Leo Tolstoy

In one of the drafts of Anna Karenina he wrote: ‘We like to imagine misfortune as something concentrated, as a fact that happened, while misfortune is never an event in life, it is life itself, the long life which is unhappy, life which preserves the attributes of happiness, when happiness and the meaning of life are lost’ (CW, XX, p. 370). It is this existential despair that drives Levin, a ‘happy and healthy family man’ (CW, XX, p. 562), so close to suicide that he has to hide the rope and the gun from sight so as not to hang or shoot himself. Mutual devotion and numerous children protect Levin and Kitty from the utter destitution of Karenin and Anna, or semi-destitution of Oblonsky and Dolly, but they are ‘unhappy in their own way’. Levin’s final religious revelation has nothing to do with his family; and on the last page, he even decides not to tell Kitty about it.

Tolstoy never needed reminders that death was near and omnipresent, but the 1870s provided him with many particular occasions to reflect on this. The year 1873, when Tolstoy started the novel, brought news of the death of Dasha Kuzminskaya, Tanya’s elder daughter and the darling of both families. This was followed several months later by the sudden death of Tolstoy’s fourth son Peter at the age of seventeen months. Next year Tolstoy’s beloved aunt Toinette, Tatiana Yergolskaya, passed away after a prolonged illness. Another aunt, Pelageya Yushkova, who took care of him in Kazan and who had lived at Yasnaya Polyana as a widow for several years, died in 1875. That year also witnessed the deaths of two more of Tolstoy’s babies, Nikolai and Varvara: the former did not survive until his first birthday, the latter passed away shortly after she was born. Death encircled Tolstoy’s novel from the railway accident at the beginning that serves as a portent for Anna’s suicide at the end.

In his first major novel, specially devoted to war and with infinitely more characters, Tolstoy showed death much more often than in the second. In War and Peace death is a necessary part of life’s eternal cycle. The deaths of old Prince Bolkonsky, Prince Andrei and Hélène allow for the marriages of both Nikolai and Maria and Pierre and Natasha, leading to the births of their numerous offspring. In the world of Anna Karenina death begets new deaths: Anna’s suicide induces Vronsky to go to war hoping to end his life there, and the death of Levin’s brother drives Levin to near suicidal despair, from which he is mysteriously saved only by the help of a religious peasant.

In February 1873 Tolstoy wrote to his cousin Alexandra that he had reread War and Peace for the new edition with a feeling of ‘repentance and shame . . . not unlike what a man experiences when he sees the remains of an orgy in which he has taken part’. Still, he was ‘consoled’ by the fact that he ‘was carried by this orgy heart and soul, and thought that nothing else mattered beside it’ (Ls, I, p. 257). He also told Alexandra that he was ‘on the point of writing something again’, but the ‘orgy’ did not repeat itself. In August 1875, midway through his work on the novel, Tolstoy complained to Strakhov that he had to ‘set down again . . . at dull, commonplace Anna Karenina and prayed to God [for] strength to get it off [his] hands as quickly as possible in order to clear a space’ (Ls, I, p. 280). Two months later he told Fet that ‘in order to work, it is necessary for scaffolding to be erected under your feet,’ that for a long time he was idly ‘sitting and waiting’ (Ls, I, p. 281) for the scaffolding, but now he felt they are in place and could resume his work. He was struggling to believe in the importance of his enterprise.