Solid gold creativity

Yes, I finally finished Anna Karenina last week.  Was shattered and moved.  By Anna crouching next to the train, red bag discarded, waiting for the “midpoint between the two wheels” to come even with her, by the glimpse of Vronsky after her death – “his face, aged and full of suffering”– going off to fight the war in Serbia, and, most of all, by the revelation of what the book has been about: the question of how to live.

Levin is the character shown explicitly to be seeking an answer to this question, but Anna too is preoccupied by it.  In fact, Levin and Anna are revealed to be mirror images of each other.  She’s the hither side of Levin, the side that fails to find a satisfactory, good enough answer to the question, who takes her life because she cannot live without it.

Levin also contemplates not living without an answer; Tolstoy has him remark, shockingly casually, even after his longed-for marriage to Kitty and the birth of their son:

And, happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.

But, unlike Anna, “Levin did not shoot himself or hang himself and went on living,” and, by accident, he comes on his answer in the wonderful scene that takes place between him and the muzhik (peasant) in the barn:

“Mityukha” (so the muzhik scornfully called the innkeeper) “makes it pay right enough, Konstantin Dmitrich!  He pushes till he gets his own.  He takes no pity on a peasant.  But Uncle Fokanych” (so he called old Platon), “he won’t skin a man.  He lends to you, he lets you off.  So he comes out short.  He’s a man, too.”

“But why should he let anyone off?”

“Well, that’s how it is – people are different.  One man just lives for his own needs, take Mityukha even, just stuffs his belly, but Fokanych – he’s an upright old man.  He lives for the soul.  He remembers God.”

“How’s that?  Remembers God?  Lives for the soul?”  Levin almost shouted.

“Everybody knows how – by the truth, by God’s way.  People are different.  Now, take you even, you wouldn’t offend anybody either …”

“Yes, yes, goodbye!” said Levin, breathless with excitement, and, turning, he took his stick and quickly walked off towards home.

A new, joyful feeling came over him.  At the muzhik’s words about Fokanych living for the soul, by the truth, by God’s way, it was as if a host of vague but important thoughts burst from some locked-up place and, all rushing towards the same goal, whirled through his head, blinding him with their light.

Tolstoy captures the experience of revelation with effortless accuracy.  We recognise it all – the incidental nature of the exchange, the slightness of what’s said, Levin’s instant recognition of what he later calls the “hint,” the quick work of elaboration and incorporation into his being, even the conventionality of the answer when it comes.

*****

These final chapters are majestic.  As the translators note, the “stream of consciousness” in which Tolstoy narrates Anna’s last hours …

gives us what are surely the most remarkable pages in the novel, and some of the most remarkable ever written.

She has woken in the morning from the nightmare that Vronsky himself has had much earlier, the nightmare that has prefigured her death throughout the book.

In the morning a dreadful nightmare, which had come to her repeatedly even before her liaison with Vronsky, came to her again and woke her up.  A little old muzhik with a dishevelled beard was doing something, bent over some iron, muttering meaningless French words, and, as always in this nightmare (here lay its terror), she felt that this little muzhik paid no attention to her, but was doing this dreadful thing with iron over her, was doing something dreadful over her.  And she awoke in a cold sweat.

The muzhik appears again just before her death — “a dirty, ugly muzhik in a peaked cap, his matted hair sticking out from under it, passed by the window, bending down to the wheels of the carriage” – and just after it:

A little muzhik, muttering to himself, was working over some iron.  And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.

Again, Tolstoy gets the nightmare image so right and I feel the horror of it alongside Anna.  But what does he mean by the reference to the book she’s been reading of evil?  That she deserves her death because of the adultery?  In the Introduction, the translators suggest this is the main idea of the novel, “the one he struggled with most bitterly and never could resolve,” that her suicide “was the punishment for her adultery.” 

I completely disagree with them that this is the main idea of the novel.  If this is what we are meant to think from the recurrence of the horrifying goblin figure and the idea of a “book” she was set on reading, then it will have been the first time Tolstoy has failed in a masterpiece of 800 pages, and that the failure has occurred at the absolute crucial moment.  And I do not think he failed for a second. 

He saw the danger of the conclusion, of the question, yes, but he trusted Anna herself to overcome it.  And so she does.  It’s not her culpability that leads to her death, but her fidelity. 

*****

After finishing the book I read the translators’ Introduction and was thrilled to discover I’d noted something about Tolstoy’s style that my beloved, Nabokov, had also noted.  The translators cite the example of the incident at the railway station early in the novel when the watchman is killed:

… several men with frightened faces suddenly ran past.  The stationmaster, in a peaked cap of an extraordinary colour, also ran past.  Evidently something extraordinary had happened.

They note:

Vladimir Nabokov says of this passage: “There is of course no actual connection between the two [uses of ‘extraordinary’], but the repetition is characteristic of Tolstoy’s style with its rejection of false elegancies and its readiness to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense.”

This “rejection of false elegancies” is brilliant. Both in Tolstoy and its description, and far more truly elegant than my  “smoothness without perfection.”  Still, I was close to the thought processes of my hero, Vlad.

The fact that I can notice and respond to this quality, this vigour, in Tolstoy’s prose just as well as a native Russian speaker like Nabokov is testament to the translators’ choice to retain such passages, rather than “tone them down” or “eliminate” them as in “previous English translations.”  So if you’re going to read this marvel of a book make sure it’s the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  They’ve been rightly awarded the highest honours for their translations.

I noted before that William Faulkner when asked to name the three best novels ever had said, “Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.”  Now I know why.  There is no reason to read any other.

*****

Image: Greta Garbo, from the 1935 version of the film, Anna Karenina, by David O. Selznick