Leo Tolstoy

Apart from his interest in pathologies of the modern family, Tolstoy had literary reasons to revert to a novel about adultery. He was an avid reader of Western prose; his diaries, letters and conversations record scores of references to contemporary British, French and German novelists of different calibre; most often, favourable ones. However, one name is conspicuously absent from the list: Tolstoy mentioned Flaubert rarely, most often negatively and avoided speaking about his main novel. The only exception confirms this tendency – in 1892 Tolstoy wrote to his wife that he had read Madame Bovary and found it to have ‘considerable merits and good reasons to be esteemed by the French’ (CW, LXXXIV, p. 138), offering both tongue-in-cheek praise and an awkward attempt to pretend he had not read the book before. Flaubert’s masterpiece had appeared in Paris in 1856. In January 1857 the author was put on trial for immorality before being triumphantly acquitted a month later. When Tolstoy arrived in Paris, two weeks after the trial, the city was still in a state of uproar. Tolstoy spent time with Turgenev, who believed Madame Bovary to be the best creation ‘in the whole world of literature’. There is little doubt that Tolstoy would have read the sensational novel.

Flaubert’s book is the ideal expression and a fine example of the spirit of nineteenth-century realism. Impeccably objective and detached, full of stunningly accurate, detailed and recognizable descriptions, it traces with an iron logic the psychological transformation of a pious girl full of dim poetic hopes and aspirations into an adulterous wife, who squanders her husband’s money on an unfaithful lover and is driven by the inevitability of ruin to a horrifying suicide. Flaubert meticulously avoids any comments or moralistic conclusions, letting the characters and events speak for themselves. Fifteen years later Tolstoy took up the gauntlet and gave his own version of love, adultery and suicide.

The first draft of Anna Karenina, written in 1873, was very preliminary in nature: the names of the characters, their appearance and details of their biographies varied, some parts of the text were not yet ready and the author filled the gaps with short notes explaining what he was planning to write. Still, unlike War and Peace, the outline of the plot as well as the relations between the characters were clear to him from the very beginning. Present are all three couples connected by two pairs of siblings – Anna and Alabin (Oblonsky) and Dolly and Kitty – and the love of both female protagonists, Anna and Kitty, for the same man. Tolstoy made an early decision to begin the novel with the crisis in the Oblonsky family and to end it with Anna’s railway station suicide. In the beginning of 1872 Tolstoy deliberately went to see the deformed body of Anna Pirogova, the abandoned housekeeper and lover of a local landlord, who had thrown herself under a train. The stories of the two Annas have very little in common, but Tolstoy was struck by the horrifying symbolism of the accident.

The early draft also bore the strong imprint of Schopenhauer’s particular strain of misogyny. For the German thinker, women were born exclusively for attracting males and childbearing; and, as a consequence of this reproductive function, inclined to search for a mate with whom they might more successfully procreate. Anna, in this version, is a lascivious animal, not so much morally corrupt as inherently immoral. The other characters see her as possessed by a ‘devil’, an evil force or, in Schopenhauerian terms, the will to live. When she gets pregnant by Udashev (Vronsky), Anna’s wet eyes shine with happiness. As was by now his custom, Tolstoy made things more subtle and less straightforward as he rewrote the novel. If the ‘will to live’ or ‘force of life’, as Tolstoy called it in the epigraph to one of the chapters, is irresistible, how could one possibly blame Anna? She had been ‘sacrificed’ on the altar of sexuality through marriage and denied frequent pregnancies. In the interval between War and Peace and Anna Karenina Tolstoy had mastered ancient Greek in order to read the classics in the original. He had been planning to read Sophocles and Euripides to use their experience in his own dramas. Instead, he turned his second novel into a classical tragedy of fate. In the final text, Anna is not acquitted, but her descent into hell acquires tragic greatness.