"With regard to my corrections, which almost always related to questions of language," wrote Strakhov, "1 found . . . that Leo Niko- layevich would defend his choice of words to the death and refused to make the slightest alteration. I could see from his remarks that he cared a great deal about what he had written and that in spite of the seeming carelessness and awkwardness of his style, lie had weighed every word and phrase as carefully as the most exacting poet."
The final version was published in three volumes at the lieginning of the following year. The chorus of praises redoubled around him. The booksellers' stocks shrank; every woman in society felt some tie with the hapless Anna. But her scowling creator would grumble to all and sundry:
"What's so difficult about describing how an officer gets entangled with a woman? There's nothing difficult in that, and above all, nothing worthwhile. It's bad, and it serves no purpose."51
2. Anna Karenina
At first, Tolstoy thought of calling his novel Two Couples or Two Marriages, since in an early version Anna Karenina was supposed to get her divorce and marry Vronsky. Then, when the characters began to impose their own wills on the author, the theme veered off in another direction. But it was a theme of the utmost simplicity. Oblonsky, the bon-vivant, has had a stupid affair with his children's former French teacher, and appeals to his sister, Anna Karenina, to try to patch things up between him and his wife. And Anna, who is grace, sweetness and integrity personified, manages to reconcile the couple. She herself is married to Karenin, an important government official in St. Petersburg, twenty years her senior, a dry, self-satisfied man and a slave to etiquette. At her brother's house she meets a swashbuckling officer, Count Vronsky, with whom Kitty, Mrs. Oblonsky's sister, is infatuated. Levin, a sober, introspective young man who is deeply in love with Kitty, goes off in despair to live on his estate when he sees that the girl has eyes for no one but the dashing soldier. Vronsky, however, pays scant attention to Kitty: it is Anna who attracts him. And she, despite her steadfast heart, cannot resist.
After the deed is done, she confesses to her husband. His first thought is to save appearances at all costs, and when his wife falls ill, he is even ready to forgive her. But she recovers and leaves the country with her lover. Then, when the novelty has worn off, her sufferings begin. Vronsky misses his military carccr, which he had to abandon to follow her. And she is miserable at having left her son in Karenin's care. She returns to see the boy in secret. Far from pacifying her, their meeting only sharpens her despair. She goes from disillusionment to disillusionment and in the end her life becomes intolerable and she throws herself under a train. Vronsky is consumed with remorse and enlists to fight the Turks. In counterpoint to this dark, violent story, there is the light-flooded relationship of Kitty and Levin. After rejecting her suitor Kitty returns to him, won over by his integrity and strength, l hey marry, settle down in the country and enjoy the perfect happiness of simple souls, in accordance with Tolstoy's golden rule.
In War and Peace the author had created so many characters, invented so much action and debated so many ideas that one might reasonably fear he had exhausted the psychological resources of a normal artist's entire career in that one work. But with prodigious ease, never once repeating himself, he created a new galaxy of characters in Anna Karenina, all as alive and convincing as those in his historical cpic. This great power of self-renewal was undoubtedly due to the fact that he himself was continually being enriched by life as it passed him. Had he been less open to the world, less changeable and diversified, the range of his imagination would have been smaller. Once again, he had made good use of meetings with friends, current events, his own sensations, in brewing the "juice of fiction."
His attitude toward Anna Karenina, moreover, changed in the course of the book, almost as though the creator had gradually been seduced by his creature. Behind the love story of Anna and Vronsky lay the love story of Tolstoy and Anna. At first, Tolstoy did not like his heroine: he condemned her in the name of morality. He saw her as an incarnation of lechery and, oddly enough, did not even make her beautiful. His first notes on the woman who has bccomc the quintessence of charm and elegance for generations of readers describe her in the following terms: "She is unattractive, with a narrow, low forehead, short, tumed-up nose—rather large. If it were any bigger, she would be deformed. . . . But, in spite of her homely face, there was something in the kindly smile of her red lips that made her likable." So much for appearance. Her personality is that of a man-killer. One whole chapter in one of the early drafts of the book, devoted to a description of Anna, is entitled "The Devil." She is the agent of evil in the world. Both husband and lover are her victims. Ilcnce Karcnin, the government official, is initially portrayed as a warm, sensitive soul, cultivated and kind. His main fault is sentimentality. When he suspects his wife of infidelity, he tells his sister, "I feel like sobbing, 1 want sympathy, I want to be told what to do!" And the first model of Vronsky is "firm, kind- hearted and sincere." In a word, two choice characters, in contrast to whom the diabolical Anna stands out blacker than ever.
However, Tolstoy unconsciously begins to be intrigued by his sinner. She moves him, disturbs him, disarms him. He is on the verge of declaring his love. Suddenly he can no longer deprive her of beauty. Plas-
tic surgery is called for: the operation is a resounding success. The troll with the turncd-up nose emerges a sylphide: 'Vronsky was drawn, not by her beauty, although she was a very beautiful woman, nor by the unobtrusive elegance she radiated, but by the expression of utter sweetness in her charming face. . . . For an instant her gray keen eyes, which seemed darker than they were because of her thick eyelashes, paused to give him a friendly glance, as though she recognized him. Then she began looking for someone in the crowd. . . . Her eyes and her smile revealed vast stores of repressed vitality." Further on, the author tells us of "her brisk step, which gave a curious air of lightness to her full body." Little Kitty was enamored of her, "as inexperienced girls often become enamored of older married women." "There was nothing in Anna that betrayed the society matron or the mother of an eight-year-old-boy; from the relaxed case of her movements, her fresh complexion, the spontaneous shifts of her expression and smile, one would not have believed her to be more than a girl of twenty, were it not for the serious, even melancholy light in her lovely eyes. This feature was what struck and attracted Kitty." Even the children fall under her spell and quarrel over who is to be allowed to touch her hand or play with her wedding ring. At the ball she outshines everyone else. Tolstoy describes her arrival with a lover's eyes: "A very low-cut black velvet gown revealed her bosom and ivory sculptured shoulders, and her fine rounded arms and slender wrists. ... A delicate garland of pansies crowned her black hair, all her own; another just like it was pinned on the black ribbon of her belt, in the middle of a white lace rufHe. Her hair was dressed very simply, the only thing one noticed were the little ringlets escaping at the nape of her neck and temples. She wore a necklace of pearls around her full throat." From this moment on, there can be no more doubt. Anna's appeal owes nothing to the artifices of coquetry'. A charm she is unaware of radiates from her body. "'Yes,' Kitty said to herself as she watched her dancing, 'there is something strange in her, wonderful, demonic.'"