anywhere else in Tolstoy. He lost sight of her, in a sense, as he drew closer to her and finally became one with her. The stream of consciousness in which he narrates Anna’s last hours gives us what are surely the most remarkable pages in the novel, and some of the most remarkable ever written.
A friend of Tolstoy‘s, the editor and educator S. A. Rachinsky, complained to him that Anna Karenina had no architecture, that the two ‘themes’ developed side by side in it, magnificently, but with no connection. His criticism prompted an interesting reply from Tolstoy, in a letter dated 27 January 1878:
Your judgement of Anna Karenina seems wrong to me. On the contrary, I am proud of my architecture. But my vaults have been assembled in such a way that the keystone cannot be seen. Most of my effort has gone into that. The cohesion of the structure does not lie in the plot or in the relations (the meetings) of the characters, it is an internal cohesion ... look well and you will find it.
In a letter to Strakhov some two years earlier he had already raised the question of this hidden cohesion:
In everything or almost everything I have written, I have been moved by the need to bring together ideas that are closely knit, in order to express myself, but each idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is enormously impoverished when removed from the network around it. This network itself is not made up of ideas (or so I think), but of something else, and it is absolutely impossible to express the substance of this network directly in words: it can be done only indirectly, by using words to describe characters, acts, situations.