One strange thing: in both Anna Karenina and War and Peace, it is the exceptional, glittering beings, those marked by some metaphysical sign, who disappear, and the average, even insignificant ones who survive and trudge on along their little paths, halfway between good and evil. After the death of Prince Andrcy—with his dreams, his doubts, his pride—we are left with the placid Bezukhov and Rostov families, for whom every imaginable felicity lies in store if they will only be content to stay out of the limelight. Anna Karenina and Vronsky are swept from the scene, leaving behind them the mighty conquerors in the battle of life: Kitty and Levin, fine, upstanding, dull young folk, held up as an example by all their neighl>or$. Is this Tolstoy's plea for mediocrity? No; he simply feels that mankind needs, now and then, these extraordinary beings to shake up the dozing masses; but in the final analysis, it is the conjunction of innumerable ordinary destinies that carries history forward. Whether we like it or not, the future belongs to the Rostovs and Bczukhovs and Levins, to the shuffling mob of men of good-will. As landowner and father, Tolstoy considers himself among their number. In justifying them, he justifies himself. And even if he is occasionally tempted to desert to the camp of the idcalists-in- rcvolt, he never tarries there. He is still at the stage of condemning private property with one hand while buying more land with the other, and inviting judges to his home while he reviles capital punishment.
But, contrary to his intentions, it is the damned, in this bitterly pessimistic novel, who arouse our sympathy and the virtuous who disappoint us. Saddled with every curse that could be laid upon her, Anna Karenina towers so far above all the other characters that the author was forced to give the book her name. The inscription, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay," bears out the idea that Anna's fall proceeds from a decision by some higher authority, divine and without appeal. Everything in this superficially realistic tale is magical. Even objects—the candle, the snowy windowpane, Anna's little red bag—arc invested with occult powers. Tolstoy invited his readers to contemplate the implications of a vast, disturbing, gloomy tragedy.
And they flung themselves upon it voraciously, titillated by the portrayal of "high society," spellbound by Anna's illicit love affair, shocked by the daring sccnes of her "fall." As the issues of the Russian Herald succeeded each other, Strakhov, in the front ranks in Moscow, dispatched regular communiques to headquarters at Yasnaya Polyana: "Excitement keeps mounting. . . . Opinions are so divergent that it is impossible to summarize them. . . . Some complain that you arc too cynical; others—more intelligent (Danilcvsky, for one)—are in ecstasy." (March 21, 1875.) "Everyone is dumb with admiration of the February issue. The January one was less popular. . . . Now there is a roar of satisfaction. It's as though you were throwing food to starving men." (March 5, 1876.) "Everyone is fascinated by your novel, it's incrcdible how many people are reading it. Only Pushkin and Gogol have ever been read like this, with people scrambling for every page and paying no attention to what anybody else is writing." (February 1877.) "Dos- toyevsky is waving his arms about and calling you a god of the art; I am surprised and delighted—surprised, because I know how intensely he dislikes you." (May 18, 1877.)
Alexandra Tolstoy was also in raptures: "Every chapter has society rearing up 011 its hind legs," she wrote, "and there is no end to the commenting and praise and gossip and argument, as though it were something that affected every individual personally."4
Friend Fet hailed him as a genius: "What artistic insolence in the description of the childbirth! Nobody since the world began has ever done it before, and nobody will ever do it again. The fools will go on about Flaubertian realism, when everything here is idealism!"5
Professional critics were no less stirred by the publication of the novel. Comparing Tolstoy and Stendhal, V. V. Chuyko, in The Voice, pointed out that whereas Stendhal always began with a psychological postulate and only gave a semblance of reality to his characters by the "extraordinary logic" with which he followed up the consequences of a given situation, Tolstoy was all instinct, inseparable from life, owing nothing to any process.
Another critic in the same periodical affirmed that "Count Tolstoy- has no equal in any foreign literature" and that "in our country, Dos- toyevsky alone can come near him."
"The author," Suvorin wrote in New Times, "has spared nothing and no one. lie portrays love with a realism that 110 one in our country has yet approached."
And Stasov chimed in, "Count Tolstoy alone is forging ahead, while all our other writers are beating a retreat or falling silent or fading away or losing face. . . ."
Dostoyevsky himself, although he disapproved of the last part of Anna Karenina out of loyalty to the holy war against the Turks, paid homage to the rest of the book in Diary of a Writer:
"Anna Karenina is a perfect work of art, appearing at exactly the right moment, utterly unlike anything being published in Europe; its theme is totally Russian. There is something in this novel of our 'new- word/ a new word that has not yet been heard in Europe, although the peoples of the West have great need of it, however proud they may be."
In a burst of national pride the author of Crime and Punishment explained that in Europe—the scat of logic, materialism and the narrow view—humans who violated the laws of society were punished by human justice, but for a Russian writer like Tolstoy, the true seat of judgment was in the heart of the individual. 'The human judge must know that lie is not a final judge, being a mere sinner like the rest, that it is absurd for him to pass judgment excqit through the only means of understanding that exists: charity, and love."
Along with these distinguished expressions of approval, Tolstoy received, as usual, a volley of snide comments and insults. Skabishcvsky wrote, in the Stock Exchange News, that the entire novel was "permeated with an idyllic aroma of diapers" and that Anna's suicide was "a melodramatic piece of nonsense in the manner of the old French novels, and a fit conclusion to a vulgar love affair between a snob and a lady of Petersburg society with a weakness for flogged coats." Ilca- chev, in The Affair, accused Tolstoy of seeking "to degrade public morality," swore that Anna Karenina was "an epic of baronial passions" utterly "devoid of meaning" and, parodying its author, suggested that he write a book on the pastoral bliss of Levin and a cow. The anonymous critic of the Odessa Courier announced that "food, drink, hunting, balls, horse races and love, love, love in the most naked sense of the word, without psychological ramifications or moral interest of
any sort—that is what the novel is about, from start to finish." lie concluded, "I challenge the reader to show me one page, nay! one half-page, that contains an idea, or rather the shadow of an idea."
Nor did Ivan Turgenev like Anna Karenina. "He has gone off the track," he wrote to Suvorin on April 1 (13), 1875. "It is the fault of Moscow, and the Slavophil aristocrats and Orthodox old maids, and his isolation and lack of perseverance." And to Polonsky, on May 13 (25): "I do not like Anna Karenina, despite some truly magnificent pages (the horse racc, the hay-making, the hunt). But the whole thing is sour, it smells of Moscow and old maids, the Slavophilism and the narrow-mindedness of the nobility."
Tolstoy returned the compliment, when Turgenev published his Virgin Soil. "I haven't read the Turgenev yet," he wrote to Strakhov, "but, judging from what I have heard about it, I am deeply sorry that this well of pure and wonderful water should have become sullied by such filth. If he would simply choose a day in his life and write about it, everybody would be delighted."6