The views of critics did nothing to dent the popularity of Anna Karenina with all sections of the Russian reading public, and persistent rumours about Tolstoy being embroiled in a fracas with his editor (which ultimately proved to have substance) only served to increase their interest. Due to its depiction of both old- and new-world nobility and its contemporary setting, this was the very first Russian novel certain members of the aristocracy deigned to read, having previously only considered French literature worth their trouble. So great, indeed, was the enthusiasm for Anna Karenina amongst St Petersburg high-society salons that some ladies with connections to the court even contrived ingenious measures to obtain the proofs of instalments before their publication. But the novel made an even greater impact on ladies without connections, who, like Anna Karenina, had fallen foul of society’s strictures, or longed for love. Tolstoy struck a chord with thousands of female readers suffering unhappy marriages when he wrote Anna Karenina. Few had the bravery of Anna Arkadyevna, but they all identified with her.
The paradox of Tolstoy writing with such sympathy about Anna while at the same time writing a novel which clearly condemns adultery is perhaps partly explained by the fate of his younger sister Maria, whose unhappy experience of marriage was one of the many life stories which served as the raw material for his ‘family’ novel. In the early 1860s, after fleeing abroad from her abusive husband, she had given birth to an illegitimate daughter, but she was ashamed to bring her back to Russia and face the opprobrium of society. In a particularly desperate letter she sent to her brother in March 1876 (by which time she was a widowed single mother), she spoke of the bitter life lessons she had learned, and directly identified with his literary heroine. ‘If all those Anna Kareninas knew what awaited them,’ she wrote, ‘how they would run from ephemeral pleasures, which are never, and cannot be pleasures, because nothing that is unlawful can ever constitute happiness.’13 This was essentially Tolstoy’s own view, but it was complicated by the realities of the relationships of his own family, many of which were highly unorthodox. His brother Dmitry lived for several years with a former prostitute (as does Levin’s brother Nikolay in Anna Karenina), his brother Sergey had several illegitimate children with his gypsy mistress before he married her, and even his wife’s mother was illegitimate.
Russian society began to change rapidly in the 1860s, but the patriarchal structures enshrined in law by the Tsarist government remained in place. Divorce became possible in the English court of civil law in 1857, but in Russia, where it lay under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church, marital separation remained extremely difficult. In the eyes of the Church, not only was marriage a holy sacrament which could not be dissolved, but illegitimate children had no rights, and the Russian law-code specifically upheld male authority and female subservience. The Tsarist government had a particular interest in supporting such patriarchal structures, as it equated domestic stability with political stability. Nevertheless, despite the stigma attached to it, the number of divorces in Russia rose steadily during the 1860s and 1870s. Tolstoy could have picked no better way of portraying the disintegration of late imperial Russian society than by writing a novel with the theme of the ‘family’.
The Great Reforms, urban growth, and the expansion of education inevitably stimulated new attitudes towards marriage, divorce, and the position of women—issues which lie at the heart of Anna Karenina. While it is easy to dismiss Tolstoy’s views on these topics as misogynist, perceptive feminist critics have shown why they deserve much more careful consideration. That Tolstoy was deeply exercised by the nature of beauty and the objectification of women can be seen by the scrupulous attention he devotes in Anna Karenina to the way in which his heroine is viewed or ‘framed’, not just in the flesh, but in the three different portraits of her, one painted by a ‘famous artist’ in St Petersburg, one by Vronsky, and one by the artist Mikhailov (the last of which we see again towards the end of the novel through Levin’s eyes). For Tolstoy, these issues are intimately bound up with the perils of romantic convention, both in art and in real life. As Amy Mandelker puts it, in Anna Karenina: ‘Tolstoy conflates the aesthetic question—what is the beautiful and can it be represented? What is its nature? What can it show us?—with the woman question—what is woman and what is her proper role in life?—to interrogate the literary conventions of realism and the social conventions of romantic love and marriage.’14 In true Tolstoyan style, his novel poses a formidable challenge to conventional assumptions on every level.
1 John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (London, 1966), 10.
2 Vissarion Belinsky, Letter to Gogol. See Thomas Riha (ed.), Readings in Russian Civilization, vol. 2 (Chicago, 1969), 315–20.
3 N. N. Apostolov, Zhivoi Tolstoi: zhizn’ L’va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo v vospominaniyakh i perepiske, first published 1928 (Moscow, 2001), 207.
4 Letter to Alexey Suvorin, 27 Oct. 1888, in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, tr. Michael Henry Heim, ed. Simon Karlinsky (Berkeley, 1973), 117.
5 Vladimir Alexandrov, Limits to Interpretation: The Meanings of Anna Karenina (Madison, Wisc., 2004), 297.
6 Gary Saul Morson, ‘Anna Karenina’ in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely (New Haven, 2007), 31.
7 Sergey Tolstoy, ‘Ob otrazhenii zhizni v “Anne Kareninoi”: iz vospominanii’, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 37/38, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1939), 567.
8 L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. Chertkov, 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928–58), vol. 16, p. 7.
9 Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton, 1986), p. xii.
10 Donna Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880 (Princeton, 1993), 177.
11 Sergey Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage, in Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (eds.), Selected Works, vol. 2 (London, 1991), 281–95.
12 A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. N. F. Bel’chikov, vol. 7 (Moscow, 1977), 511.