ANNA KARENINA
ANNA KARENINA
LEO TOLSTOY
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ROSAMUND BARTLETT
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Text and Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Leo Tolstoy
Principal Characters and Guide to Pronunciation
ANNA KARENINA
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
Explanatory Notes
INTRODUCTION
Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.
ANNA KARENINA, one of the world’s greatest novels, and with justification regarded by many as Tolstoy’s finest artistic work, also marks the culmination of his career as a professional writer. Begun in 1873, when the author was 45 years old, it resumes and develops themes explored in previous works, most notably the epic War and Peace, which he had embarked on ten years earlier. These themes, which may be subsumed under the central question ‘how to live?’, are explored with a pressing urgency in Anna Karenina, for Tolstoy was increasingly overcome during the novel’s protracted composition by an existential despair which is reflected in its closing pages. While Anna Karenina represents the summation of the literary journey that Tolstoy had completed thus far, all the way from Childhood, his first work of published fiction of 1852, the novel also looks forward to what he would write over the next three decades of his life.
Tolstoy emerged from the spiritual crisis which engulfed him upon completion of Anna Karenina no longer as a novelist, but as a crusader for his own brand of ethics-based Christianity. He did not completely forswear the writing of literature, indeed some of his best fiction dates from this next period, but he resolutely turned his back on publishing novels for what he regarded as the pampered educated classes. Having been the most highly paid author in Russia, he also now relinquished the earning of fees and royalties for personal enrichment, and channelled his creative energies into proselytizing his new-found religious beliefs. Many of their central precepts are adumbrated in embryonic form in Anna Karenina, and also underpin the enthralling love story which lies at the heart of its narrative, thus making it a truly pivotal novel in Tolstoy’s oeuvre. As a work passionately bound up with questions of national destiny, Anna Karenina also belongs firmly to the great Russian literary tradition, which reached its fullest flowering during Tolstoy’s lifetime.
Russian literature had developed along very different lines to those of Western Europe by virtue of the simple fact that there was no tradition of belles lettres until Peter the Great launched Russia on an accelerated Westernization programme at the beginning of the eighteenth century, secularizing the arts in the process. The first Russian novel, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, was not published until 1831 (so the old Countess who expresses surprise in his story ‘The Queen of Spades’, written and set in 1833, that there are any novels written in Russian, is not far from the mark). The belated start, coupled with the imposition of censorship by the end of the eighteenth century and the general lack of political freedom in the Tsarist state, ensured that artists in Russia inevitably practised their craft with a greater seriousness of purpose than elsewhere in Europe. There is, then, a fundamental difference from Western literature, memorably described by John Bayley as being so ‘swaddled in the inertia of its accomplishment, the complacency of its prolongation’, that even at its ‘most urgent’ it still sounds literary, with Chaucer’s tone ‘already professional’. By contrast, he writes, the ‘critical dicta of the Russians seem like telegrams exchanged by revolutionaries after a coup d’état has begun, but before it is known whether it will succeed’.1
The nominally liberal era of Alexander I was replaced in 1825 by the reactionary regime of his martinet younger brother, Nicholas I, who immediately put his stamp on national life by dealing brutally with the idealistic young officers who staged the abortive Decembrist Uprising just as he was coming to power. As time went on, and Nicholas’s reign grew more repressive, Russian writers increasingly came to be seen as bearers of the truth, and as moral leaders, particularly by those young members of the intelligentsia from a lowly social background who had benefited from a university education. Figures such as Vissarion Belinsky, Russia’s first professional critic, saw literature first and foremost as a weapon for social reform, and believed writers had a vital role to play in helping to arouse in the Russian people a sense of their human dignity and bringing the barbaric institution of serfdom to an end. In 1847, as he lay dying in Germany, Belinsky penned a vituperative letter to Nikolay Gogol, in which he lambasted him for defending serfdom and absolutist government. Russia did not need sermons and prayers or an encouragement in the shameless trafficking of human beings, he thundered, but rights and laws compatible with good sense and justice. The fresh forces trying to break through in Russian society, he argued, were crushed by the weight of oppression, and so produced only despondency, anguish, and apathy. Only in literature, he declared, was there life and forward movement, despite the Tatar censorship.2
Tolstoy was 21 when Belinsky’s incendiary letter was smuggled into Russia and circulated secretly in manuscript two years later in St Petersburg. Unlike the earnest and impoverished Dostoevsky, who was imprisoned and exiled to Siberia for having been present at a reading of Belinsky’s letter, Tolstoy was leading a dissolute life of gambling, carousing with gypsies, and going into society, to which his aristocratic pedigree gave him an automatic entrée. Within a few years, however, he had joined the army, developed a sense of responsibility, and discovered his vocation: to be a writer. Tolstoy’s first work of fiction, the semi-autobiographical Childhood, was published in 1852 while he was serving in the Caucasus, and was immediately acclaimed for its acute powers of pyschological analysis, and what the critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky defined as ‘purity of moral feeling’. By the time Tolstoy arrived in St Petersburg in November 1855, straight from the siege of Sebastopol, where he had penned several outstanding pieces of reportage about the realities of the Crimean War (and become a pacifist in the process), he was greeted as a conquering hero. He met Turgenev and other luminaries in the literary community for the first time, but soon fell out with them all and retreated back to his beloved country estate of Yasnaya Polyana. It was here, as an archetypal ‘repentant nobleman’, that he would write War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both works in which peasants are ultimately the sources of the greatest wisdom.