Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.
The queer thing about it is that actually Tolstoy was rather careless when dealing with the objective idea of time. In War and Peace attentive readers have found children who grow too fast or not fast enough, just as in Gogol's Dead Souls, despite Gogol's care in clothing his characters, we find that Chichikov wore a bearskin overcoat in midsummer. In Anna Karenin, as we shall see, there are terrific skiddings on the frozen road of time. But such slips on Tolstoy's part have nothing to do with the impression of time he conveys, the idea of time which corresponds so exactly with the reader's sense of time. There are other great writers who were quite consciously fascinated by the idea of time and quite consciously tried to render its movement; this Proust does when his hero in the novel In Search of Lost Time arrives at a final party where he sees people he used to know now for some reason wearing gray wigs, and then realizes that the gray wigs are organic gray hairs, that they have grown old while he had been strolling through his memories; or notice how James Joyce regulates the time element in Ulysses by the slow gradual passing of a crumpled bit of paper down the river from bridge to bridge down the Liffy to Dublin Bay to the eternal sea. Yet these writers who actually dealt in time values did not do what Tolstoy quite casually, quite unconsciously, does: they move either slower or faster than the reader's grandfather clock; it is the time by Proust or the time by Joyce, not the common average time, a kind of standard time which Tolstoy somehow manages to convey.
No wonder, then, that elderly Russians at their evening tea talk of Tolstoy's characters as of people who really exist, people to whom their friends may be likened, people they see as distinctly as if they had danced with Kitty and Anna or Natasha at that ball or dined with Oblonski at his favorite restaurant,* as we shall soon be dining with him. Readers call Tolstoy a giant not because other writers are dwarfs but because he remains always of exactly our own stature,† exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance, as other authors do.
And in this connection it is curious to note that although Tolstoy, who was constantly aware of his own personality, constantly intruding upon the lives of his characters, constantly addressing the reader—it is curious to note that nevertheless in those great chapters that are his masterpieces the author is invisible so that he attains that dispassionate ideal of authors which Flaubert so violently demanded of a writer: to be invisible, and to be everywhere as God in His universe is. We have thus the feeling now and then that Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, by its
*
"Those very particular sensations of reality, of flesh and blood, of characters really living, of living on their own behalf, the main reason for this vividness is due to the fact of Tolstoy's possessing the unique capacity of keeping time with us ; so that if we imagine a creature from some other solar system who would be curious about our time conception, the best way to explain matters to him would be to give him to read a novel by Tolstoy—in Russian, or at least in my translation with my commentaries." VN deleted passage from the section. Ed.
†
"The Russian writer Bunin told me that when he visited Tolstoy for the first time and sat waiting for him, he was almost shocked to see suddenly emerge from a small door a little old man instead of the giant he had involuntarily imagined. And I have also seen myself that little old man. I was a child and I faintly remember my father shaking hands with someone at a street corner, then telling me as we continued our walk, 'That was Tolstoy.' " VN deleted passage from the section. Ed.
94
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
subject, not by a definite person moving a pen from left to right, and then coming back and erasing a word, and pondering, and scratching his chin through his beard.*
The intrusion of the teacher into the artist's domain is, as I have remarked already, not always clearly defined in Tolstoy's novels. The rhythm of the sermon is difficult to disentangle from the rhythm of this or that character's personal meditations. But sometimes, rather often in fact, when pages and pages follow which are definitely in the margin of the story, telling us what we ought to think, what Tolstoy thinks about war or marriage or agriculture — then the charm is broken and the delightful familiar people who had been sitting all round us, joining in our life, are now shut off from us, the door is locked not to be opened until the solemn author has quite, quite finished that ponderous period in which he explains and reexplains his ideas about marriage, or Napoleon, or farming, or his ethical and religious views.
As an example, the agrarian problems discussed in the book, especially in relation to Lyovin's farming, are extremely tedious to foreign-language readers, and I do not expect you to study the situation with any degree of penetration.
Artistically Tolstoy made a mistake in devoting such a number of pages to these matters, especially as they tend to become obsolete and are linked up with a certain historical period and with Tolstoy's own ideas that changed with time. Agriculture in the seventies does not have the eternal thrill of Anna's or Kitty's emotions and motives. Several chapters are devoted to the provincial elections of various administrators. The landowners through an organization called zemstvo tried to get into touch with the peasants and to help the peasants (and themselves) by setting up more schools, better hospitals, better machinery, et cetera. There were various participating landowners: conservative, reactionary landowners still looked upon the peasants as slaves—though officially the slaves had been liberated more than ten years before—while liberal, progressive landowners were really eager to improve conditions by having peasants share the landlord's interests and thus helping the peasants become richer, healthier, better educated.
It is not my custom to speak of plots but in the case of Anna Karenin I shall make an exception since the plot of it is essentially a moral plot, a tangle of ethical tentacles, and this we must explore before enjoying the novel on a higher level than plot.
One of the most attractive heroines in international fiction, Anna is a young, handsome, and fundamentally good woman, and a fundamentally doomed woman. Married off as a very young girl by a well-meaning aunt to a promising official with a splendid bureaucratic career, Anna leads a contented life within the most sparkling circle of St. Petersburg society. She adores her little son, respects her husband who is twenty years her senior, and her vivid, optimistic nature enjoys all the superficial pleasures offered her by life.
When she meets Vronski on a trip to Moscow, she falls deeply in love with him. This love transforms everything around her; everything she looks at she sees in a different light. There is that famous scene at the railway station in St. Petersburg when Karenin comes to meet her on her way back from Moscow, and she suddenly notices the size and vexing convexity of his huge homely ears. She had never noticed those ears before because she had never looked at him critically; he had been for her one of the accepted things of life included in her own accepted life. Now everything has changed. Her passion for Vronski is a flood of white light in which her former world looks like a dead landscape on a dead planet.