But Anna Karenina is not the conscious cause of the tragedies brought about by her implacable beauty: she was born under an evil spell, and at a moment chosen by fate, the spell simply begins to work. As the author continued, with infinite pains, to model each contour of this lost soul, he became increasingly irritated by the healthy, ordinary mortals around her. In the beginning she was the assassin and Karenin and Vronsky her victims. Now the tables were turned. Neither of the two men was worthy of her. With cold rage Tolstoy divested them, one by one, of the qualities he had freely bestowed upon them. He debased them in order to elevate and justify Anna.
Karenin bccomes a dried-up, self-centered, narrow-minded man, a pure product of Petersburg bureaucracy. Life is hidden from him by administrative regulations; ever)' gesture he makes is an expression of the law, of convention; he paralyzes and disfigures everything he touches; for him, his wife is simply one item of his establishment. Not until the storm is about to break does he actually concede that she "might have her own destiny, thoughts, desires," and as this possibility terrifies him, he prefers to dismiss it from his mind, just as some people hate the countryside and can only walk on concrete pavement, so Karenin, when life rushes in upon him in all its brutal nakedness and no longer in the form of an official report, utterly loses his grip. "What she feels, what goes on in her soul, is no concern of mine," he tells himself. "That is between herself and her conscience, it is a question of religion." And further on, "I made a mistake when I linked my life to hers; but there was nothing shameful in my mistake and therefore I do not need to be unhappy." A mixture of sham dignity, official piety, self-righteousness, cowardice, rectitude and sanctimoniousness, the reactions he causes in people are the cxact opposite of those aroused by his wife. The mere sight of Anna warms people's hearts; he, involuntarily, chills them. At a dinner at the Oblonskys, 'lie was the chief reason for the pall that fell over the party."
Faithful to his style of "contrasts," however, Tolstoy refuses to cut any character out of a single piece of cloth. When his wife is ill, Karenin suddenly bccomes human. Ilis carapace cracks. He becomes drunk with sympathy, dazzled by his own generosity-. He even allows Anna's lover inside his house. "Remorse at having wished for Anna's death, the compassion she inspired in him and, more than anything else, the joy of forgiving had transformed his moral torments into a profound sense of peace." The lull is short-lived. As soon as Anna recovers, he bccomes as hard as before. What was sublime at the bedside of a dying woman is ridiculous in the presence of a healthy one. As a member of society, lie does what society demands. Thus he can have nothing to reproach himself with afterward. But she wants "to tear apart this spidcrwcb, sticky with lies, in which lie was keeping her prisoner." "Whatever happens," she says, "anything is better than dissimulation and deceit."
She believes that in Vronsky she has found an ally as well as a lover. But he, whose heart was crystal-pure in the first draft, is subjected to the same process of degradation as Karenin, in order to highlight the figure of Anna. Tolstoy's dislike of his hero grows with his infatuation for his heroine. True, lie is not just a handsome, vain and foolish officcr, he belongs to the "gilded youth" of the capital for whom amorous in-
trigue is closely akin to the pleasures of the hunt "In his Petersburg universe," wrote Tolstoy, "people were divided into two totally different types. The lower type was composed of vulgar, stupid and ridiculous people who believed that a husband should sleep only with his wife, a maiden should l>e pure, a married woman chaste, one must bring up one's children, make money, pay one's debts and other nonsense of that sort." On the other side there was "a world in which the rule was to appear elegant, handsome, free with money, bold and high-spirited, to abandon oneself without scruple to every passion, and to laugh at everything else." Vronsky, a bachelor, feels much more at home in the second. But when he meets Anna his self-assurance falters; he is gripped by a passion of unwonted violence. Even after the charm of novelty has worn off, he sometimes feels a superstitious fear of her grace and elegance and the intensity of the emotions that course through her. The thing he is least able to understand is her aching love for the son from whom she is separated. lie refuses to think of her as a mother, and she is so aware of this that she prefers to hide from him the almost physical pain she suffers after seeing her little Sergey again. Vronsk/s failure to understand this condemns her to solitude. "Her sorrow was all the greater for being unshared," Tolstoy wrote. "She could not, nor did she wish to confide in Vronsky. . . . She knew he would never be able to understand the depth of her anguish; she knew a cold commcnt would be his only response to any allusion to her distress and she knew she would hate him for it, and was afraid. . . ."
With clinical exactitude, Tolstoy observes the slow poisoning of their liaison. Every phase of the disease is exhaustively described. More than their relations as lovers, the very structure of their personalities is infected, unable to withstand the trial of living together. They are ostracized by society, which will not forgive them for flaunting its rules, and they float in an artificial vacuum, with nothing to support them, no friends, nothing to plan for. Though she was strong enough to brave public opinion, Anna feels that a moral structure she has possessed sincc childhood is bending and giving way beneath her, and she had never realized how useful it could be. Of her two sources of support, her son and her lover—the first has been taken away from her and she may lose the second as well if she is not careful. She becomes anxious, she convinces herself that Vronsky must be pining for his carefree life of old, she accuses him of secretly seeing people whose doors are closed to her; she begins to think he has tired of her and is being unfaithful; she is tortured by jealousy; soon her only aim in life is to keep her hold over her lover, and as her fear that he will desert her increases, her efforts become more and more strained, nagging, awkward. Before long,
her beaut)' and the physical pleasure she gives him arc all she can rely upon to hold him. But Vronsky- is no longer affected, even by her beauty. When he looks at her, magnificently attired on her way to the theater, a shudder of repulsion runs through him. "He raised his eyes," wrote Tolstoy, "and saw her beauty and the adornment that set it off so well; but just then it was her very beauty and elegance that irritated him." And later, "There was no longer anything mysterious in the feelings her beauty aroused in him; and so, although he was more aware of her appeal than ever before, he was almost offended to see her so beautiful." Sensing that this weapon, too, will soon be useless to her, Anna begins to flirt with other men, but she cannot arouse Vronsky from his apathy. Then she grows desperate: she has nightmares, takes drugs, finally sees that death is the only way out. "Why all these churches and bells and lies?" she thought. "To hide the fact that we all hate each other like those scrapping cab-drivers!" Her inner monologue continues, jerky, compulsive, relentless, until the moment she throws herself under the train.
When shading his vast composition, Tolstoy wanted to save the brightest light for the legitimate couple, Kitty and Levin. Kitty is a pure, ardent and secretive girl in whom marriage suddenly reveals practical qualities of the highest order. Her husband is flabbergasted by her. "I low can this poetic, admirable Kitty, in the first weeks and even the first days of our married life, cope with tablecloths and furniture and mattresses for guests, and trays, and the cook, and the dinner?" This cry of wonderment was not uttered by Konstantin Levin, but by- Leo Tolstoy. As always he had great respect for a woman's virtues as a housewife. A wife's universe should be bounded by bed, kitchen stove and cradle.