Life and death at the railway station

When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone.

Trust Chekhov to get it exactly right.  He puts his finger on what matters most about Tolstoy: “because Tolstoy achieves for everyone.”

Because for all us readers and writers, Tolstoy has always already written.  No matter what happens, what we do and don’t read, what we do and don’t write, what device we do or don’t use for reading, Anna Karenina and his other great works will already have been brought into existence.

2010 is the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, and many events and commemorations of his life are planned.  One such event is the release in London and Berlin of the new film, The Last Station, starring Christopher Plummer (my dear Colonel von Trapp) and Helen Mirren.  The film covers the tempestuous period immediately before Tolstoy’s death at the age of 82.  The film is based on the 1990 novel by Jay Parini which is itself based on the diaries kept by the various members of Tolstoy’s household.

As Robert McCrum says in yesterday’s Guardian in his review of The Last Station, Parini was the first to spot the huge potential of the diaries as raw material for a novel.  Which is one of those things that makes you wonder how it cannot have been spotted previously.

I’m a fan of the film in advance.  Because of its subject, naturally, but also because of its title.

The common story is that Tolstoy died at the tiny railway station of Astapovo after leaving his beloved estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the middle of the night for fear his deteriorating relationship with Sophia, his wife, would kill him.

However, according to a new website established to mark the centenary of his death, he didn’t actually die at the station but at the station master’s residence where he’d been taken after getting off the train.  And he lingered for several days before dying.  Long enough for Sophia to hire her own train and bring the family to see him, though by the time they arrived, he was not conscious.

Regardless of whether it’s the location where he actually dies, or where he begins to die, the railway station is crucial to the story.  Because, as hinted in the film’s title, railway stations have featured throughout his novels as the scene of event and death.

In Anna Karenina, for example, his masterpiece above masterpieces, Anna first meets Vronsky at the railway station, soon after a guard is killed at the station when de-coupling carriages.  So too Anna experiences the “greatest joy she will ever have of Vronsky,” alone in her carriage at the halt between St Petersburg and Moscow, and disembarks, grasping the cold post in her hand, to find Vronsky waiting on the platform in the swirling snow.

And, of course, in the end there is Anna’s suicide at the station when, agitated and disoriented, she disembarks one last time and waits for the “midpoint between the two wheels” to come even with her.

That Tolstoy should also have his death scene at a railway station, 40 years after writing Anna’s death, brings to mind Flaubert’s exclamation over his greatest creation, “Emma, c’est moi!

*****

In reading the website marking the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, I came across so many surprising and mind-boggling facts about the man I’m hereby starting a year of sharing them on this blog.  Here’s a few to start with:

  • the Soviet version of his collected works consists of 90 volumes
  • to better study the gospels of the Bible in later life Tolstoy learnt Hebrew and then Dutch “because someone directed him to an admired translation in that language”
  • his favourite book was Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and he had a portrait of Dickens on his study wall in Yasnaya Polyana
  • in his early 70s he “devoured” Confucius, and at the age of 75 read the whole of Shakespeare … for the second time
  • in the last year of his life he was corresponding with Mahatma Gandhi, then working as a lawyer in South Africa; Gandhi named his second ashram in South Africa, the “Tolstoy Colony.”

*****

To go to the website for the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, click here: http://tolstoy.beckerfilmgroup.com/index.html

To read Robert McCrum’s review of The Last Station in The Guardian, click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/31/tolstoy-the-last-station-film-mccrum

Images: http://tolstoy.beckerfilmgroup.com/index.html (top and bottom); Wikipedia (middle)

Goodbye Levin

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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

Truth is a woman: Quotes from June

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Finally, I’ve finished Anna Karenina.  It’s only taken months, what with 800 pages and 15 minute bursts of reading.  Is it because I’m getting older that my attention span is shot, or can I blame the internet?  I’m going to discuss the book again shortly, but for now, the famous opening line:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

And because I love opening lines as much as titles, here’s the brilliant opening of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

Supposing truth to be a woman — what?  is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women?  that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have hitherto been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench?

And this from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, via my friend Rob M.  As fresh as the day it was uttered over 25 centuries ago:

The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts.
Think only on those things that are in line with your
principles and can bear the light of day.
The content of your character is your choice.
Day by day, what you do is who you become. 

 

Image: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Labouring mightily: Quotes from May

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On the weekend I heard for the second time the most wonderful quotation and this time I’m writing it down.  It was in a program about the career of the Italian film-maker, Roberto Rossellini, and the movie, Rome, Open City which he made in 1945.  The quotation comes in the last line in the program when Rossellini’s asked to compare his development between Rome, Open City and the film he made the year after, Paisà.  He says in the earlier film there is plenty of seduction, because wherever there is sentimentality there is seduction, but by the time of the later film he wanted something more pure.  He says he no longer wanted ‘to seduce, to persuade’, but ‘to offer,’ which is ‘a completely different thing.’

*****

Heard Bob Ellis on the radio a little while ago.  When asked for his views on the Prime Minister, he replied, ‘the mountain has laboured and brought forth … a clerk.’

*****

Tolstoy, in the meantime, is brilliant.  Take for instance the latest episode when Levin joins the peasants to scythe the meadows to make hay, and exhilarated by the physical work and envious of the sexual affection between one of the young peasants and his new wife, he starts thinking that this is the only way to live and impetuously starts dreaming about how he can dispose of his current life. 

He’s all resolved to change everything immediately, and starts walking home after spending the short summer night dreaming in the mown meadow, listening to the singing of the peasants who are also camping in the meadow, and then he hears a carriage approach and he looks in and sees Kitty.  Immediately, the foolishness and futility of his feverish planning is revealed.  All his resolution vanishes in an instant, exactly as we’ve experienced a hundred times in our own lives.  And it’s so right that Tolstoy would have Kitty in the carriage — out of place, unexpected, shockingly accessible — just when Levin’s made up his mind to renounce her.

And all that had troubled Levin during that sleepless night, all the decisions he had taken, all of it suddenly vanished.  He recalled with disgust his dreams of marrying a peasant woman.  There, in that carriage quickly moving away and bearing to the other side of the road, was the only possibility of resolving the riddle of his life that had been weighing on him so painfully of late.

Some other quotations from this part of the book:

The singing women approached Levin, and it seemed to him that a thundercloud of merriment was coming upon him.

Some of those muzhiks who had argued most of all with him over the hay, whom he had offended or who had wanted to cheat him, those same muzhiks greeted him cheerfully and obviously did not and could not have any malice towards him, nor any repentance or even memory of having wanted to cheat him.  It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labour.  God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward.  And whom was this labour for?  What would its fruits be?  These considerations were irrelevant and insignificant.

… the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life.

Shamming in anything at all can deceive the most intelligent, perceptive person; but the most limited child will recognise it and feel aversion, no matter how artfully it is concealed.

Surrounded by all her bathed, wet-headed children, Darya Alexandrovna, a kerchief on her head, was driving up to the house when the coachman said:
‘Some gentleman’s coming, looks like the one from Pokrovskoe.’  Darya Alexandrovna peered ahead and rejoiced, seeing the familiar figure of Levin in a grey hat and grey coat coming to meet them.  She was always glad to see him, but she was especially glad now that he would see her in all her glory.  No one could understand her grandeur better than Levin.

He considered Russia a lost country, something like Turkey, and the government of Russia so bad that he never allowed himself any serious criticism of its actions …

*****

Image: Anna Magnani, star of Rome, Open City

Anna and Vronsky

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I’m re-reading Anna Karenina.  It’s the Penguin edition by the fêted translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and it says on the flyleaf:

William Faulkner, it’s said, was once asked to name the three best novels ever.  He replied: “Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.”

I don’t know if it’s the translation or that I’ve grown up since, but it scarcely feels like a book now; it’s more like an animal.  It’s so lithe and fresh and vigorous, with long effortless sentences and smoothness without perfection.

I’ve just finished Part One. The stage has all been set.  The train, the accident at the station, the recounting of the short history of the Shcherbatsky sisters.  Stiva has blotted his marital copybook, and Levin has brought to town his painful honour.  Anna, wearing black not lilac, has looked down the staircase at Vronsky.  Kitty has missed the mazurka, and seen the answer to her question — “Who is it? … All or one?” – on Vronsky’s face.

And we’ve just had the masterpiece scene on the train at the halt between Moscow and Petersburg.  The scene in which Anna, probing her conscience and congratulating herself on her rigour, lives out the greatest joy she will ever have of Vronsky, the high point of their affair, alone in the train carriage, before it has even begun.

She went through all her Moscow memories.  They were all good, pleasant.  She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and his enamoured, obedient face, remembered all her relations with him: nothing was shameful.  But just there, at that very place in her memories, the feeling of shame became more intense, as if precisely then, when she remembered Vronsky, some inner voice were telling her: “Warm, very warm, hot!” …  She passed the paper-knife over the glass, then put its smooth and cold surface to her cheek and nearly laughed aloud from the joy that suddenly came over her for no reason.  She felt her nerves tighten more and more, like strings on winding pegs.  She felt her eyes open wider and wider, her fingers and toes move nervously …

The vividness of the whole scene is extraordinary. I could hear the voice of the “bundled-up and snow-covered man” shouting something in her ear, and the wind, “as if only waiting for her,” whistling “joyfully.”  I could feel the “cold post” she grasps, as “holding her dress down,” she steps out of the carriage. And when Vronsky materialises on the platform I felt, like Anna, the same sense of almost tiresome inevitability.

For Tolstoy understands, like Flaubert too — who somewhere in his notebooks describes the greatest erotic event of his life as the planning of a visit to a brothel that never actually eventuated – that two thirds of love consists in anticipation, not consummation.

For the same reason, it’s almost a shame to keep reading.

*****

Image: Detail from Mrs Wilton Phipps by John Singer Sargent, courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library.