Leo Tolstoy

The chronological and cultural gap between a contemporary reader and Russian high society in Tolstoy’s time obscures the historical dislocation in the foundation of the plot. Anna’s stigma is grossly exaggerated; by social standards of the time, her behaviour was, of course, scandalous, but hardly unprecedented or exceptional. Russian high society was rife with stories of adultery and civil marriage. Emperor Alexander II lived and fathered children with his mistress, Ekaterina Dolgorukaya. This caused consternation among conservatives, who consolidated their opposition around the empress (one of whose ladies-in-waiting was Alexandra Tolstoy) and the heir to the throne. Such an aristocratic Fronde had little chance of bucking the trend set by a modernizing autocrat. Victorian bourgeois morality did not take root in a country where the bourgeoisie was relatively weak and uninfluential.

Tolstoy’s own married sister Maria had a daughter with her civil partner, the Swedish viscount Hector de Kleen. Maria’s history was different from Anna’s – she had left her husband because she was not willing to ‘serve as a senior wife in his harem’.¹⁰ She was soon abandoned by the viscount and felt deeply repentant of her sins, but she never became a pariah. Likewise, Sofia’s sister Liza, who failed to charm Tolstoy in 1862, divorced her impotent husband and remarried after eight years of unconsummated family life at exactly the time when her brother-in-law was writing Anna Karenina.

In a scene symbolically set in a theatre, the murmur of gossip is transformed into a roar of public damnation by Anna’s inner voice. Her inner demons define her predicament, driving her towards near madness and ultimately to tragedy. In the epigraph to the novel, ‘Vengeance is mine and I’ll repay,’ Tolstoy quotes Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, but it remains unclear whether the actual revenge in question is performed by the just God of the New Testament or the ‘terrible and cynical deity’ of sexuality. Following Rousseau, Tolstoy condemned the hypocrisy of those who practised the vices for which they blame Anna, but ‘society’ was guilty not of ruining her love, but of corrupting her soul. Vronsky’s seduction of a married woman meets with universal approval. Vronsky’s mother also initially welcomes this liaison; Tolstoy was obviously thinking of his dear aunt Toinette, who wished for him to have an affair with a well-born married woman, a badge of honour for a young noble male.

‘Emma Bovary – c’est moi,’ Flaubert famously said. Tolstoy could hardly have made the same claim for Anna, though he endowed her with a flame of carnal desire all too familiar to him. There is no doubt, however, that Tolstoy could have said this about Konstantin Levin, the most autobiographical character he ever produced. Levin’s surname is derived from the author’s first name: Lev. Tolstoy endowed Levin with his own biographical details, traits of character, ways of estate management, everyday habits and preferences, social views and a sense of an anxious spiritual quest – nearly everything apart from literary talent. He did not have much left for Vronsky, the ideal image of a man comme il faut.

Nevertheless, ‘despite a marked difference between Vronsky and Levin’ (AK, p. 637), Anna is able to discern in them ‘that common trait, which caused Kitty to fall in love with them both’. This ‘common trait’ was that of Tolstoy, who divided himself between the two characters. In War and Peace the main female character is first enchanted by an impeccable officer, but then understands her true feelings. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy goes further. In an episode that serves the same role as the decisive meeting between Pierre and Natasha in War and Peace, Levin falls in love with Anna. When he returns home, Kitty’s hysterical outburst seems to be excessive, if taken at face value; nothing has actually happened that could threaten their marriage. Still, both Levin and the author know that Kitty is right.

The interrelationship between Levin and Anna’s family stories is often seen through the prism of the first, proverbial sentence of the novel: ‘All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (AK, p. 1). The structure of the novel, however, as well as the meaning of the opening maxim, cannot be reduced to such a shallow contrast. ‘It is well known that happy marriages are rare,’ wrote Schopenhauer.¹¹ Tolstoy described two happy families, if entirely different ones, in the epilogue to War and Peace and after that lost all interest in this subject.