In the first five chapters of part four we attend the developments of the Vronski-Karenin theme in St. Petersburg. It is now mid-winter 1873, and Anna is going to have a baby, Vronski's child. In chapter 6 Karenin visits Moscow on political business, and at the same time Lyovin comes to Moscow too, after his visit abroad. Oblonski in chapters 9 to 13 arranges a dinner at his house, first week of January 1874, where Lyovin and Kitty meet each other again. The chalk writing scene occurs, as this time-keeper will tell you, exactly two years after the beginning of the novel; but somehow for the reader, and for Kitty (see various references in her conversation with Lyovin at the card table while they fiddle with the chalk) only a year has passed. We are thus confronted by the following marvelous fact: there exists a tell-tale difference between the Anna physical time on one side and the Lyovin spiritual time on the other.
By part four, exactly in mid-book, all the seven lives are abreast again as they were in the beginning, February 1872. It is now January 1874 by Anna's and my calendar but 1873 by the reader's and Kitty's calendar. The second half of part four (chapters 17 to 23) shows us Anna in Petersburg almost dying in childbed, and then Karenin's temporary reconciliation with Vronski and Vronski's attempt to commit suicide. Part four ends in March 1874: Anna breaks with her husband; she and her lover go to Italy.
Part five consists of thirty-three chapters. Not for long have the seven lives been abreast. Vronski and Anna in Italy again take the lead. This is quite a race. Lyovin's marriage in the first six chapters takes place in early spring 1874; and when we see the Lyovins again, in the country and then at Lyovin's brother's deathbed (chapters 14-20), it is the beginning of May 1874. But Vronski and Anna (sandwiched in between these two sets of chapters) are two months ahead and somewhat insecurely enjoying a southern July in Rome.
The synchronizing link between the two time-teams is now the mateless Karenin. Since there are seven major people involved and since the action of the novel depends upon pairing them, and since seven is an odd number, one person will obviously be out and bound to be without a mate. In the beginning Lyovin was the outcast, the superfluous one; now it is Karenin. We go back to the Lyovins in the spring of 1874 and then we attend to Karenin's various activities, and this brings us gradually to as late as March 1875. By now Vronski and Anna have returned to Petersburg after a year in Italy. She visits her little son on his tenth birthday, say, March 1, a pathetic scene. Soon after, she and Vronski go to live on Vronski's country estate which very conveniently is in the same district as the Oblonski and Lyovin country places.
Lo and behold, our seven lives are abreast again in part six, which consists of thirty-three chapters, from June to November 1875. We spend the first half of the summer of 1875 with the Lyovins and their relatives; then in July Dolly Oblonski gives us a lift in her carriage to Vronski's estate for some tennis. Oblonski, Vronski, and Lyovin are brought together in the rest of the chapters at some country elections on the second of October 1875, and a month later Vronski and Anna go to Moscow.
Part seven consists of thirty-one chapters. It is the most important one in the book, the book's tragic climax. We are now all abreast in Moscow, end of November 1875: six of us are in Moscow, three pairs, the insecure, already embittered Vronski-Anna, the breeding Lyovins, and the Oblonskis. Kitty's baby is born, and in the beginning of May 1876 we visit, with Oblonski, Karenin in St. Petersburg. Then back again to Moscow. Now begins a series of chapters, from 23 to the end of part seven, devoted to Anna's last days. Her death, by suicide, is in mid-May 1876. I have already given my account of those immortal pages.
Part eight, the last one, is a rather cumbersome machine, consisting of nineteen chapters. Tolstoy uses a device that he has used several times in the course of the novel, the device of having a character move from one place to another place and 124
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
thus transfer the action from one set of people to another.* Trains and coaches play a significant part in the noveclass="underline" we have Anna's two train journeys in the first part, from Petersburg to Moscow and back to Petersburg. Oblonski and Dolly are at various points the traveling agents of the story, taking the reader with them wherever Tolstoy wants the reader to be. In fact, Oblonski is finally given a soft job with a big salary for services rendered to the author. Now in the first five chapters of the last, eighth, part, we have Lyovin's half-brother Sergey travel on the same train with Vronski. The date is easy to establish because of the various allusions to war news. The Slavs of Eastern Europe, the Serbians and Bulgarians, were fighting the Turks. This is August 1876; a year later Russia will actually proclaim war with Turkey. Vronski is seen at the head of a detachment of volunteers leaving for the front. Sergey, on the same train, is on his way to visit the Lyovins, and this takes care not only of Vronski but also of Lyovin. The last chapters are devoted to Lyovin's family life in the country and to his conversion when he gropes for God with Tolstoy giving directions.
From this account of the structure of Tolstoy's novel it will be seen that the transitions are far less supple, far less elaborate, than the transitions from group to group in Madame Bovary within chapters. The brief abrupt chapter in Tolstoy replaces the flowing paragraph in Flaubert. But it will be also noted that Tolstoy has more lives on his hands than had Flaubert. With Flaubert a ride on horseback, a walk, a dance, a coach drive between village and town, and innumerable little actions, little movements, make those transitions from scene to scene within the chapters. In Tolstoy's novel great, clanging, and steaming trains are used to transport and kill the characters—and any old kind of transition is used from chapter to chapter, for instance beginning the next part or next chapter with the simple statement that so much time has passed and now this or that set of people are doing this or that in this or that place. There is more melody in Flaubert's poem, one of the most poetical novels ever composed; there is more might in Tolstoy's great book.
This is the moving skeleton of the book, which I have given in terms of a race, with the seven lives at first abreast, then Vronski and Anna pressing forwards, leaving Lyovin and Kitty behind, then again all seven are abreast, and again with the funny jerking movement of a brilliant toy Vronski and Anna take the lead, but not for long. Anna does not finish the race.
Of the six others, only Kitty and Lyovin retain the interest of the author.
I M A GE R Y
Imagery may be defined as the evocation, by means of words, of something that is meant to appeal to the reader's sense of color, or sense of outline, or sense of sound, or sense of movement, or any other sense of perception, in such a way as to impress upon his mind a picture of fictitious life that becomes to him as living as any personal recollection. For producing these vivid images the writer has a wide range of devices from the brief expressive epithet to elaborate word pictures and complex metaphors.
1) Epithets. Among these to be noted and admired are the "limply plopping" and "scabrous" as applied so magnificently to the slippery insides and rough outsides of the choice oysters Oblonski enjoys during his restaurant meal with Lyovin. Mrs.
Garnett omitted to translate these beautiful shlyupayushchie and sbershavye; we must restore them. Adjectives used in the scene of the ball to express Kitty's adolescent loveliness and Anna's dangerous charm should also be collected by the reader. Of special interest is the fantastic compound adjective, literally meaning "gauzily-ribbonly-lacily-iridescent"